John Cassidy's Blog, page 120

Is Nick Denton Really the New Rupert Murdoch?

Kudos to my colleague Ben McGrath for finally eliciting some dollar figures for the revenues of Gawker Media. Back in early 2006, when I spoke to Denton about the possibility of writing an article about Gawker's rise, he was friendly enough, but he wouldn't reveal anything concrete about his company's finances. Since that was one of my primary interests, I dropped the story.

Before moving on to other topics, I came to suspect that Gawker Media's revenues were rather punier than many people thought and than Denton had intimated. Somebody with direct knowledge of the firm's business side said that in estimating its revenues, the best thing to do was think of a number and move the decimal point one place to the left.

Fast-forward four years and the page view figures for Gawker Media's network of sites have risen impressively: they attract some 17 million unique users a month in the United States and about 450 million page views. Ben reports that Gawker Media's revenues are now "on the order of fifteen to twenty million dollars a year." Being (like Denton) something of a skeptic, I will take the lower figure as the more accurate one and work from there. Now, in the world of online publishing, $15 million per annum isn't exactly puny, but it isn't exactly gonzo, either. Reuters blogger Felix Salmon says it is "lower than I would have expected," given Gawker's rapid growth, and the FT's John Gapper says it "indicates the difficulty for media businesses in garnering significant revenues purely from online advertising."

Denton has moved beyond the stage of running a cottage business, but suggestions that he has joined, or is about to join, the ranks of moguldom, where revenues are measured in the hundreds of millions, or billions, are absurd. Denton is aware of this disjuncture—up to a point. A few weeks ago, I met him at a party, and he told me that New York magazine, which recently profiled him as one of the people who run the city, had pitched the story to him as "the new Rupert Murdoch." In telling me this, Denton said he thought New York's editors had been "a bit premature." When I suggested that they might have been about forty years premature he didn't smile.

Gawker Media's page-view numbers are testament to Denton's energy and acuity as an online publisher, and, as he frequently points out, they are higher than the figures for the Web sites of big mainstream publications such as the Washington Post and Time. (Though not bigger than NYTimes.com, which each month attracts 26 million unique users and 640 million page views.) What Denton doesn't point out—and why should he?—is that some of the deadwood media dinosaurs he would consign to the knackers' yard appear to be growing faster than Gawker Media and doing a better job than Gawker Media in converting page views to advertising dollars.

Take Time Inc. In April, 2008, its network of sites, which includes People.com and Time.com, was attracting some 20 million U.S. visitors a month, according to Quantcast, a supplier of online metrics. Today, the Time sites are getting about 50 million visitors a month, an increase of 150 per cent. During the same two-and-a-half-year period, Gawker Media's visitors, again according to Quantcast, went from about 12 million to 20 million, an increase of two thirds. If these figures are even roughly accurate, they suggest that Gawker has shared in online media's rapid growth rather than standing out.

Now for advertising. In the second quarter of this year, the digital operations of the New York Times Company, which include the NYTimes.com, About.com, and Boston.com, generated $94.3 million, implying that its annual revenues are roughly twenty-five times those of Gawker Media. The revenues of the Washington Post Company's online news division—WaPo.com and Slate, principally—are smaller. They totaled $27 million in the second quarter, but that still makes them roughly seven times the size of Gawker Media's revenues. On this basis, it appears hard to argue that Denton is about to sweep away Punch Sulzberger or Don Graham, still less Murdoch himself.

That said, he runs an innovative little company that has some well-known online brands, and he has bigger ambitions. Understandably enough, he likes to group his sites together for publicity and marketing purposes. In fact, they are a diverse collection of businesses, each with its own strengths and weaknesses. Gizmodo (gadgets), Kotaku (gaming), io9 (sci-fi), and Lifehacker (personal productivity) are basically geek sites. Together, they account for well over half of Gawker Media's unique visitors, and, I would guess, an even higher proportion of its revenues. Jezebel is a sassy site for women; Deadspin is a sports blog; Gawker is a celebrity/media gossip column; Jalopnik is devoted to cars; Fleshbot is a porn site.

