To understand what the temperatures were like in 1999, the last time a big-stage golf event – the Ryder Cup – came to The Country Club in Brookline, Massachusetts, you would have required two thermometers.
One, for the general New England sports fandom, wouldn’t have reached hypothermia, but it certainly wasn’t going to hit 98.6, either. It’s as if wide swaths of the sports citizenry weren’t quite tuned in and, hey, who could have blamed them?
Local sports morale wasn’t exactly rampant that year.
The winter teams had been miserable in 1998-99. The NHL Bruins lost in Round 2 of the Stanley Cup playoffs to the Buffalo Sabres, and the Celtics won just 19 of 50 games in a lockout NBA season. Making matters worse, NHL Hall of Famer Bobby Orr was still retired and Rick Pitino was still the Celtics head coach, so misery was in full supply.
As for the fall club, the NFL Patriots had spent the spring trying to move to Hartford, Connecticut, and the summer trying to figure out its surfer dude of a coach, Pete Carroll. Kiss that season goodbye.
That left our Boys of Summer, the Red Sox, to pen another chapter in that great rivalry with the Yankees. Of course, to quote whichever baseball writer said it, “it was a rivalry like the hammer and the nail.” The BoSox being the nail, of course.
They would finish four games behind the Yankees in the division race that year, then get trounced, 4-1, in the American League final. In winning 11 of 12 postseason games, the Pinstripes won their 25th World Series since the Red Sox had last won one.
Which brings the ’99 Ryder Cup into the equation. In that Boston summer of sports lethargy, there was intrigue in this golf competition. Maybe it was generated by just a small segment of the “Inside Golf” crowd, but if you had used a second thermometer on them, it would have hit a fever pitch.
Skeptical? Don’t be. Instead, digest the sort of numbers that were generated by TCC committee members who might not have had excessive land to work with, but oh, their Rolodexes were plugged into Boston firms and financial institutions that dated to the days before Francis Ouimet won the 1913 U.S. Open.
CLICK HERE TO READ THIS UNLOCKED STORY AT GGP+... AND USE COUPON CODE GGP48 TO SAVE 20% ON AN ANNUAL SUBSCRIPTION