Sports
The time the Ryder Cup almost died
In this episode, we explore a pivotal moment in Ryder Cup history that nearly led to its demise in the late 1970s. The narrative highlights the challenges faced by the European team amid American domi...
The time the Ryder Cup almost died
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Interactive Transcript
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As you have no doubt noticed from the title of this episode, this week we are continuing our local knowledge tour through the formative moments of Rider Cup history.
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Last time in an episode that I titled three maniacs of the Rider Cup, we told you about a man named Robert Hudson, a grocery executive from Portland, Oregon, who in 1947 single-handedly revived the Rider Cup after 10 years of absence due to World War II.
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It's not clear historically how much anyone was really fighting for it to come back. Hudson had connections with the PGA of America and he was this kind of novice to golf so he probably didn't have the idea on his own, but it was going to take somebody like him to bring it back because the fact was the UK had been so battered by the war that they needed a patron essentially to pay for everything.
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They're traveled, they're lodging the whole nine yards, so Hudson saved the Rider Cup. It may not have been single-handedly history is never that clean, but it's close to single-handedly as you can get.
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It's a great story and you would think following this transformational destructive war that would have been the closest the Rider Cup ever came to dying. But I don't think that's true.
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The story we're going to tell today comes more than 30 years later and doesn't involve anything quite as dramatic as a global war. It's a more personal, direct story, but I think you'll agree with me that when you get into the details of what actually happened, how close the Rider Cup came to just disappearing, and how few people really seemed to care, this was a more critical case, even more critical than the post-war period.
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This was the Rider Cup truly on life support and its survival and its eventual blossoming into what it is today looks even more unlikely.
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Now, I should say I talked about this before in lesser detail a couple years ago in an episode about the 1983 Rider Cup.
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The history just before that cup is part of the context that saw the European team not just become competitive with the Americans that had happened before in the UK and Ireland era albeit rarely.
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Not just be competitive, but start to establish a system and a team identity in the early beginnings of a tactical philosophy that would allow them to keep being competitive for the next 40 years in county right up to the present day.
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So I hope the content we're about to get is not too recycled for the long term diards, but like I said, it's a story that is worth highlighting on its own and going a little deeper as we continue here in our Rider Cup swing.
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So, 1947, the cup gets saved by this unlikely later life golf obsessive in Portland, owns a grocery chain, what happens after that? Well, for 30 years the US dominates.
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Great Britain wins in 1957, they tie in 1969, which technically meant the US retained the cup, but as we covered in the last episode actually that 69 Rider Cup was seen as a big victory by Great Britain.
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Certainly more so than the Americans felt that it was a victory, forget what the rules said, but other than those two years, 57 and 69, through 1977 the US wins the other 14 Rider Cups.
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And let me tell you, go look through the scores of these cups on Wikipedia, it's almost never close.
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Early on, you had a couple that were not total routes, but once they added more matches, you have the US winning by scores like 23 to 9 or 19 and a half to 12 and a half or 23 and a half to 8 and a half, 21 to 11.
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You get the point and we should note that through all of this, the Rider Cup is benefiting from the fact that it is still green modern.
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Televised golf is either not existing or a little bit later still in its infancy, so the cup kind of keeps limping along as part of the golf calendar, but make no mistake, over time these blowouts are taking their toll.
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And we are entering a period of history where the money behind this stuff starts to really matter. I've said this before, and it may have seemed out of left field then and it may seem that way now, but as a counter example,
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I like to talk about an event called the Dual in the Pool, which was a swimming meet, a Rider Cup style swimming meet, founded in 2003 between the US and Australia, and if you're a fan of Olympic swimming like I am, you can see the idea behind it.
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These two countries are the preeminent powerhouses, there was some juice behind it at the time, and the people in charge thought, hey, maybe we can capitalize on this rivalry.
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Well, the US dominated the Australians for the first three of these dual in the pools. Then they brought in Europe, Europe got smashed to, and by 2016, the organizers of this thing could not pay a TV network to broadcast it, it died.
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They revived it briefly in 2022, it was bad again, end of story. Now this is not a perfect parallel, but it shows how in today's world, you don't last very long as a sporting event if you're not competitive, if you don't have history behind you.
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Now we just think, man, if the Rider Cup, as it was in that era of American dominance that started in 1990, instead of 1927, if it had started in 1990 and just been the series of washouts, I don't think it would have lasted a decade.