Naturally, these sites have very different audiences. Persuading corporations to purchase ads across all of them must be tough, which means each site has to stand on its own two feet. But when you break down the audience figures for the individual sites, they look somewhat less impressive. Gawker.com, for example, attracts roughly 400,000 visitors a day in the U.S., compared to 1.6 million for TMZ.com and 1.7 million for People.com, two of its rivals in celebrity coverage.

According to Quantcast, the average visitor to Gawker views about four pages, which means he or she scans the home page and clicks on three stories. When I just did this, it took me about three and a half minutes. (Admittedly, I didn't read the comments.) Now, I'm no ad salesmen, but my guess is it isn't easy persuading Citibank or Unilever to buy ads for any publication (online or offline) to which a good many readers devote less than five minutes a day, all the time hoping their boss isn't watching.

Denton in his more reflective moments acknowledges some of the economic challenges he faces. In the New Yorker article, he says online publishers could end up like Craigslist, destroying a lot more value than they create, or they could end up like cable companies such as MTV and CNBC, which struggled financially to begin with but ended up minting advertising dollars. The article also reports that when he started out he assumed that each of his sites, to be economically viable, would need to attract a million page views a month, but today he thinks the figure is twenty million.

Gawker Media's bigger sites comfortably exceed that threshold, but growing an online audience is increasingly costly. A few years back, the Gawker site employed four or five reporters whom it paid modestly to churn out a lot of copy—at one point, the going rate was twelve dollars a post, twelve posts a day. Today, Gawker.com has a dozen people plus an intern on its masthead, and some of them reportedly earn decent salaries (up to $75K plus a year, with benefits).

The cost inflation is unlikely to stop. Online publishing has turned into a destructive arms race. When I spoke to Denton, if memory serves, there were about fifteen or twenty posts a day on Gawker.com, and Denton told me he believed the ideal figure was twenty-five. As I write this, the Gawker home page says there have been sixty-nine posts in the last twenty-four hours. As the emphasis in online publishing shifts further to video, the cost of producing memorable content is going to escalate further. There is a reason that most cable channels, and even some video-heavy news Web sites, such as TMZ, reside inside giant media companies such as Comcast and Time Warner.

Then there is the bigger question of where the Internet is going, and how blogging outfits such as Denton's fit into a rapidly changing ecosystem. Gawker Media is quintessentially a product of the open Internet. Its business depends on taking content produced by others and turning it to its own advantage. But as Chris Anderson, the editor of Wired, pointed out in a recent cover story, we are witnessing the development of a closed, or semi-closed, Internet, in which distribution companies such as Apple, Facebook, and Hulu run their own content networks, and a lot of interesting content is walled off. In such an environment, will Gawker and Jezebel still have enough material to link to? Will advertisers flee the chaos of the Web and migrate to more sheltered confines? Will Denton launch his own iPad app, and, if so, what will he put on it?

For the moment, Denton appears to be betting on the free Web defeating the proprietary Web, and he could be proved right. But to me the upshot of all this is, a) I am not so sure that Gawker Media as currently constituted is, as Ben writes, "a sustainable business," and, b) if Denton really wants to compete with the big boys, rather than simply sniping at them, he will need to attract a cash infusion, either by selling out to a larger player, or, more likely, by attracting a rich investor who is willing to let him maintain control. Perhaps this is why he has been buying back shares he had issued to employees.

Finding a suitable deep-pocketed partner might not be as easy as some observers are suggesting. Denton likes to hint that he has already rebuffed a takeover offer from Murdoch's News Corp. My sources say that isn't quite accurate. According to the version I heard, one of Murdoch's minions did meet with him a few years ago and say that if ever he wanted to sell he should get in touch. But that is as far as things went.

Clearly, Denton could find a buyer or strategic investor at some price, but it wouldn't necessarily be in the $100 million range that is bouncing around the blogosphere. Such a figure would place a valuation on Gawker Media of more than six times its revenues. Yahoo, the third biggest site on the Web, is trading at three times revenues. AOL, another big online publisher, is valued at less than its revenue. Could it be that Denton wasn't low-balling his former employees by much when, in offering to buy back their shares, he reportedly valued the company at $30 million, or roughly two times revenues?

