Roots of Ryder Cup Golf Tournament Involve Seed Company The Ryder Cup, which will be held for the 39th time this week at Medinah Country Club near Chicago, has become one of the most keenly anticipated team events in sports. But the origins of the event are somewhat muddled. For many years, it was accepted as fact that the Ryder Cup was dreamed up in 1926 by Samuel Ryder, a successful English seed merchant, as he was celebrating at Wentworth Golf Club in Surrey, England, with a group of British professionals in the afterglow of their 13 ½-1 ½ victory over an American team. Marveling at the fine play and camaraderie between the two sides, Ryder reportedly said: "We must do this again! I'll donate the trophy. Thus, the Ryder Cup was born. It is a nice story, but that is not what happened. What became the Ryder Cup had been in the works for several years. Ryder and his brother, James, began staging challenge matches for British professionals at his golf club, Verulam Golf Club, just north of London, from 1923 to 1925. The event attracted the best players of the day: Harry Vardon, James Braid and J. H. Taylor, remembered in Britain to this day as the Great Triumvirate. After the American Walter Hagen won the British Open in 1922 and 1924, and the new British stars George Duncan and Arthur Havers emerged by winning in 1920 and 1923, the time seemed ripe for a match between the best of the United States and the best of Britain. The planned match was reported in The Daily Telegraph in 1925, the year before the Wentworth event was to take place. In April 1926, it was announced in the news media: "Mr. S. Ryder, of St. Albans, has presented a trophy for annual competition between teams of British and American professionals. The first match for the trophy is to take place at Wentworth on June 4th and 5th. Ryder's involvement was further reported in The Times of London, by the great golf writer Bernard Darwin, six weeks before the event and in The New York Times at the time of the event. Invitations, undoubtedly arranged for by Ryder, had been sent a year before the event to Hagen, the leading American player of the day, to see if he could arrange a team to play. Ever the showman, the bombastic Hagen enthusiastically accepted for the American side. While not an officially sanctioned event by the British P.G.A., it was a marketing coup for Ryder's firm, the Heath and Heather Seed Company, to promote his penny mail-order seed packets. Thus, the Ryder Cup may be one of the earliest examples of corporate sponsorship of a sporting event. But ultimately this first Ryder Cup was expunged from the record books. Soon before the matches, a general strike gripped Britain, effectively shutting down most travel into the country. Several of the American stars, most notably Gene Sarazen and Johnny Farrell, could not make the trip and were replaced by non-American stand-ins, including two Britons, two Scotsmen and an Australian trick-shot artist. In the end, Ryder withheld the trophy, calling for the first official Ryder Cup to be played the next year. To commemorate the victory, the British team was presented with gold medals instead. But the seeds of what became the Ryder Cup were planted much earlier, in 1913. In a little-noted event, the first real international team match in golf was contested in France, of all places. It consisted of two four-man teams in four-ball matches on the first day and four singles matches on the second, each match at 36 holes. The French, led by the 1907 British Open champion Arnaud Massy, soundly thrashed the American side, 6-0, in Versailles. The Ryder Cup will be played in France for the first time in 2018 at Le Golf National, near Versailles. The seeds for the Ryder Cup were further sown in 1921. George Sargent, a former president of the P.G.A. of America, discussed holding an international match with Sylvanus Jermain, the president of Inverness Golf Club in Toledo, Ohio. The magazine Golf Illustrated promoted an international match later in 1921 as follow-up to The Glasgow Herald's 1000 Guineas Tournament to be played at the Kings Course in Gleneagles, Scotland. The British team overpowered the Americans, 9-3, and the event was not a rousing success. Few spectators stayed after the tournament was concluded, perhaps because the American side was sprinkled with Scottish exiles and the golf was less than sterling. The public viewed it as little more than a weak exhibition, but it was a beginning. After the halting start in 1926, the Ryder Cup took root with the first official matches at Worcester (Mass.) Country Club the next year. The United States won convincingly, 9 ½-2 ½, and received the somewhat diminutive 17-inch-high, solid-gold trophy with the image of Samuel Ryder's golf instructor, Abe Mitchell, addressing a tee shot on top. The seed that was planted in France in 1913, nurtured in 1921, cultivated at Wentworth in 1926 and that finally came into full bloom in 1927 at Worcester has grown into what many call golf's fifth major championship. Martin Davis, the historian for the Golf Channel, has written or edited 24 books on golf. His next book, "The Ryder Cup: Golf's Grandest Event," will be released next year.