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I think it would have been a dual in the pool, and that is part of the remarkable story of the Rider Cup, that it began to peak at exactly the right time exactly when it needed to.
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But man, it was close. It was so close to dying right around the time when money really started to matter when you needed a competitive event instead of the series of blowouts, and I would say the critical moments began in the mid 70s.
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The morale of the Europeans at this point was about as low as it could possibly go. In 1969, as we said, it was a high point, but as the years went on, it stood out as what it was, which is not a sea change in the fortunes of these teams, but a brief blip, an anomaly that gave way to more American dominance.
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And it wasn't just the losing that bothered them, it's the very clear disparity in how everything is run.
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But remember, aside from a few players, professional golf was very separated back then. The Americans played in America, the British played in Europe, the crossover that is so common today was only beginning to happen then.
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Even a tournament with the Gravitas of the Open Championship to use an example, it had only been about a decade since the best American players made a concerted effort to play there on a routine basis.
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So, the Ryder Cup was one of the few times they all came together, and every time it happened, the British became abundantly aware of how different the standards were.
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Here's a quote from Tony Jacqueline, one of the British players who actually did play in America, here's how he summed up the difference.
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By then I was totally disenchanted and particularly with the attitude of those in charge, not just of the Ryder Cup, but Golf in Europe generally.
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For a dozen years or so, I had been playing mostly in the States, and was constantly aware of how much higher standards were over there.
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I remember one year in 1975 that Arnold Palmer's Home Club, Laurel Valley, we were all given Stylos plastic shoes, and one of my souls came completely off during my singles match against Ray Floyd.
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Meanwhile, there they were traveling by Concord, looking at a million dollars, wise to match and the best of everything laid on.
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In those days, we really were second class citizens, and like lambs to the slaughter.
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And cool.
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And by the way, this is a complete side note, but I've read this a few times, from many different players of that era, they always mentioned the American wives, how attractive they were.
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It's always, you know, almost parenthetically to the other stuff they're saying, but the fact that it was in their heads and all makes me laugh.
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There was a serious inferiority complex going on with the British about basically not to be crass, but about how hot the American wives were.
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You see it over and over again.
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Anyway, back on the competitive front, they tried a few different things. They tried some format changes.
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The British formally added Ireland to the team in 1973, nothing made much of a difference.
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And it all led to infighting and bad behavior.
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But here's the really interesting thing, the Americans, they didn't like it either.
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One of them, Jack Nicholas, a guy who, when you look at golf history, always seems to have a lot of foresight.
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And, you know, for good and for bad, always seems to be seeing around the corner.
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He decided to do something about it in the Ryder Cup.
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1977 was the precipitating moment, the low point, and the thing you always read about is that Tom Wisecoff qualified for the team, the American team, but decided to skip the Ryder Cup.
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Why? Because he wanted to go hunting for big horn sheep.
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His quote at the time was, he didn't know when he'd have a chance to do it again.
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Hunting, that is, not the Ryder Cup.
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Now, just try to imagine if somebody did that today, what a scandal would be.
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It just goes to show what I mentioned above. These decades of blowouts took their toll.
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The Ryder Cup was as low status as it would ever be.
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So that year in 1977, Nicholas played a match against Mark James and Tommy Horton.
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And they were very slow players.
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Nicholas and Tom Watson beat them badly, five and four.
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But Nicholas, the whole time he played was thinking, why am I out here being miserable with a snail-like pace?
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And it's not even competitive.
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Unlike Wisecoff, though, who just kind of bailed out, he decides to do something about it.
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He has a conversation afterward with a man named Lord Darby, who's a cousin of Queen Elizabeth, and more importantly was the president of the British PGA,
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which at the time was the main governing body behind the Ryder Cup on the British European side.
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And the essence of that conversation is that, look, you better do something here.
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Because this event is dying, you know, Wisecoff is just the tip of the iceberg.
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Even I'm not having a good time. Nicholas told him, the Americans are going to stop coming if this doesn't get better, and then you're doomed.
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His exact words were, according to him, quote, frankly, when the matches start, there isn't much competition.
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We win every year, and I don't think that's right. End quote.
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And it's interesting that it was Nicholas, who really brought this to the forefront.
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I think his stature and the fact that he's American allow him to have this conversation.
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You know, he's not really going to be concerned with whatever social norms dictate, who can speak frankly with a man like Lord Darby.