2011 is almost upon us. Undoubtedly, there is still some "dumb money" out there, but the days when big media companies were desperate to acquire hip Web content at any cost could be behind us. Right now, Murdoch, Bewkes, et al. are more interested in building tablet apps for their existing properties and figuring out how to get a grip on online television.

Perhaps Denton is hoping that the Facebook I.P.O., which is now expected to take place in early 2012, will spark another dot-com bubble, which would provide him with currency to fund further expansion. (Good luck with that one, Nick.) As an admirer of his enterprise, and as somebody who shares some (but not all) of his strictures about the old-style American publishing industry, I will be watching his next move with interest. Like Murdoch, he is a savvy operator who prides himself on his detachment and shouldn't be underestimated. But that's where the comparisons should stop. For now, at least, Uncle Rupert can sleep soundly in his bed.

Why Buy Liverpool F.C.?

Do John Henry and Tom Werner, the principal owners of the Boston Red Sox, know what they are doing in trying to buy Liverpool F.C., the venerable but troubled English soccer team?

The club's current owners are two other rich Americans, Tom Hicks and George Gillett, Jr., who bought it for $338 million in 2007, using mostly borrowed money. Liverpool is struggling on the field and its finances are weighed down by debts of close to $500 million. Its principal lender, Royal Bank of Scotland, has set a deadline of October 15th for a sale or financial restructuring.

Henry and Werner have offered about $480 million for Liverpool, which would allow the club to repay its debts, but wouldn't leave much over for Hicks and Gillett. In what amounted to an internal coup, a majority of Liverpool's board of directors on Monday agreed to the takeover against the wishes of Hicks and Gillett, who are reportedly demanding $900 million to relinquish control.

Hicks and Gillett retaliated by trying to replace two of the independent directors who voted for the bid, thus giving them a blocking majority. The British courts will now decided the outcome of the dispute, but whatever happens I can't see much financial sense in the Henry/Werner bid.

If they do acquire control, they will have to deal with Liverpool's fanatical fan base, which has already whipped itself up into an anti-American fervor. (For a sample of the anti-Hicks feeling, see this video.) Just like the long-suffering Red Sox fans before the team's 2004 World Series victory, the embittered Liverpudlians—"scousers"—will never be happy unless they can top their deadly rival, Manchester United, the British equivalent of the Yankees. Henry and Werner doubtless think they can repeat the success they had with the Sox, but they would be entering an economic environment that is very different from the one they are familiar with.

Major League Baseball is a collusive oligopoly in which the team's owners, with the help of a salary cap, restricted entry, and an exemption from the anti-trust laws, conspire against the players and the fans to enrich themselves. English (and European) soccer is a competitive free-for-all, where Russian oligarchs, Middle Eastern sheikhs, and Spanish "socios" shower money around like madmen to buy success, players' salaries can go to any level, and a couple of bad years on the field can lead to financial ruin.

If Henry and Werner decide to bring in two or three top players from rival clubs—and the fans will demand that they do—they will have to pay up to $100 million in "transfer fees" just to buy out their existing contracts, and that is before any salary negotiations. Then there are the rival owners. Instead of having cozy meetings with Bud Selig and Hal Steinbrenner, Henry and Werner will be going up against Roman Abramovich (Chelsea) and Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed al Nahyan of Abu Dhabi (Manchester City).

True, they will also be dealing with three Americans, Avi, Bryan, and Joel Glazer, whose family owns Manchester United (as well as the Tampa Bay Buccaneers), but the Glazers' bruising experience since buying control of United in 2005 is hardly an advertisement for trans-Atlantic takeovers. Five years on, many United fans are still protesting the sale, and this even though the team has won the Premier League three times in the past four years.

Henry and Werner will be willing to take some heat if they can get a good deal, but when it comes to owning professional soccer teams that phrase rarely applies. In a recent review of the finances of English soccer, the accounting firm Deloitte LLP noted that players' wages rose by eleven per cent during the 2008-2009 season, while revenues rose just three per cent. "In a classic example of competitive game theory, clubs are continually driven to maximize wages rather than profitability," the review noted. Dan Jones, a Deloitte partner, said, "Whilst some clubs seek to break even on a consistent basis, the emerging norm for many Premier League and Championship (second-tier) clubs appears to require significant ongoing benefactor support. As such we appear to be seeing a continuing shift from a sustainable 'not for profit' model toward one with potentially calamitous consistent and significant loss-making characteristics."

