The Ryder Cup has come a long way from its first installment 98 years ago. There will be more players—12 per team instead of 9—and the European team didn’t welcome non-Britons until 1947 and didn’t add players from the continent until 1979. Furthermore, captains Keegan Bradley and Luke Donald won’t be playing, as Walter Hagen and Ted Ray did. And the teams will try to win more than half of 28 total points, a considerable increase from the 16 up for grabs in 1927.
How did the Ryder Cup become the spectacle it is today? Here are 10 individuals who have helped bring us some of golf’s most impassioned and super-heated moments.
Samuel Ryder
That man whose name is on the trophy found success selling seeds in penny packets from St. Albans, 25 miles northwest of London. He was the town’s mayor in 1905, took up golf at the age of 50, and joined The Verulam Golf Club where he was the captain three times. While vacationing in Dorset, he would play Came Down Golf Club where he met the three Whitcombe brothers, all prominent English professionals, with whom he’d talk about the possibility of staging a team match against the United States. Such a match had taken place at Gleneagles in 1921 when a sufficient number of Americans (see James Harnett, below) came to Britain for the Open Championship. In February 2026, Walter Hagen announced he would be playing in that year’s Open and would pick a team of four Americans to play the British professionals. That April, the British press reported that Ryder had put up a gold trophy for the event, and in May it was reported each team would have eight players. By time of the match in early June, it was 10 a side, and playing at Wentworth, the British won 13 to 1. Much of the press was happy to call it the Ryder Cup, but actually Ryder had withdrawn his support for a number of reasons—Hagen, not the PGA of America, had picked the American team; some of the players were born outside the U.S.; the Americans had arrived shortly before the match giving them little chance to practice; and only those that had traveled to Britain were available. Ryder did officially grant his support for the match in 1927, by which time the British PGA and PGA of America had signed a formal charter laying out the legal formalities of a regular contest.
James Harnett
Because no U.S. golfer had yet won the Open Championship, James Harnett, an employee of Golf Illustrated magazine in New York, suggested a team of 12 to 20 of the best professionals travel to Britain to compete in the 1921 event. The magazine’s editors wrote to the PGA of America asking it to choose the team and stating it would fund the enterprise through popular subscription—a “British Open Championship Fund”—to which every golfer in America could donate $1. The PGA of America endorsed the proposal and 12 American pros played in the Glasgow Herald 1,000 Guineas tournament two weeks before the Open Championship as well as an exhibition against the British professionals that the home team easily won. Incidentally, that year’s Open was won by Jock Hutchison, who had come over as part of the U.S. team and was an American citizen, although he’d been born and raised in Scotland.
George Sargent
Sargent was an excellent golfer from England who emigrated to Canada in 1905, becoming the Head Professional at Royal Ottawa Golf Club. In 1909, he won the U.S. Open at Englewood Golf Club in New Jersey; he would play in a total of 16 U.S. Opens. He became the Head Professional at Scioto Country Club in 1912, and, in 1921, was elected President of the PGA of America. It was to him that Golf Illustrated’s letter (see above) was addressed. Readily agreeing to the magazine’s idea, he promised his organization’s cooperation “in every way” and that it “appreciated the inauguration of such an effort on its behalf.”
Sylvanus Jermain
Sylvanus Pierson Jermain developed a number of public courses in Toledo, Ohio, and co-founded Inverness Club in 1903. He was also President of the Ohio Golf Association, served four terms as President/Chairman of Toledo’s Board of Parks Commissioners, wrote a book on the rules of golf, and was Treasurer of Woolson Spice Company. He’s also considered one of the prime movers behind the idea of a U.S. vs. Great Britain team match, putting the idea to George Sargent, who was quoted in the Toledo News-Bee as saying, “I remember he suggested the scheme to me, and I tried to put it across without success.”
