Ryder Cup: is it the greatest sporting show on earth?

The crowds began to descend on Gleneagles well before dawn on the first day of the Ryder Cup, and with an hour left before the first tee time the grandstands were full of chanting fans.

And by the time the tournament got underway, shortly after 7.30am, there was "bedlam" on the first tee, according to live coverage on The Guardian. The febrile atmosphere even impressed the American contingent, and sports website SB Nation claimed that the crowd appeared "to be setting a new standard" in enthusiasm.

And it wasn't just the fans getting overexcited as the first day of competition got underway. The media has also been falling over itself to eulogise about the competition.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

"What makes the Ryder Cup the greatest sporting event of all is that it never fails to deliver and, largely for that reason, never stops making you feel youthful," gushes Ben Dirs on the BBC. "The gladiatorial nature of the Ryder Cup brings out the beast in players on both sides," he enthuses, and that makes it a "a genuine watch-it-down-the-pub event".

On top of that "Ryder Cups are short, sharp shocks, unlike cricket or rugby World Cups, which start amid much fanfare but quickly turn into a drizzle of one-sided and largely irrelevant contests", he adds.

As with other sporting events, the build-up is longer than the works of Chaucer, says Oliver Brown in the Daily Telegraph, "but when finally it comes the action is the most giddying, richly concentrated cocktail you could wish for".

The Ryder Cup provides all "the churn and swirl of the greatest sporting drama, this is a stage without peer", he adds.

There has been plenty of drama in Scotland in recent weeks says Melanie Reid in The Times, but "nothing quite rivals the extraordinary Ryder Cup circus, whose own GDP cannot be that far off Scotland's". Gleneagles resembles "a bizarre city wrapped around a ball game hyped into international war... So for the next three days, suspend all sense of perspective and enjoy the show."