Are Henry and Werner prepared to act as "benefactors"? If they aren't, they must be thinking one of three things:

They can get Liverpool on the cheap, turn it around, and in a few years flip it for a profit. But that is probably what Hicks and Gillette were thinking when they bought the club in 2007.


The other soccer owners will come to their senses and impose a salary cap. But this is not going to happen. The European Commission has already indicated that salary caps would fall foul of European anti-trust law.


They can manage the club so well that its on-field success makes it a good business. Perhaps they can, but, again, at what cost? Recent history says it will be a very high one.

Ryder Cup, Day Four: Europe Wins—Just!

Anybody who got up early this morning to watch the last day of the Ryder Cup, which was shown on NBC/Universal's USA Network, witnessed one of the most tense and nerve-tingling sporting finales in recent memory. After a tremendous surge, which featured crushing victories by Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson, and a sensational birdie-birdie-birdie finish by the rookie Rickie Fowler, the American side was poised to pull off one of the great comebacks in sports.

It all came down to the final match featuring Graeme McDowell, the flinty Northern Irishman who won this year's U.S. Open, and Hunter Mahan, a tall, easygoing Texan. As the players approached the sixteenth green, Mahan had cut McDowell's three-hole lead cut to one, and many Europeans feared the worst. But McDowell curled in a lengthy birdie putt, giving him a lead of two holes with two to play. On the par-three seventeenth, which was surrounded by thousands of fans, Hunter Mahan mishit his tee shot, coming up short of the green, chunked his chip shot in embarrassing fashion, and missed a lengthy putt. With McDowell six feet away in two, Mahan conceded the hole and the Cup. McDowell raised his arms aloft, and promptly disappeared in a heaving sea of people.

It was an anti-climactic end to what had been a memorable four days. Throughout the final session, the standard of golf was superb. With lift-and-place rules in effect, soft greens, and no wind, the Celtic Manor course was vulnerable to sound ball striking, which the U.S. team duly delivered. As I said in my previous post, for the U.S. to win it needed to blunt some of Europe's top players, whom Captain Monty had sent out in the early matches. This, it did. Steve Stricker, who was one down after eleven holes against Lee Westwood, birdied the twelfth and eagled the fifteenth to win 2 and 1. Stewart Cink missed a couple of makeable putts on the way in against Rory McIlroy, but still came away with a valuable half, giving the U.S. 1½ points of a possible two.

In retrospect, the key match was the third one out, in which Luke Donald, Europe's M.V.P. of the tournament, held off a late spurt by Jim Furyk to win one up. If Furyk had snatched a half, the U.S. momentum might well have proved unstoppable, because in the fourth game, Dustin Johnson blitzed the course, going eight under through fourteen holes, to dust Martin Kaymer 6 and 4 (thus getting a bit of revenge for his defeat in the P.G.A. Championship). The bottom half of the draw appeared to favor the U.S. team, and so it proved. Mickelson and Woods finally played well, Zach Johnson comfortably defeated an out-of-form Padraig Harrington, and Fowler, a controversial captain's pick, performed heroics.

Overall, the United States won three out of the four sessions and should have retained the trophy. But the third session of four-ball and alternate-ball matches, which Europe won 5½ to ½, proved decisive. At Brookline, in 1999, the U.S. team famously came back from four points down before the singles. This time, despite a valiant U.S. effort, Europe's three-point lead overnight enabled it to cling on for victory.

The big winner of the tournament was Colin Montgomerie, who successfully rallied his team on Saturday afternoon, when it was on the verge of defeat. But, as Lord Wellington commented of Waterloo, his triumph was a darn close run thing. Had the U.S. got another half a point, the European media and fans would have pilloried Monty for his choices of Harrington and Eduardo Molinari over Paul Casey and Justin Rose. Harrington hasn't played well in over a year, and he only managed to eke out two points because Ross Fisher, his partner, carried him to victory. The Molinari brothers, for all the enthusiasm and good feelings they engendered, won just 1½ points out of a possible six.

