A Welsh European: Golf,tourism and the remaking of national imaging

The Ryder Cup, golf tourism and the nation

The Ryder Cup first took place in 1927, although an unofficial match had taken place a year prior to that (Concannon, 2004). The trophy was named after the English seed merchant Samuel Ryder, a keen golfer who wanted to see an international competition between the best golfers from Great Britain and the USA. The USA dominated the competition where they won 19 of the first 22 matches. The cup was contested every two years with the event alternating between venues in the USA and in England up until 1973, when Scotland were the hosts for the first Great Britain and Ireland team.

During the 1960s and 1970s such was the USA’s dominance of the competition that some expressed concern that the Ryder Cup would cease to exist, as it was no longer perceived to be a fair and equal competition. Stafford describes the decision in 1979 to expand the Great Britain and Ireland team to include players from elsewhere in Europe as something that ‘saved a festival of golf that was in grave danger of petering out’ (2006: 18) and the event has now developed to become an important occasion on the golfing calendar.

Seve Ballesteros from Spain, a key figure in these early European successes and perhaps the creation of a European team itself, was rewarded for his part in the resurgence of the event when Spain hosted the 1997 Ryder Cup with Ballesteros as Captain. The captaincy is generally given as a reward to someone who has made a significant contribution to the event as a player, although this process has not been without its controversies over the years. Ireland staged the Ryder Cup for the first time in 2006, Wales hosted it in 2010 and Scotland provided the location for the event in 2014. The next Ryder Cup to be staged in Europe will take place in France and in 2022 Italy will be the hosts, so in some ways it could be suggested that we are witnessing a developing and emerging Europeanization of the Ryder Cup. Of course, as Paasi (2001) has noted in a much broader discussion of Europe and European identities, just what we mean and understand by Europe is varied and subject to multiple interpretations.

The Ryder Cup has evolved into ‘one of the great sporting occasions of the modern era’ (Concannon, 2004: xi), and Stafford (2006: 17) suggests that it ‘has become the biggest event in golf, bar none’, although others would argue that the four individual majors (the Open, the US Open, the Masters and USPGA [US Professional Golfers Association]) are more prestigious. Both of the texts referred to above were written for a popular market and there has been limited academic work on the Ryder Cup.

Tourism, sport and national identities: the case of Wales

The importance of both tourism and sport to the (re)presentation of national identities has been looked at by scholars across the world (e.g. Frew and White, 2011; Smith and Porter, 2004). Edensor’s (2002) broader work on popular culture includes numerous references to both tourism and sport in outlining the ways in which national identities are created, imagined and performed. Pitchford has outlined the role of ethnic tourism and nationalism, pointing out that many of the tourist attractions in Wales, such as its castles and industrial museums, tell ‘a compelling story of Welsh conquest and industrial underdevelopment’ (Pitchford, 1995: 50). Morgan and Pritchard’s work is important in helping to unpack some of the complexities shaping the promotion of Wales both domestically (in a UK context) and in international markets, highlighting some of the main challenges faced in developing Wales as a brand (Morgan and Pritchard 2005; Pritchard and Morgan, 1996, 2001).

Other scholarly work focused on related aspects of tourism in Wales include Saxena and Ilbery’s (2008) study of integrated rural tourism, Clifton’s (2011) research on place and branding, the work of Jones (2001) on the economic impacts of hosting a major sporting event, and Chaney’s (2015) analysis of the place of tourism in political parties’ manifesto discourse. This is by no means an exhaustive list but is included here as an indication of some of the most important work shaping the area that forms the focus of this particular article. Chaney (2015) highlights the economic role of tourism in Wales, and the increasing importance of sport tourism as part of the rhetoric of nation building in the political discourse.

