A couple of gentlemen having a chat in a hotel room, before dinner, is not everyone’s idea of a meeting to change the face of world golf forever...

Far more fitting, as an iconic memory, is the unforgettable sight of that magnificent flying machine, Concorde, flying low like a gargantuan mechanical swallow above massed crowds at the Belfry celebrating 1985 victory by Tony Jacklin’s Europe. Contrasting though they may be, these two scenarios are linked, not only to each other but to the intoxicating transatlantic tour de force that The Ryder Cup has now become. And, more enticingly, to The K Club installment that shortly will grip the golfing community by its nerve ends.

When the ‘couple of gentlemen’ referred to in the opening sentence had their ‘chat’ The Ryder Cup was little more than a slightly boring, highly predictable biennial walk-over for the USA. Eight years later, when Concorde soared over the Belfry, the competition was ready to pursue the Olympic Games and football’s World Cup into supersonic orbit as the planet’s most popular sporting occasion.

The ‘two gentlemen’ were not of course just ordinary Joes. One was The Rt. Hon. The Earl of Derby, MC, President of the Professional Golfers’ Association and the other was Jack Nicklaus, randomly selected by various eminent bodies for awards ranging from ‘the golfer of the 20th Century’ to ‘the greatest sportsman of all time’. Nicklaus was a playing member of Dow Finsterwald’s US Ryder Cup at Royal Lytham & St Anne’s in 1977 when Brian Huggett’s Great Britain & Ireland, (as the opposition was then), were soundly beaten. That’s how it was, more often than not.

Just how the change from ‘country’ to ‘continent’ came about has been described in slightly varying ways. I’ll stick to the simple version I jotted down during an interview with the late Lord Derby, at Knowsley Hall, his ancestral home in Chesire.