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I'm not sure that message could have come across the same way from a British player.
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But coming from Nicholas, it has a lot of weight.
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Lord Darby asks him to send a letter, outlining all his points.
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Nicholas does that. He sends the letter.
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And Nicholas's vision is to include all of Europe on the British side.
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Now, this vision is not unique to him.
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In fact, there were a lot of people thinking at the time.
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There were some, like Peter Allison, Dow Finsterwald, who thought it should be America versus the whole world.
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But this idea of, you know, changing Britain and Ireland to Team Europe had been floating around.
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And to his credit, Lord Darby still imagined the future where an event like the Ryder Cup could be very lucrative.
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And by May of 1978, he pushes it through the British PGA, with the idea that 1979 will be the very first US versus European Ryder Cup.
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Now, that change was going to be a big deal in the future.
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Having a full European team was critical.
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You know, if you want to take a look at what a theoretical Ryder Cup that survived with the old format might be like, look at the Walker Cup, where the US is 1-5 in a row,
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9 times the last 11, many of them including this year's in a total runaway.
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So, you know, that would be the Ryder Cup right now if it was still in that format.
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Although, I think it would not have survived.
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But point is, it would have mattered a lot eventually to have the full continent on board.
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And of course, players like Sivy Biaistero, Sembernau Langer from continental Europe, would be huge components of those early European Ryder Cup teams.
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However, the competitive balance did not happen right away.
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The first time they played as a full team Europe at the Green Briar in West Virginia in 79, there were only two continental players who made the trip that was Sivy Biaistero and Antonio Garrito from Spain.
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The quote-unquote Europeans got slaughtered again. Larry Nelson personally laid waste to Sivy.
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It's one of the funny lost bits of Ryder Cup history that Nelson went 5-5.
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At the time, was the only guy to do so in the current format.
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And for those five victories, Sivy's name got drawn right alongside him.
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And by the way, all of this happened after Tom Watson, but drew from the American side.
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He had a good reason, unlike Wisecoff, he had a newborn child at home.
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But still, they were lacking one of their best players.
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So that's a disaster. Then in 1981 comes Europe finally gets to play at home for the first time.
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But the US brings one of their best teams ever.
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And meanwhile, on the European side, everyone's mad. Tony Jacqueline is mad because he was in a position where he could have been a captain's pick and for all his years of loyalty and play, he gets left off.
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And then the other guy in the much bigger story is that Sivy Biaistero is also left off due to a fight with all the Europeans about appearance fees.
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And it's lambs to the slaughter yet again.
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The score this time, 18.5 to 9.5 for the Americans.
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And here, right here, in my opinion, we have the low point.
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This is the moment where it feels like everything has been tried.
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You've pulled out all the stops and everything has failed.
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Now, it's very hard to imagine today knowing what the Ryder Cup has become, but try to put yourself in that time and place.
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And if you're one of the few people who cared about the fate of the event, you have to be looking at it going, we've tried everything.
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We have no idea what to do.
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So how did we get from there to here?
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Well, it happened quickly, relatively speaking.
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If you fast forward just two more years to 1983, Europe has a new attitude and a new lease on life.
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By 1985, they won their first cup as a continent.
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Two years later, they went on American soil for the first time ever.
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And by 1991, the American fans and indeed American TV executives have even caught on that this is a phenomenal competitive event and they're off to the races.
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But if the timeline makes it seem like, wow, that was a quick and easy fix, think again.
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Because those two years between that low point in 1981 and the resurrection in 1983, nearly saw the death of the whole thing.
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The name you have to know now is Colin Snape.
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He was the executive director of the British PGA in a couple years later.
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In 1983, he's going to be one of the guys who shocked Tony Jacqueline by offering him the writer cup captaincy and setting in motion the whole transformation.
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But after the 81 blowout in England and Walton Heath, something really, really bad happens.
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As if the big loss again and the feeling that we tried everything, nothing works.
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As if that wasn't bad enough, the Sun Alliance company, which had been the patron saint of the writer cup on the sponsorship side going all the way back to 1973,
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they have been sponsoring it for the British.
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Their chairman was a friend of the prime minister and he was basically giving the writer cup his money because he saw it as a kind of patriotic duty.
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You know, the writer cup is good for Britain, that kind of thing.
