Concession Crankiness, Part 2
The psychology and history of gimmes in big-time match play as the 45th Ryder Cup approaches.
Once a footnote to non-stroke play jousts, the decision over whether to concede a putt has taken on an outsized role during the rare weeks when match play takes center stage.
The intrigue over freebies has become oddly pervasive and distinctly American as a test of respect or friendship, despite the situations involving golfers fighting to beat each other in a match. Gimme gawking has even spread to crowds and television. As soon as a putt in a close match has finished rolling out, announcers regularly speculate about whether the next putt should be given. Sometimes they even judge the player who made their opponent mop things up, as if the non-concession was an intentional act of defiance when the player is under no obligation to concede.
As we’ve seen in Ryder Cups and documented in Part I, select players have revealed a strange brew of entitlement, weakness, annoyance, and fear by overreacting to not receiving a free putt.
“One of the common denominators of great match players is that they don't expect anything,” says former winning European Ryder Cup captain Paul McGinley. “If you expect something to happen and it doesn't happen, it controls you mentally.”
Sometimes players have gone on a run of birdies, typically followed by overblown celebrations confirming their rage at the concession slight. Other times, they are legitimately wounded by a snub even after making the putt.
“It's a sign of weakness and insecurity that you expect to be given whatever length putt it is,” says McGinley, the European team’s Strategic Director who played on three winning Ryder Cup teams. “You've got to be prepared for so many eventualities. So why would you be letting somebody have power over you? You've got to be the person in control of the game, of your own mind, and what you're doing.”
It’s easy to seize on recent examples when modern coverage allows for so many more match play moments to be seen, screen-captured, and shared. But stories of concession-related antics and even vows of revenge have dotted match recaps in the century or so that concessions have been around.
“A good deal of recrimination would be saved if every young player made up his mind that he would not concede any putts at all,” said three-time Ryder Cup participant and two-time Captain Henry Cotton. That was in 1931.
Concession drama was an offshoot of the debate over stymies back when the ball was played down on the greens. Meaning, tension over concessions started before anyone was studying how aggressively their opponent reached for a coin, and back when golfers sometimes hit flip wedges over their opponent’s ball while on the green.
The term “gimme” isn’t even a century old, first appearing in a W.H. Faust story defining the term but not associating the slang with any particular place or person. The verb to “concede” a hole or putt popped into the golf lexicon around 1890. That’s when the master early documenter Horace Hutchinson invoked it to describe a match situation.
Concessions of putts received an inaugural Rules of Golf mention in 1909, according to the USGA’s Michael Trostel and Victoria Nenno.
“Interestingly, the USGA was strongly against it,” they write. “The section Special Rules for Match Play Competitions reads, ‘The Rules of Golf Committee recommends that players should not concede putts to their opponents.’”
The USGA’s opposition to concessions continued to appear in the Rules book until 1933, while it was not until 1961 that the C word appeared in the R&A “Decisions on the Rules” when the R&A officially declared that a “player is entitled to concede a hole or match at any time.”
The R&A types saw concessions as a noble but straightforward act in the interest of moving things along. The American side, already more smitten with stroke play, made a wide range of arguments against concessions, including claims of taking away valuable practice of short putts for golfers and concerns about etiquette tussles breaking out (which now have gone mainstream on huge stages like the Ryder Cup).
Noted golf writers defended the practice of gimmes while scolding the point missers who took the lack of a concession personally.
“Some men feel preternaturally aggrieved when asked to hole out a short putt,” wrote H.S.C. Everard, author of A History of the Royal & Ancient Club of St. Andrews from 1754–1900. “It should be scarcely necessary to say that they have absolutely no grounds whatever for annoyance at such a request.
“In ‘serious golf’ the reply should be the courteous one: ‘Putt it out, mine enemie.’”
Former Walker Cupper and writer Bernard Darwin attempted to justify concessions as a necessary defense against the American love of keeping score, calling it a “bore” to watch golfers holing out putts which could not affect a match, “but which are holed purely for private satisfaction.”