The European victory relied heavily on Donald, Westwood, McDowell, and Ian Poulter. But let us not forget Miguel Angel Jimenez, the round-bellied forty-six-year-old Spaniard who today defeated Bubba Watson 4 and 3. In an age when young "bombers" like Watson drive the ball a fifth of a mile or more, it was refreshing to see Jimenez's more traditional brand of golf—fairways, greens, good putting—rewarded. With his long hair and his love of red wine and cigars, Jimenez is beloved on the European tour, but he had never previously won Ryder Cup singles match. Now he has.

On the U.S. side, Stricker (3), Woods (3), and Cink (2) accumulated the most points. Matt Kuchar, Jeff Overton, and Zach Johnson also played well. Three of the four captain's picks—Woods, Cink, Zach Johnson—justified their inclusion. The other, Fowler, won just one point, but that was partly because two of his doubles partners were Mickelson and Furyk, who both had a terrible tournament. Ranked number three and five in the world—Westwood has just over squeezed Mickelson out of the two spot—they accumulated just 1½ points between them.

In the Ryder Cup, one side can win when one of its top players has a bad week. (Witness the Europeans and Harrington.) But no team can afford to have two of its mightiest cannons go pop. When all is said and done, that is the fate that befell Team U.S.A. this weekend.

But for all the rain, and all the delays, what a match it was!

Too bad that at 10:40 A.M., before the award ceremony could begin, USA Network cut to a daytime soap that had already been running for forty minutes. Surely, after following the match that far, the suits at NBC/Universal could have seen it through to the end. Whatever motivated the decision, it made the entire country look like bad losers.

Ryder Cup, Day Three: All Hail to the Europeans

In most big sporting events, there comes a moment when the star players on each team are called on to rally their lesser brethren and lead them to victory. Think of Michael Jordan or Joe Montana taking over the fourth quarter during the playoffs, or A-Rod smashing three game-tying home runs during the 2009 post-season. At a soggy Celtic Manor, the pivotal moment came early Saturday afternoon, when Colin Montgomerie paired up his two best players, Lee Westwood and Luke Donald, in the first match of the third and penultimate session, an alternate-shot contest. Pavin also sent out first his best twosome, Tiger Woods and Steve Stricker, who had won six straight games in international competition. With Europe trailing 6 to 4, and six more vital points on the line, the Ryder Cup was slipping away.

If Woods and Stricker had taken an early lead and held onto it, the entire contest might well have been over. With a key U.S. flag showing on the jumbotrons scattered around the course, it would have been easy for the other Euros, and their fans, to lose heart. Momentum is a mysterious but vitally important element of team golf, especially for the home side. During the first two sessions, the Americans had succeeded in preventing the Euros from gaining any "mojo," keeping the crowd out of the match.

In what was, without question, the best display of team golf I have seen, Westwood and Donald changed all that. During a remarkable hour and a half, they birdied the first, second, fourth, sixth, and seventh holes to go five up, a virtually unassailable margin in alternate-ball games. As word of what was happening whistled around Celtic Manor, you could see the other European players standing a little taller and striding out little more purposefully. When darkness fell on Saturday evening, the Euros were ahead in all six matches.

Woods and Stricker, ranked one and four in the world, didn't play particularly badly. After finally winning a hole at the ninth, a long Stricker putt, they ended the front side at one under par. But Westwood and Donald, ranked three and eight, were nothing less than magnificent. They drove the ball in the fairway, hit the greens, and holed the putts—virtually all of them.

This morning, when play resumed, the two Europeans took up where they had left off. At the 210-yard par three 10th, Donald hit a solid long iron into the middle of the green, and Westwood holed a forty-footer for birdie, sending the crowd nuts. Woods made a valiant attempt to hole his chip from the side of the green, but the ball lipped out. At the eleventh, a par five, Stricker missed a makeable birdie putt and Donald made his. With seven holes to play, the Americans were six down—and out on their feet. (The final blow was administered at the thirteenth.)