Sport tourism has also developed markedly as an academic subject in the past twenty years (Gibson, 1998; Weed, 2009). Sport tourism, particularly through the staging of major international events, has been increasingly used by politicians and a variety of other stakeholders to promote national identity (Rahman and Lockwood, 2011), and sport has long been recognized for its important role as a means of national representation in Wales (Johnes, 2005). The study of golf tourism has developed markedly in recent years (see Hudson and Hudson, 2010) and includes contributions from scholars across a range of disciplinary backgrounds. The scholarly writing on golf tourism has focused primarily on two areas encompassing the behaviour and travel preferences of golf tourists (e.g. Gibson and Pennington-Gray, 2005; Hutchinson et al., 2009; Kim et al., 2008; Petrick, 2002), and the impacts of golf tourism (e.g. Briassoulis, 2007; Gelan, 2003; Lim and Patterson, 2008). Little has been written to date on golf tourism and image (re)creation from a socio-cultural perspective, with limited consideration of the sport and its biggest international events as a means of (supra)national representation.

All of the above also needs to be located within and around some recognition of the increased commercialization and commodification of elite sport. Mark McCormack’s promotion of golfer Arnold Palmer in the early 1960s led the way here. McCormack was one of the first to recognize the commercial power of sporting celebrity and founded the International Management Group (IMG) becoming arguably the most powerful man in sport for a time. Ian Woosnam would sign with this agency in 1984 and enjoyed a long and successful relationship with IMG. Woosnam is, to the best of my knowledge, the only Welshman to have featured on the cover of the prestigious Sports Illustrated magazine in the USA. He was the first Welshman to appear in a European Ryder Cup team and the first (and to date only) Welshman to captain Team Europe.

The Ryder Cup offers an interesting site to further explore tourism discourse where golfers from one continent compete as part of Team Europe. The next section will outline the theoretical framework underpinning this and considers the work of Raymond Williams as a lens through which to look at the case study of the 2010 Ryder Cup.

Theoretical framework

Texts produced by organizations such as Visit Wales and Ryder Cup Wales, and the role of Ian Woosnam in them, offer an important site to consider the ways in which an individual comes to represent a nation. Extracts from Woosnam’s (2002) autobiography are juxtaposed to this to further explore the ways in which national identities are (re)presented and understood. What is presented is an interpretation of discourse and is not merely a reproduction of the text. The aim here is to focus on (re)presentations of the nation rather than search for some unobtainable truth. This aligns itself with a particular form of analysis, which frequently takes an anti-realist posture and is not restricted to conclusions about discourse itself (Silverman, 2001). No discourse is a complete entity and so it is perhaps best viewed as an articulatory practice that constitutes and organizes social relations (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985).

This work draws upon the writing of Raymond Williams as a means of framing the study. Turner (1990: 52) suggests that the influence of Williams ‘has arguably been more profound than any other’ within Cultural Studies, while McGuigan (2014: xv) refers to him as ‘the greatest cultural theorist of modern Britain’. Although known for academic works such as Culture and Society (Williams, 1958), The Long Revolution (Williams, 1961) and Marxism and Literature (Williams, 1977), he was also a prolific writer of other genres and his works of fiction (many of which were partly autobiographical) were set within the Black Mountains (e.g. Williams, 1960, 1964). Williams clearly loved that area and his biographers have noted that he considered himself to be more of a writer than a member of the professoriate (see Inglis, 1995; Smith, 2008) and that it was through his works of fiction that he began to explore the meaning of his native land.

His Welsh identity has at times been overlooked or indeed misrepresented and misunderstood by some clumsy generalizations that fail to engage with the complexities of national identities in a particular locale. That is not to say, though, that this aspect has been totally ignored, for the work of Welsh scholars Dai Smith (2008) and Daniel Williams (2003) has been particularly important in emphasizing the place of Williams’s local and national importance. Smith’s (2008) biography of Williams, for which the author had access to private papers, offers an insightful analysis of his formative years growing up in Pandy. Daniel Williams (2003) has brought together most of Raymond Williams’s important writing on Wales and shows how a more conscious engagement with Wales and wider Welsh issues informed his work in the 1970s and beyond.