Jock Hutchison
Add Hutchison’s name to the potential list of Ryder Cup inventors. A 2013 story in the Scotsman newspaper suggests the Scottish ex-pat was pivotal in promoting a trans-Atlantic match: “It was sometime in 1920 when the idea of a golf match involving the best of British and America’s finest first started to take hold. History records that the Ryder Cup was born seven years later, but the concept had already fired the imagination by then. Close to the heart of it, it seems, was Jock Hutchison…
“Jock was home from America (for the Glasgow Herald 1,000 Guineas tournament, the first informal U.S. vs GB match, and the Open Championship, which he won) and was telling anybody who would listen that the standard of player in the new world was hot. Maybe too hot for anything his homeland could throw at them.”
Abe Mitchell
Mitchell was a fine golfer who won numerous professional titles in Britain (and one in the U.S.—the Miami Open in 1924) and finished in the top 10 at the Open Championship eight times. In October 1925, it was reported that Samuel Ryder had hired him as his personal instructor on a £500 salary with £250 expenses—an extremely generous appointment. Ryder had been a major supporter of professional golf for some years and is likely to have befriended Mitchell at some of the tournaments he sponsored, recognizing not only his playing ability but also an aptitude for teaching. Ryder clearly thought very highly of him as the golfer on top of the gold trophy he would donate for the team matches was modeled on Mitchell. He was chosen as playing captain for the British team ahead of the first match in 1927, but appendicitis prevented him from going. Mitchell did play in 1929, 1931, and 1933, winning four of a possible six points.
Robert Hudson
It took Britain many years to recover from World War II; fielding a team of golfers to play against the Americans wasn’t seen as a priority. The 1947 match wouldn’t have happened were it not for Hudson, an Oregon businessman who opened 30 Piggly Wiggly stores in and around Portland. An avid golfer, he practically bankrolled the whole 1947 Ryder Cup, paying for both teams’ travel expenses and even meeting the British team in New York and joining them for the four-day train trip across the U.S.
Jack Nicklaus
By the late 1970s, the Ryder Cup had lost its appeal: The U.S. had won 18 of the first 22 matches and making the team wasn’t terribly important to some U.S. players (Tom Weiskopf chose to go hunting rather than play in 1977). Nicklaus suggested adding Continental Europeans to the Great Britain & Ireland team to boost its chances of winning, a change the PGA of America and British PGA agreed to for the 1979 event. (Ironically, Nicklaus didn’t qualify for that year’s U.S. team.) Seve Ballesteros and Antonio Garrido of Spain were the only Continentals that year, qualifying on merit: Playing together in foursomes and fourballs, they managed just one point from four, and both lost their singles.
Seve Ballesteros
Ballesteros never felt particularly welcome in the U.S., feeling slighted by the press, his competitors, and especially by Deane Beman, who suspended him from the PGA Tour for a year in 1986 after he failed to meet the 15-tournament minimum to retain membership. So Seve liked nothing more than beating Americans at the Ryder Cup. Just look back at old video and see the joy on his face in 1985, 1987, 1995, and 1997 in particular, when he was captain; contrast it with the anguish in 1991 and 1993. The proud Spaniard had a Ryder Cup record of 20–12–5 with a win percentage of 60.8 percent, but as much as his play it was the passion and intensity he bought to the team room, the galleries, and TV audiences, which is arguably the most important factor behind the enormity of today’s Ryder Cup.
Tony Jacklin
Adding continentals didn’t have much of an effect in 1979 (U.S. 17, Europe 11) or 1981 (U.S. 18½, Europe 9½). Something more had to change if the Ryder Cup was ever going to be taken seriously. Enter Jacklin, Europe’s new captain in 1983. The two-time major champion identified where he thought Europe had been going wrong, saying the team was 2- or 3-down before the matches started because they were made to feel inferior. “Once I sorted things, the players responded,” Jacklin said. “Travelling by Concorde, wearing cashmere, the best, a team room where you had everything, where you could gel together. The response they gave to the way they were treated was wonderful. And it’s been the same way ever since.”