He continued, “This insistence upon scribbling little figures on a card is not only a waste of time but actually defeats the sporting spirit which is a fundamental principle of match play.”
Besides the most famous “sporting spirit” situation featuring Jack Nicklaus and Tony Jacklin in 1969—“I didn’t think you would miss it but I wasn’t going to give you the chance”—the Ryder Cup has seen other moments of sportsmanship likely unimaginable to early proponents of gimmes.
Justin Leonard’s famous putt at the 17th green in the 1999 Ryder Cup potentially secured an epic comeback and the matches. But since the long make came before his opponent, Jose Maria Olazabal, could halve the hole with a 20-footer—on a green that had been trampled by the overexuberant Americans—many thought a concession was in order and only added to the bad blood lingering to this day.
A few moments after the 17th green situation and just days after Payne Stewart said of the European team, “on paper, they should be caddying for us,” Stewart conceded the 18th hole birdie putt to Colin Montgomerie. The decision was prompted by the terrible treatment of his opponent.
“That is not what this event is about,” Stewart said. “When we got to the 18th hole and I got on the green, I looked at my caddie and said, ‘I’m not going to make him putt his putt. He doesn’t deserve to have to stand over that putt.’ We had already won the Ryder Cup. That’s what it’s all about. My individual statistics don’t mean crap out here. I wasn’t going to put him through that.”
Concessions can also be a practical tool for saving energy. When a hole is about to be lost, but a player is still trying to hold out hope by making a long putt and seeing an opponent three-putt, most times they would have been better off conceding the hole and moving to the next tee (unless the match conclusion is on the line).
In one famous case, the player about to win the hole confidently conceded to move things along and test himself.
Phil Mickelson, who was once expected to Captain the matches at Bethpage and will spend the week in his new life as a social media troll, has been a part of several wild concession-related situations.
In the 1990 U.S. Amateur second round facing future Mid Am champion Jeff Thomas, Mickelson had a four-footer for birdie. Thomas took three shots to the green and was lining up a 25-footer when Mickelson conceded Thomas’s par putt. Mickelson sank his birdie try and took the match 6&5.
“Why did I do that?” Mickelson said to writer Dave Shedloski years later. “Well, he took like two minutes to hit the chip shot, and he hit it 40 feet by the hole. Then he started the process again, and I just thought, ‘just pick it up.’ So he did, and I made it, and we went on.”
According to Brian Keogh at the Irish Golf Desk, Mickelson first protested the lack of a concession by floating his putter between ball and cup at the 1991 Walker Cup. He made the putt but few friends.
“He’s an arrogant so-and-so,” opponent Andrew Coltart said. “If his club had touched the ground I would have claimed the hole.”
Mickelson took the showdown 4&3, but according to Keogh, “he endeared himself to few that week, especially when he was asked about a shot he hit into the crowd and said: ‘That’s not a place I want to be – the Irish women are not that attractive.’”
In a Sunday singles match at the 1999 Ryder Cup against Jarmo Sandelin, Mickelson watched as his opponent searched for a coin after hitting an approach to three feet. It appeared Sandelin was sending a message that the putt was good until a fan yelled out, “Hey Jarmo, you need a coin?”
“As a matter of fact, yes,” Sandelin said.
Fans showered the green with loose change. Sandelin later claimed a hole in his pants pocket caused him to lose his precious marker. Or, so the batty Sandelin claimed.
Using concessions as a gamesmanship tool can often be confused with the more recent phenomenon of players outwardly griping about something they are not entitled to and subsequently revealing weak character. Somewhere along the gimme way, it became a well-known tactic to concede putts to your opponent early in a match only to turn into Marcel Marceau over the closing holes. The theory believed that not facing short putts early in the round would make players more prone to miss them late.
That approach has generally given way in a world with more immaculate green surfaces and players entrenched in a stroke play mindset where they are used to putting everything out. All of which makes the present-day offense taken over non-concessions that much more bizarre. Why do players feel so entitled to a freebie they never get in stroke play? And why are they willing to expend so much energy revealing that they feel slighted?
Are they just entitled? Peculiarly aggrieved? Trying to get the crowd on their side? Or all the above?