It is as a founding figure in the development of Cultural Studies that Williams is perhaps best recognized in academic circles. His work transcended traditional boundaries and appeared across the social sciences (see Williams, 1976). Edensor (2002) highlighted that despite the rise of Cultural Studies, the ways in which the nation is experienced and understood through aspects of popular culture needs further study. Whannel (2008: 15) notes that when Cultural Studies emerged as an academic subject in Britain during the 1970s ‘few writers regarded sport as having any significant importance in the wider scheme of things’. As sports have become increasingly commercialized and commodified, a socio-cultural approach can help us better understand the meaning of sport across a range of social milieus and would also seem to represent a useful lens for further exploring the cultural aspects of tourism.

Williams did not sound distinctly Welsh, and Smith (2008) notes how some colleagues expressed surprise when first finding out that Williams was from Wales. His university days and adult working life were spent in England and much of his published work focused on English literature and culture. His self-definition as a ‘Welsh European’ evidenced a greater engagement with aspects of Welsh culture and the analysis of the meaning of nation and national identities (Williams, 1983). This is important for it represented a conscious attempt to distance himself from the English bourgeoisie and points to the interplay between nation and class that formed a centrally important part of his writing.

Although he left school at 16 and moved in very different social circles to Williams, Ian Woosnam’s accent was one characterized by the distinctive burr of the border country – in his case a brogue representative of the agricultural landscape of Shropshire, England. This area has been identified as an interesting one for tourism development and, in conjunction with the neighbouring counties of Herefordshire (England) and Powys (Wales), was a space that ‘had a special identity as an ancient borderland, neither truly English nor truly Welsh’ (Saxena and Ilbery, 2008: 249). Kneafsey (2000) has highlighted the importance of understanding the particularities of historical configurations and newer social relations within any specific locale. Williams reflected on growing up in his own border country where ‘there was a curious sense in which we could speak of both Welsh and English as foreigners, as “not us”’ (2003 [1979b]: 50).

At one level, Woosnam and Williams may seem like a strange pair, but what they share is the experience of growing up in a border country with its complex interplay of a range of identities. Williams (2003 [1971]: 3) once noted that ‘I used to think that born into a Border country at once physical, economic, and cultural, my own relationship to the idea of Wales was especially problematic’, but would also reflect upon the fact that others from different parts of the country explored some similar tensions in making sense of Wales. At the heart of his work was the concept of ‘structure of feeling’, which points to both the objectivity of ‘structure’ and the more elusive notion of ‘feeling’ (see Williams, 1973). Eldridge and Eldridge (1994) have noted the similarities of this to the sociological imagination of C. Wright Mills (1959) and point to the interconnective approach adopted by Williams and applied to all of his work. While Williams reflected upon his own formative experiences in much of his academic writing, it is in his works of fiction, such as Border Country (Williams, 1960), that we really begin to see Wales in a wider sense. Each individual has her/his own unique relationship with their nation, although in sport and tourism certain narratives come to the fore and others are marginalized. In moving on to the case study that forms the focus of this article, I now look specifically at the role of Ian Woosnam.

Ian Woosnam’s Wales

The homepage of the Ryder Cup Wales website featured a picture of Woosnam and the words ‘Wales is a small country with big golfing ambition’ (Ryder Cup Wales, 2010). Woosnam is featured on the front covers of both the Golf as It Should Be document (Visit Wales, 2007) and the Services to Clubs Guide (Ryder Cup Wales 2010 Ltd, 2008) where he is also pictured on pages 3 and 20. His picture appears on three other occasions in the Golf as It Should Be guide, where an additional two-page feature article focuses on ‘Ian Woosnam’s Wales’ (Visit Wales, 2007: 8–9). His is the only image of a recognizable figure within any of the documentation, thereby reflecting both his exalted status and the lack of any other recognizable individual in Welsh golf. What this means is that in some ways Woosnam becomes a reflection of Wales, and Wales in turn becomes a reflection of him.