If, as seems likely, the Europeans go on to win the Cup, there will be no mystery about where things turned around. And if, as also seems equally likely, Westwood soon takes over from Woods as the world's number one, there can be no quibbling. At this moment in time, Westwood is by far the better player. He has always driven the ball more accurately than Tiger, and his iron play has been comparable (they both excel). Until a year ago, Tiger had a better short game, which was why he won more tournaments. (Recall, for example, last year's U.S. Open, where he holed a twenty-five-foot putt to reach a playoff with Rocco Mediate. Westwood, playing alongside Tiger in the final group, missed a similar length putt, and missed the playoff.) This year, Tiger's putting has gone to pot along with the rest of his game. Westwood, by contrast, looks like he expects to make everything.

Right now, the focus remains on the final singles session. For the Americans to retain the cup, they need to win it by a margin of 7½ to 4½, a very tall order, especially if they drop behind early. The first three matches are Stricker vs. Westwood, Stuart Cink vs. Rory McIlroy, and Jim Furyk vs. Donald. In all of these matches, the Europeans will be favored. But if Stricker and Furyk can somehow pull out two halves, and Cink can best McIlroy, who hasn't been playing as well as he can, things will get very interesting, because the bottom half of the draw favors the U.S. team.

The final six matches are Watson vs. Jimenez, Woods vs. Franscesco Molinari, Fowler vs. Eduardo Molinari, Mickelson vs. Hanson, Zach Johnson vs. Harrington, and Mahan vs. McDowell. On paper, the U.S. would be favored to sweep the first four of these games, leaving the fate of the Cup in the hands of Johnson and Mahan, who face Harrington and McDowell respectively. An American comeback is unlikely: it is not out of the question. But the for the U.S. to have any chance, its stars, Woods and Mickelson particularly, but also Stricker and Furyk, will have to rise to the occasion. Do they have it in them? We shall see.

Ryder Cup Day One: Welsh Washout

Golf-wise, not much happened today. In monsoon-like conditions, none of the four matches progressed beyond the twelfth green. Team U.S.A. holds the lead in two of them, Europe is ahead in one, and one—featuring Tiger Woods—is tied. (See here for details.) As expected, all of the games are close.

The big story was the lengthy rain delay and the response it provoked. With the Cup threatening to spill over into Monday, something television networks loathe, the organizers hastily changed its hallowed format. Instead of two sessions of four ball, two sessions of alternate shot ("foursomes"), and one session of singles, there will now be just four sessions in all, with the middle two featuring two-ball and alternate-ball matches simultaneously. Absent further weather delays, the contest might still be completed on Sunday evening. To say the least, though, some of its tradition and subtlety has been compromised.

One of the Cup's features is the potential it offers for active captainship and strategic errors. Which players should be teamed up? (On Day One in 2004, Hal Sutton, the U.S. captain, put Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson together: they promptly lost both matches, and the U.S. side went on to lose the Cup.) Which players should play all five sessions, and which players should be rested, especially during the alternate-shot sessions, a format pros rarely encounter? Now that all is out the window. Under the revised format, the two captains will have to play all twelve team members in each of the remaining sessions. Less choice means less intrigue.

The organizers point out that all twenty-eight points will still be contested, which is true, but the unique ebb and flow of the match, another of its great attractions, has been irrevocably altered. Who is to blame for this somewhat chaotic situation? The U.S. P.G.A. Tour and its obsession with the ten-million-dollar FedEx Cup is the obvious target. Until this year, the Ryder Cup took place in September. Now the FedEx Cup series of playoff takes up all of that month, forcing the Ryder Cup back to soggy October. "It's a great shame but the schedule was dictated by the FedEx Cup," noted Paul Azinger, the American captain in 2008. "The FedEx wasn't invented when this tournament was launched but it is now and that's just the way it is."

Some of Fleet Street's finest are duly outraged: "Professional sport can be a sordid business at times," comments the Daily Telegraph's Mark Reason, "but the decision to push the Ryder Cup into October in order to accommodate the end of season FedEx Cup cash-fest in the States has brought undeserved misery to golf fans and Wales." Hear, hear, says the Guardian's Paul Hayward. On the one hand, Hayward points out, professional golf promotes the history and glory of the Ryder Cup, seducing "us with mood music and battle cries. Across the road, it makes Celtic Manor wait until winter is creeping near and subjects tens of thousands of spectators with expensive tickets to weather. . .induced interruptions and a miserable trudge through mud…. The point is that the risk of abject weather and bad light was increased by the choice of dates and will be even greater in 2014 if, as the word on the street suggests, the PGA Tour of America have offered the third week in October to the host venue, Gleneagles."