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But apparently that sense of patriotism does have limits because after 1981, the Sun Alliance insurance company said,
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this, why are we doing this? What's the point? We're not doing it anymore.
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They pull out and that's when things get very, very bad because when that sponsorship goes,
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Colin Snape was in charge of this kind of thing. He looked around, he asked around, he traveled around,
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nobody else was feeling very patriotic either.
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And by the way, just as a side note, you should know this wasn't a problem in America.
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The PGA was flushed with money by comparison to the British counterparts and the European counterparts.
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There was no huge concern with them. You know, they can send their players in perpetuity, no problem.
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The problem on the American side is the players not wanting to go anymore.
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But as far as the PGA of America is concerned, yeah, no problem.
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But also, the writer cup wasn't such a valuable property to them yet that they were willing to foot the bill for the Europeans.
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So it all comes down to whether these guys can find a sponsor on the British European side.
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And Colin Snape is the man tasked with the impossible.
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He's got to go round up some money somehow and he's got to do it fast because 1983, they've got to send their players to America.
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And that's not going to be cheap.
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And here's what Snape told Robin McMillan in the excellent oral history, us against them, which I recommend to everybody.
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It's such a wonderful Bible of the writer cup.
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But here's what he told McMillan about that particular task.
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Quote, for months, I went door to door like a brush salesman trying to sell someone, anyone, the writer cup.
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I went to a tile company to Chemical Bank, the American Bank which had just opened in London.
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It's now called JP Morgan Chase.
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I even approached the company that managed the careers of Tom Jones and Engelbert Humperding.
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Eventually we had a meeting of the writer cup committee and I had to report that in six months, the only offer I'd had was 80,000 pounds in cigarette coupons, which could be redeemed for cash.
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And because it was tobacco, the offer didn't see the light of day, but it shows how bad things were.
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End quote.
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Six months, and all he's got to show for it are the cigarette coupons that politically they cannot even use.
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The word thankless doesn't quite begin to describe his job, does it?
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It got so bad that Bernard Gallagher proposed, hey, screw it, let's just pay for ourselves.
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Which was never going to happen.
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But then someone called Cone Snape and said, there is this guy Raymond McEl, chairman of a company called Bell Scotch Whiskey.
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And it might be worth talking to him.
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Snape was understandably cynical, yet every right to be, every lead so far it falling flat for him.
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But he didn't have a lot of other options. In fact, he had none.
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So what the hell? He gets on a train on a bleak day and heads to Scotland to Perth.
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This is December, 1982. It's been more than a year since the last writer cup.
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The next one is less than a year away. Time is very much running out.
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Raymond McEl was a big shot.
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He owned this, you know, pretty big company.
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He sat in the giant board room surrounded by his flunkies.
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And to Snape's surprise, Snape makes his pitch.
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McEl is basically on board right from the start.
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And his big plan, which was music to Snape's ears, is that he wanted to sponsor the writer cup when it was in America
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because he wanted to expand his market.
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And I don't know if that works incidentally.
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As an American, I had never heard of Bell Scotch Whiskey, but it turns out it is the best selling whiskey in the UK
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and they were acquired by Guinness a few years after this took place.
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So Raymond McEl was very successful. I don't know if the writer cup game it worked.
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But anyway, the number on the table was 300,000 pounds for two writer cups, 83 abroad and again at home in 1985.
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And that was staggering to Snape because the Sun Alliance deal was 75,000 pounds.
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And so somehow, on Death's Door, Desperate, he manages to strike gold.
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And this is just another one of those crazy things that seems to happen in writer cup history to save the event when it seems doomed.
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Almost as if there is a little magic there. This thing just won't die.
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There's always a green grocer for Portland, Oregon. There's always a whiskey company that's going to resurrect it.
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But that's how close it came.
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They're less than a year from the writer cup. No sponsor to speak of. Without Bell Scotch Whiskey, probably there's nobody that's going to emerge.
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And they're going to have to figure something else out. And it's going to be very, very bad.
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But they do get the sponsorship. Now Snape's next job was to sell the sponsorship to the PGA of America.
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And that is not easy on paper. Right? Raymond McEl's big plan is they don't know me in America.
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That's a huge market. So in order to make this worth it, my, you know, the name of my company's got to be everywhere.
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Everybody's got to know Bell Scotch Whiskey. And so what Snape is telling the PGA of America is basically,
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I need the sponsor's name to be all over everything when we come to America.