Miller et al. (2001: 31) note how ‘the sporting body bears triumphant national mythologies in a double way, extending the body to encompass the nation and compressing it to obscure the social divisions that threaten national unity’. A short and squat figure with powerful arms, a legacy of his childhood growing up on a farm, the golfer fits the role of the little guy in a narrative that has some resonance for a small nation that has often struggled for visibility in the shadow of a larger, dominant neighbour. While the guide states that ‘Ian Woosnam wasn’t quite born in a Welsh bunker’ (Visit Wales, 2007: 8) it does not, of course, note that Woosnam was actually born in England. For in sport, tourism and countless other broader social and political spheres, Wales and the essentialized construction of Welshness is often largely defined against not being England and English (see for example, Bowie, 1993; Johnes, 2005; Pitchford, 1995).

Woosnam refers to the Welsh family background of both of his parents in his autobiography (Woosnam, 2002). In the Golf as It Should Be guide (Visit Wales, 2007) he states how annoyed he got when people used to ask him which part of England Wales was in. He also notes how he used to try to promote the quality of Welsh golf courses overseas ‘but it was pretty much a lonely job’ (Visit Wales, 2007: 8). Here then we see how this one individual assumed a very important role in promoting his nation as he was in many ways the sole standard bearer for the country. This is outlined in his autobiography by the following extract:

By 1987, the significance of my Welshness seemed somehow index-linked to my success in the game. The more I won, the more people seemed to know where I came from and, consequently, the more proud I felt to call myself a Welshman. (Woosnam, 2002: 113)

For many within the international golf community he became the Welsh, and the Welsh in turn were collapsed to be Ian Woosnam, evidencing the ways in which the sporting body ‘bears triumphant national mythologies’ (Miller et al., 2001: 31). The great challenge in promoting Wales as a distinct and identifiable entity to potential tourists has been highlighted elsewhere (e.g. Pitchford, 1995; Pritchard and Morgan, 1996). This challenge was perhaps accentuated in attempting to capitalize on the hosting of the 2010 Ryder Cup given that, in trying to develop golf tourism, Wales would be competing against neighbouring nations that had a far more established position in this field.

Golf as it should be: challenging dominant ideologies

Woosnam’s visibility in relation to the ‘Golf as It Should Be’ campaign is also important for he provides a physical reference point beyond the rhetoric and ‘brand-speak’ of tourism marketing. The challenges faced in developing a presence in the competitive golf tourism market are evidenced in Woosnam’s observation that Scotland and Ireland ‘had a hundred years start on us so we had a lot of catching up to do’ (Visit Wales, 2007: 8). The ‘Golf as It Should Be’ strategy aimed to position Wales as a challenger brand. Pride (2004: 159) notes how, when it comes to branding, the most difficult task facing any destination ‘is the quest for true differentiation’. Wales is (re)positioned as distinct from its competitors by positioning it as ‘the antidote to the golfing scene in the competitor countries’ (Pride, 2004: 164). This was a clever marketing campaign, aiming to highlight a differentiation, but the challenge of basing this around an event that is by its very nature a very exclusive one (see Morrow and Wheatley, 2003) presents an interesting paradox. The image that is promoted is of a golfing destination far removed from the ‘corporateness of England’ (in Pride, 2004: 165) yet at the same time key stakeholders need to use the sport as a means of attracting corporate sponsors and inward investment.