All of this is undoubtedly true, but once the Cup was shifted to October why was a venue chosen in south Wales, a region with a notoriously wet climate, especially in the fall? Again, the main answer appears to be money. Decades ago, when the Ryder Cup was the U.S.A. vs. U.K. and Ireland, the Cup was often played at old links courses, such as Birkdale, Lytham-St Annes, and Ganton, where the sandy soil could accommodate plenty of rain. But in recent decades, the European Tour has picked a series of flashy new developments: Valderrama, in Spain, the K-Club, in Ireland, and now Celtic Manor. In golfing terms, none of these courses is particularly distinguished. But they all have wealthy owners who were willing to pick up much of the cost of hosting the event.

Sir Terry Matthews, a self-made businessman who is often described as Wales's first billionaire, reportedly spent more than a hundred million pounds developing the Celtic Manor resort, and he lobbied heavily for its selection as the Ryder Cup venue. Queried about the possibility of rain, he assured skeptics that three of the Twenty Ten course's biggest advantages were "drainage, drainage, drainage." But today, in the words of Northern Ireland's Graeme McDowell, it was "water, water, everywhere."

The Battle of Celtic Manor: Ryder Cup Preview

"It's just golf, Bubba." With all of the hoopla surrounding the biannual Ryder Cup, which begins tomorrow, in Wales, this was the advice that one member of the United States team, Zach Johnson, a former Masters champion, gave to another, the long-hitting Bubba Watson, who is making his Cup début. But, of course, it isn't just golf. It is a peculiar but intensely gripping amalgam of jingoism, intercontinental rivalry, psychological warfare, and made-for-television entertainment.

Even for many people with but a casual interest in golf, the Ryder Cup is just thrilling to watch. And since the twelve-man U.S. team flew into Cardiff airport earlier this week, the rivalry and mind games have begun in earnest. To inspire the European side, captain Colin Montgomerie ("Mrs. Doubtfire" to his many American tormentors) called on the ailing Seve Ballesteros, the Spanish golfing legend, who played in nine Ryder Cups and made a hobby of baiting (and beating) the Americans. On the speakerphone from Madrid, where he is suffering from a brain tumor, Ballesteros spoke to the European team for about ten minutes. "He gave a very passionate speech like he used to give the team 13 years ago when he was captain," Montgomerie reported. "The passion engulfed the team room."

Corey Pavin, the American captain, countered with an uplifting address, delivered in person, from a decorated fighter pilot, Major Dan Rooney, who is also a professional golfer. After telling Tiger Woods, Phil Mickelson, et al., how he watched the U.S. victory at the 2008 Ryder Cup, which took place in Kentucky, from a military base in Iraq, Rooney presented them with A2 aviator jackets, long standard issue in the U.S. Air Force. Pressed on why he was drawing the U.S. military into a sporting contest, Pavin, who famously donned a camouflage baseball cap when he played in the 1991 Ryder Cup, at Kiawah Island, South Carolina, a match so bitter it became known as "The War by the Shore," said: "I think military awareness in the United States is probably at an all-time high. And I think people, certainly in the States and over here, appreciate the military and what they do for our freedoms—I think it is worthwhile to recognize that. Major Rooney is a very inspirational guy and a great patriot."

Even before this latest caper, some Europeans regarded Pavin as something of an American kook. A feisty grinder on the course, Pavin, who won the 1995 U.S. Open, at Shinnecock Hills, was brought up in a Californian Jewish family. In 1991 he converted to Christianity, of the born-again variety, and for many years he has been an active member of the P.G.A. tour's bible-study group. His wife Lisa, a pretty Vietnamese American who refers to herself as "the Captainess," recently appeared on the cover of a golf magazine clad only in a small red-white-and-blue sheet. She helped to design the rather strange-looking U.S. uniforms, which the British press has wasted no time in mocking. "The arrival of the US team at the Ryder Cup this week resembled an invasion of science teachers, lost in time and space after an experiment went wrong back in 1977," commented Hannah Betts, a fashion writer on the Daily Telegraph. "Boxy jackets, Travolta trousers and—please God, no—are those slip-on shoes?"