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Now this is the PGA of America's turf. Obviously it's in the name PGA of America. They're not going to love that.
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They're going to love this encroachment. But Snape has a trump card.
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And that trump card is if you say no, we're screwed and the writer cup is over. Balls in your court.
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That's not bad. That's, that's not bad leverage. Say, well, you, you agree or we go home up to you guys.
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And the PGA of America. Again, they don't quite know what the writer cup is going to become. Nobody could have predicted that.
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But face with the choice of killing it or keeping it going. They say, okay, fine.
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Plaster Bell Scotch Whiskey everywhere. Let's do this.
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Now for the remainder of this episode, I will be quoting liberally from the cup they couldn't lose my book about the writer cup that came out a couple years ago.
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I think I'm allowed to do that. And what you're going to find.
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And it's a somewhat unsexy truth. But I actually, I think it's still pretty fascinating.
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But what you're going to find and what you've already found is that in this little period between 81 and 83,
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it is a series of meetings that put Europe back on stable ground and sort of propel the writer cup forward on this new,
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more steady and more competitive path.
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We've already heard about the meetings with Bell Scotch Whiskey, the meetings of the PGA of America.
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But for the next critical juncture, they, they being the Europeans, had to solve the problem of a captain.
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Right there have been these discussions for a long time among the European players.
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We want a younger captain. Somebody who understands us. There has been a problem with leadership in the last few writer cups.
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So fast forward to the spring of 1983.
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Sandmore Golf Club in Leeds, Colin Snape, an a man named Ken Skullfield, who is the executive director of the new European tour.
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They found Tony Jacqueline on the driving range. They said, hey, can you, can you chat for a moment?
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He says, sure. And they asked him if you wanted to be writer cup captain.
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Now Jacqueline's reaction to quote him was quote, you could have knocked me down with a feather. I was in total bloody shock.
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Remember, he was embittered. We only mentioned it briefly. He was embittered though from being left off the 81 team.
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And aside from those personal qualms, Jacqueline's chief problem was, as we mentioned before, how he and his fellow players consistently felt like second class citizens to the extent that they didn't even know who would be paying for the dry cleaning.
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Early in writer cup history, Walter Hagen made it a priority for the Americans to travel in style.
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And that philosophy continued over time and we're going back to the 1920s for this. They had always been really doing things like taking a conquer to events that the best clothes, facilities, food, drink, lives, as we said, while the Europeans were stuck with disintegrating plastic shoes and musty locker rooms at best.
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So Jacqueline hears this offer. He tells Skullfield and Colin Snape that he needed time to think about it.
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And though their approach may have seemed sudden to Jacqueline in the grand scheme of things, it wasn't that quick a decision. It had been brewing for months. In fact, there was a full-fledged battle happening in the inner ranks of the British PGA and the European tour.
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The central argument of which was, who should the captain be? Should it be someone older, lifetime achievement award in a distinguished player or someone younger, more of the players generation, perhaps in the twilight of their career,
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but who still knew them better and might understand more precisely how to compete and how to win? So there were all these meetings, you know, we say that word again meetings.
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Multiple committee meetings, players like Bernard Longer and Bernard Gallagher, pushing for a younger captain, but by the end of 1982 there was no resolution in sight.
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Two factors decided the argument in favor of a younger captain. One is that, the 1983 Cup in Florida was fast approaching and they still hadn't made a choice.
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Today, imagine that it would be unthinkable to name a captain with less than a year to go, but by the time they secured Jacqueline, the writer cup was about four months away.
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So that didn't necessarily tilt the balance in favor of a younger old, but it did tilt the balance in favor of, you better decide now. Really, there's no time to spare.
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Second, as we said, they had just barely survived the hunt for a new sponsor and they knew that if the matches didn't become close, they would be stuck in the same position two years down the road.
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Right, you lose your name in Mackel if there are two more blowouts, who knows what would happen? Anything, anything that promised a better chance of winning or at least being competitive became a priority.
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And eventually, that Gallerard Langer faction went out to men like Snape and Skullfield and Lord Darby.
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The radical choice to offer the cap and see to a disgruntled 38 year old didn't seem quite so radical anymore.
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Even if they didn't particularly like him, especially Lord Darby. Now Jacqueline's first instinct was to tell him to shove it, but then he started thinking about all the grievances he'd been nurturing and the fact that the writer cup was so close at hand.