As a visible image in both Ryder Cup Wales and Visit Wales documentation, Woosnam represents an ever-present and symbolically important figure of the Welsh golfing landscape. A farmer’s son who spent his early years as a professional golfer struggling to make a living on the tour, Woosnam lived in a camper van and travelled from tournament to tournament surviving on a diet comprised largely of baked beans. His avowed fondness for a beer and a cigarette (Woosnam, 2002) led to the ‘Boozy Woosie’ tag but this also served to position him as less aloof and more approachable than some of his peers. At a time when golfers increasingly appeared more distant and dislocated from fans as considerable prize money reshaped the game (Sounes, 2004), Woosnam’s popularity was shaped in part by his perceived ‘ordinariness’, even though he also reaped the huge financial rewards now available. The importance of his national identity cannot be overstated here in attempting to give Wales a presence in an area where the country has long struggled to present a distinct and identifiable image. The challenges of promoting Wales and a Welsh identity in the USA (see Pritchard and Morgan, 1996), and the wider problems in (re)positioning this against other nearby nations in the golf tourism marketplace are evidenced by the following extract from Woosnam’s autobiography:

‘So, Woosie, you’re from Wales?’ an American journalist had asked during a press conference earlier in the year.

‘That’s right’ I replied.

‘So what part of Scotland is that?’

The room erupted in laughter, but the guy had been entirely serious! I shook my head, and took another question. (Woosnam, 2002: 113)

Whereas Woosnam won the US Masters title in 1991, and was once ranked the Number One golfer in the world, for much of the first decade of the new millennium no Welsh player appeared in the top 100 of world golf. No Welshman made the 2010 European Ryder Cup team and so, for the first time in the history of the event, there was no golfer from the ‘host’ nation present in the home team.

Apart from Woosnam, Philip Price (in 2002) was the only other Welsh player to feature as part of a European team at the time the event was staged in Wales (although Jamie Donaldson was to play a key role for Team Europe in 2014). This represents a marked contrast to Scotland, Ireland and England, each of which has contributed many more players to Team Europe. Northern Ireland has also been much more visible in recent years, with two of its golfers winning some of the major golf tournaments. Outside of this historic core, Spain has been represented in European teams by many more golfers in this same period, and since the 2010 event Sweden and Italy have now contributed more golfers to Team Europe than Wales.

As a small man, Woosnam also represented a perfect fit for a nation constantly battling against the odds and struggling to (re)assert itself against bigger opponents. The historian Gwyn A. Williams (1985) suggested that Wales is an ‘artifact’, made and remade over time, and usually framed within a British context. While many are comfortable with this dual identity, it is also important to look at an additional layer and the place of a European identity within this configuration. Woosnam’s importance, I argue here, was to incorporate Wales within a European context where he ensured that the Welsh would be a recognizable part of this broader collective and provided a physical reference point to draw upon.

The paucity of elite golfers from Wales ensured that (almost by default) Woosnam would have to be the focal point of any promotional literature where a recognizable face was needed. This makes his a unique role in recent Ryder Cup promotions for he became the identifiable symbol of the country. Other Ryder Cup matches, staged outside England, had more reference points to contribute to the framing of local/national narratives but, ahead of the 2010 event, Woosnam stood alone as ‘the Welshman’. In making sense of his role, and employing the self-definition of Raymond Williams, I suggest that Woosnam is best viewed as a Welsh European. Such a term points to the layered national and supranational identities and his long-term role as the significant figure in making Wales a visible part of (Team) Europe in golf.

A Welsh European

Suddenly England, bourgeois England wasn’t my point of reference any more. I was a Welsh European, and both levels felt different. (Williams, 2003 [1979a]: 136)

Osmond (2001: 123) noted how people living in Wales can participate in a variety of identities stating that ‘they can be Welsh, British, European … [M]ore often than not they combine these attachments in varying degrees of intensity.’ He also notes how, for the Welsh, the notion of being European is perhaps easier than it is for the English because they are used to dealing with multiple identities. Wales found itself wiped off the map of Europe in 2004 when the front cover of the Euorostat Yearbook had somehow sunk the country into the Irish Sea! The Western Mail (self-styled papur cenedlaethol Cymru, the national newspaper of Wales) printed a dot-to-dot map of the country for the European Union to cut out and keep.