Montgomerie, no stranger to controversy himself, has also run into flak. On Monday, he issued a team ban on Twitter, thereby enraging some of his younger players who are avid tweeters. (Ian Poulter, he of the spiky hair and garish outfits, has more than a million followers.) Twenty-four hours later, the European captain was forced to back down, issuing a "clarification" in which he said the ban referred only to revealing details of the team's meetings and other confidential matters.

With all of this stuff going on, the golf has been taking second place, but that is about to change. For many months, and for reasons that I don't find entirely convincing, the European team has been regarded as a heavy favorite to regain the Cup. The argument for the Euros are many: Europeans are better at match play; European golf is a lot stronger than it used to be; some of the top Americans—most notably, Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson—are out of form. As far as it goes, this is all true. But there are countervailing factors at work.

In recent years, Europe has lost four of its Ryder Cup stalwarts: Montgomerie himself, Darren Clarke, Sergio Garcia, and Jose Maria Olazabal. Its 2010 team contains six rookies—Ross Fisher (England), Peter Hanson (Sweden), Martin Kaymer (Germany), Rory McIlroy (Ireland), and Edoardo and Francesco Molinari (Italy)—versus five on the U.S. side (Dustin Johnson, Matt Kuchar, Rickie Fowler, Jeff Overton, and Bubba Watson). Moreover, the two Euros that could truly be regarded as world-class Ryder Cup veterans—Ireland's Padraig Harrington (three major titles) and England's Lee Westwood (number three in the world rankings)—both have question marks hanging over them. Harrington hasn't won outside of Ireland in two years. (He made the team as one of Montgomerie's three captain's picks.) Westwood is recovering from an ankle injury, and he hasn't played since the P.G.A. Championship in mid-August.

To be sure, Woods and Mickelson are also looking distinctly iffy, but both of them are still capable of playing patches of great golf, which is all that is necessary in match play. Moreover, the U.S. team boasts three more veterans who are known for their consistency: Jim Furyk (who last week won the ten-million-dollar FedEx Cup), Steve Stricker, and Stewart Cink. The Euros, by contrast, will have to rely on Luke Donald, Miguel Angel Jimenez, and Graeme McDowell, talented golfers all—McDowell won this year's U.S. Open, at Pebble Beach—but not players renowned for coming through in head-to-head contests.

Then there are the conditions. Despite its location in a Welsh river valley, Celtic Manor's Twenty Ten course, which was constructed specifically for this event, is a U.S.-style "stadium course," with lots of bunkers, changes in elevation, and water hazards. Inexplicably, Captain Monty has failed to "trick it up" in favor of Europe. At Valhalla, in 2008, Paul Azinger, the U.S. skipper, had trees removed and fairways widened to favor the U.S. players who hit it long but occasionally wild: Woods, Mickelson, Anthony Kim, and J. B. Holmes. Despite the fact that this year's U.S. team is again stacked with "bombers"—in addition to Woods and Mickelson, there are Dustin Johnson, Overton, and Watson—Montgomerie has apparently refrained from bringing in the fairways and growing up the rough to punish errant shots. And despite the fact that Pavin has said, "That's what I'd do if I were him."

So what we have is two teams that appear evenly matched on paper; a good deal of uncertainty about how some of the top players will perform; fairly neutral conditions; an edge in experience (and underdog status) to the U.S.; and home-field advantage to the Europeans. I think the match will be close, and I wouldn't like to pick a winner. But if I were a betting man (and before I moved to the U.S. I was one) I would take the generous odds that the British bookmakers are offering on a U.S. victory: 13/8—wager $80 to win $130. As the U.S. team has discovered to its cost many times in the past twenty-five years, the Ryder Cup, once lost, isn't easy to win back. This year, for a change, the onus and pressure are on the Europeans.

Let the contest begin!

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