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And again, just a few months away, he wondered if this was a real opportunity to change things. Maybe he had some leverage here because who do they go to after him?
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So, he dreams up a wish list. He says, I want carte blanche to run things how I see fit, which includes flying the concord to Florida, getting a proper clothing deal, being able to take the caddies to America free of charge.
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That wasn't a given before. Having a team room with all the food and drink they'd need and getting three captain's picks.
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So he decided to bring them that proposal and if they said no, he thought, okay, well, no harm done, I tried.
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Now, if his shock on the driving range when they confronted him had been great, it was even bigger when Skullfield and Snape said yes to everything.
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You know, they'd have to move mountains to make something that happened since the coffers weren't exactly overflowing, but they had the bell scotch money.
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They needed to be competitive and they needed Jacqueline to say yes. Basically his calculation that he might have some leverage was correct, even though he was still very surprised that they said yes.
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So, they agree and Jacqueline really is left with no choice but to accept the job. Now, Lord Darby had been hanging around Sanmore. He was too dignified and too high up to ask Jacqueline directly, but he was very much anxious for his decision.
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And afterward when Jacqueline said yes to two men shatted and they weren't particularly fond of each other. This is a story that, you know, we won't get it to here, but it is an interesting story that you can read about in the relationship but only get words with time.
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But that day at Sanmore was probably the high point of their relationship. Both men got what they wanted and at one point, chatting Jacqueline felt bold enough to bring up another problem he'd been thinking about for two years, he says to Lord Darby, what about Sevy?
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Lord Darby looks at him and says, you've accepted the captain's job, he's your problem.
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Which really, I mean, it's kind of funny saying you deal with it, but it is giving tacit permission. If you can get him on board, great.
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Which brings us to the last critical meeting that summer before the open championship at the Prince of Wales Hotel, Southport, England.
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The open was about to be played at Royal Burkdale, but Jacqueline's immediate priority was to meet with Bias Starros.
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And when they met for breakfast at this hotel, the Prince of Wales, Sevy's eggs grew cold, he vented every one of his grievances to Jacqueline.
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Every one of his Ryder Cup grievances, Jacqueline listens patiently and then he says, well, I agree with every bloody thing you said.
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They're all opinion in the ass, but I'm in charge. We do what we want now and I can't do it without you.
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I've accepted the job, but without you, we're not going to be competitive.
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Jacqueline also brought up how becoming a Ryder Cup star if Bias Starros could manage it would improve his image in the UK.
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And that was of no small importance to Bias Starros at the time, so in the end, his anger swashed somewhat Sevy seemed to deflate.
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Okay, he said, I help you.
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And here's what Jacqueline said years later, quote, in my God, once he committed, he was unbelievable and cool.
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The end result was the emergence of a unified team Europe with the money to compete, Tony Jacqueline is captain and Sevy Bias Starros leading the charge for the players.
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It would have been unimaginable just two years earlier, but on one side of that table at the Prince of Wales Hotel sat a captain with unprecedented freedom,
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who was about to revolutionize the whole event, and on the other side sat a player who was angry and uncertain, but who was fated to become the greatest Ryder Cup player of the mall.
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And from that moment, not only had the immediate survival of the Ryder Cup been ensured, but still had the competitive bounce, which is perhaps more important because that two cup sponsorship from Belskotz Whiskey, that was going to go away.
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And if they couldn't promise a compelling event, they'd already seen how quickly those sponsorships would disappear, and how hard it would be to replace them.
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And I think as a concluding thought that this is maybe what's most exceptional for me about everything is how short the timeline was for success.
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These guys had to make a good Ryder Cup happen so fast, and their only precedent was 50 years of boring lopsided results.
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I think if you were sitting there in 1981 and you were a Vegas odds maker, you had all the details, the chances of the cups surviving would not have been good, he wouldn't have given that good odds.
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So this is a great upset story in some ways, and again, today you don't think of the Ryder Cup as an underdog, it is so massive and so profitable and so big in the world of golf, but that's exactly what it was back then.
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And it's always been remarkable to me how thin the ice was, how close it all came at that definitive hour to going under.
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Local Knowledge is produced by Greg Gottfried with editorial guidance from Sam Weinman.
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Our music for today's episode is called The Void Says High by Dr. Turtle.
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Thank you very much for listening, have a wonderful day.