Williams grew up in a small Welsh village 6 miles from the English border where a very strong local sense of identity meant that villagers would refer to both the Welsh and the English as ‘not us’ (Williams, 2003 [1979b]: 50). For Woosnam, all opportunities to play golf had to fit around farming commitments (Woosnam, 2002). His border country dictated that he learned the game of golf on a course where 15 of the holes are in Wales but players cross into England to play the 3 other holes. The significance of crossing the border between Wales and England was one that Williams reflected upon throughout his career and was an important journey in shaping his analyses of many other aspects of culture.

Anderson’s (1983) descriptor of nations as ‘imagined communities’ has been used by a range of scholars, including those interested in tourism and sport. While the imagined community of millions has been described as being more real when conceived as a team of 11 named individuals playing football (Hobsbawm, 1990), so then I would suggest the idea of Europe is perhaps best imagined through the image of 12 named individuals representing the continent in a biennial golf match. In other sports, such as football, Europe has long served as a distant and far away ‘other’ for many British supporters. Teams have long talked of ‘getting into Europe’ (Williams and Wagg, 1991) and national stereotypes form a central part of sports reporting where sport is situated within and around wider social and political discourse and there is evidence of both hostility and pro-European affirmations (Blain et al., 1993; Steen, 2015). Steen’s (2015) recent work on the Ryder Cup noted the focus on ‘continental collectivity’ within the British media reporting of the event.

While it may be promoted and oftentimes celebrated as a symbol of a united Europe, the Ryder Cup team has always been one with an established British and Irish core. Outside of the five nations who contributed to the Great Britain and Ireland configuration, only seven other nations have had representatives in the European team to date. On average, a European Ryder Cup team will consist of 7–8 players from Great Britain and Ireland, and besides these countries, only Spain and Sweden have really positioned themselves as part of the core of Team Europe. The Europe represented in a Ryder Cup team, then, is still very much a Western European one, and is based upon a very narrow geographical core. It was his engagement with the work of other European intellectuals that Williams reflected upon, noting that ‘I am now necessarily European’ and that ‘[t]he people to the left and on the left of the French and Italian communist parties, the German and Scandinavian comrades […] are my kind of people; the people I come from and belong to’ (Williams, 2003 [1979a]: 136). His self-definition as a ‘Welsh European’ emphasizes the importance of social class, the challenging of a dominant hegemony, and the interplay of nation and class, which have been identified as central to the case study discussed in this paper. In trying to capture the significance of one individual, at a particular time, I have attempted to tease out elements of the relationship between biography and society as presented within tourism-promotion discourse.

Concluding remarks

This article has attempted to explore the role of an individual within wider national tourism discourse around the staging of a mega-event. It has also highlighted the role of the stateless nation of Wales as host of the event. As the most (and perhaps only?) recognizable figure in Welsh golf, Woosnam played an important role in promoting the 2010 Ryder Cup and ensured that the event had some recognizable links to Wales beyond just the location of the match itself. His visibility and recognition within the international golfing industry both collapsed and extended the sporting body to encapsulate the nation through this one figure. The role of an individual, and having his biography positioned within and around wider social and cultural developments, points to continuity and change in better understanding the ways in which Wales and Europe are (re)imagined within the particular context of the case study discussed here.

Hall (1996: 4) noted that it is precisely because identities are constructed within and not outside of discourse that ‘we need to understand them as produced in specific historical and institutional sites’. The positioning of Woosnam as a Welsh European speaks to the continuity and change of identities. This one figure is extended (as Wales) and then further extended (Wales as part of Europe) in the sporting discourse to represent a particular place. His personal biography, on some levels, fits a narrative that attempts to position Wales and Welsh golf as something distinct from the ‘corporateness’ of England. In engaging with the work of Raymond Williams it is important to acknowledge that he was a critic of global capitalism. The discourse used in ‘branding’ Wales as a tourist destination may have been far removed from his own understanding and feeling for that place. What we do know is that Williams did enjoy televised sport and once noted that he would keep his television set for it alone. For sports fans in the UK, live coverage of the 2010 Ryder Cup was only available to those who had paid for a subscription to Sky television. This is a subject on which Williams would surely also have had some strong opinions.

