Twelve years ago, I looked on from what seemed like half a mile away as Paul McGinley, the calmest bat in the Belfry, rolled in the decisive 11-foot putt to claim the Ryder Cup for Europe.

This week, the 47-year-old Irishman captains Europe against Tom Watson's Americans at Gleneagles, in Scotland's Perthshire, in the biennial sporting classic that demonstrates unfailingly how golf, the most individualistic of games, can also be a gripping team sport.

Like many of the most satisfying sporting competition formats, the three-day Ryder Cup is a slow burner, with a rhythm more akin to a cricket Test match than a 100 metre dash or a football cup final.

This allows plenty of time for pondering weighty issues, and two of the questions you might hear chewed over between the peppered flags and gut-wrenching putts that are the contest's stock-in-trade are the following:

1. Why don't we have more sports events in which the teams involved represent continents?

2. Why can't Europe, by which people normally mean the European Union (EU), devise more institutions that are as popular and successful as its golf team?

This second issue seems particularly topical this year, given the recent independence referendum in Scotland and other separatist pressures around the continent, not to mention the waxing influence of eurosceptic parties such as the United Kingdom Independence Party.

I think with both these subjects, a good starting-point is to recall why this week's home team is Europe, and not Great Britain.

Hard to believe now, but four decades ago the Ryder Cup was dying on its feet.

The Ryder Cup was in anything but rude health when the United States' grip on the contest saw them win nine out of 10 between 1959 and 1977 ©Getty Images



Why? Because Great Britain was just not competitive: the USA won nine of the 10 contests between 1959 and 1977, with the 1969 encounter at Royal Birkdale ending up tied.

It was only in 1979, with the inclusion of Europeans, such as Spain's Severiano Ballesteros, that the team from the eastern side of the Atlantic became a worthy opponent for that from the west - and then not immediately, with Europe winning the cup (for the first time since Great Britain's win in 1957) only in 1985.

The formation of this particular continent-wide sports entity, then, came not from a popular clamour for a European golf team per se, but rather from a desire to engineer a worthwhile contest.

In this way, the European golfers ushered into the team fulfilled the same function as the handicap in a horse race, which uses weight discrepancies to try and allow horses of different abilities to compete on equal terms, producing an exciting and unpredictable finish.

Seve and his fellow Europeans were lumps of lead under the US saddle.

It was not until 1985 that the United States' opponents, now competing under the European flag, won the Ryder Cup ©Getty Images



Under normal circumstances, I think that a continent is just too big and diverse a thing to command natural sporting allegiance.

This to me is demonstrated by the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) competitions over the years featuring continental teams, sometimes alongside individual nations.

I have to say, speaking as someone who takes a moderate, though far from intense, interest in athletics, that they have never really captured my imagination; I had to do a Google search to discover that the event I had in mind is now called the IAAF Continental Cup and that it was staged this year in Marrakech, Morocco.

Anyway, to summarise: had British golfers been better, a European Ryder Cup team simply would never have been needed.

That said, over the past 30 years, this European golf team, which assembles once every two years, has undeniably become very popular.

That McGinley putt in 2002 triggered football-style chants of "Yew-rupp! Yew-rupp!" in the verdant heart of eurosceptic Middle England.

It is hard to conceive of anything else - anything - that could do that.

"This victory has to be more uniting for Europe than the euro ever will be," observed a Norwegian journalist at the press conference with the winning team, and who today could disagree with that assessment?

With nine wins and a tie in the last 14 Ryder Cups, Team Europe has just as undeniably been very successful.

Indeed, it is hard to think of another pan-European, or EU, institution in any field that has proved itself so consistently to be greater than the sum of its parts.

Team Europe - the best thing to have come out of the continent? ©Getty Images



Perhaps then there is an argument for conducting a study to identify a formula transferable to other European institutions so as to imbue them with some of the Ryder Cup team's positive qualities.

Thinking, though, about examples of other Europe-wide entities or initiatives that have been both successful and popular - the Marshall Plan for one; NATO for another - I am not at all sure that the conclusions of such a study would be very much to our liking.

Both of these European success stories, you see, required considerable North American input.

And the Ryder Cup golf team is no different: as the competition's website explains, "Jack Nicklaus [the great US golfer] was instrumental in calling for the change with Lord Derby, President of the PGA, and in 1978 it was announced that the next Ryder Cup, at The Greenbrier in West Virginia, would be Europe vs the United States."

I am starting to wonder if some American also had a hand in a fourth trans-European success story that came to mind - the InterRail railcard used by many of my generation to travel around Europe as students.

If we Europeans are not to be forced to admit that Americans sometimes appear to know what is good for us better than we do ourselves, I think it might be advisable to view the European Ryder Cup team as a glorious sporting one-off, not a model to try to duplicate in different walks of life.

Let's enjoy the mysterious sporting alchemy that seems to click in whenever the Ryder Cup team gathers for what it is over the next three days, and not seek to overburden it with broader significance.