Yet although it is clear that Woosnam provides an important site for the incorporation of Wales into European golfing narratives, it is important not to position this observation alongside an essentialized construction of Welshness and a particular imagined identity. Woosnam was born over the border in England and spent much of his adult life in Jersey, where the advantages of paying lower taxes were clearly influential (Woosnam, 2002). Although born in Wales, Raymond Williams lived in England for most of his adult life and is best known for his scholarship on English literature and culture. His self-definition as a Welsh European reflected both an increased national consciousness and awareness, alongside a conscientious rejection of the English bourgeoisie. I have applied this descriptor to Woosnam here as a means of highlighting the golfer’s significant role as a marker of Wales where, as a playing member, and later captain, of Team Europe, he ensured that Wales were represented in Ryder Cup matches and that his small nation was a visible part of Europe within golfing narratives at least. He was the first Welsh player to be part of Team Europe and for the foreseeable future will be the only golfer from Wales to have assumed the captaincy of this collective.

Raymond Williams is celebrated for his academic contribution but his work as a novelist is often overlooked. In novels such as Border Country, rich descriptive accounts of the landscape and reflections on the importance of place clearly situate the author and indicate a sense of topophilia (love of place) in evidencing the strong attachment to a particular locale (Williams, 1960). This was something that was also very much evident in Woosnam’s (2002) autobiography and provided part of the discourse framing Woosnam’s role as an ambassador of Welsh golf, and in the words he contributed to the various tourism texts ahead of the 2010 Ryder Cup. Pritchard and Morgan (2001: 177) pointed to the ways in which space, place and landscape ‘are in constant flux’ and noted how the meaning of Wales as a tourism space was shifting. In more recent years we have seen this change even more and the development of Wales as a tourist destination has continued apace.

While he did not play any part in a thrilling victory for Team Europe in 2010, it was in many ways still Ian Woosnam’s Ryder Cup. The most celebrated figure in Welsh golf became something of a reassuring identifier to the competition and ensured that the Welsh could be part of this wider European collective. In the rain-soaked hills of south Wales he provided a comforting and continuous link to make Europe the home team. For four days, many of the spectators from the host nation themselves became ‘Welsh Europeans’ and cheered on fellow Europeans.

Beyond a strong English core at the heart of the 2010 Ryder Cup team, five other nationalities were represented in Team Europe. There is some evidence of an emerging Europeanization of the Ryder Cup, with two future events scheduled to take place in continental Europe, but 37 years on from the creation of a European team only 12 different nationalities have represented the collective to date. In a referendum on whether Britain should remain a part of the European Union (on 23 June 2016) the British electorate voted to leave. This so-called ‘Brexit’ will dramatically reshape the role of Britain within Europe. While international sport is largely about politics with a small ‘p’, it will be interesting to observe how this supranational collective and a pan-European identity are portrayed in the media coverage of upcoming Ryder Cup matches. The Ryder Cup is perhaps the only sporting event where the European flag is waved by spectators, although the various national flags of the team members also feature prominently.

Sharratt (2001: 307) noted that although Williams may be claimed as a Welsh novelist, ‘his own emphasis on a shared “culture” (in that larger sense) took him conceptually and imaginatively beyond the familiar but problematic boundaries of “nation” or “state” and their accompanying assumptions’. In considering the role of Ian Woosnam as a Welsh European, this study has explored the ways in which an individual represents a nation within tourism discourse to provide a physical reference point upon which to position the host nation of a mega-event within a supranational collective.