There’s a restaurant in Pier 39 in San Francisco, the city’s cheerfully self-promoting waterfront tourist trap, that offers, along with the city’s trademark clam chowder and some excellent Californian chardonnays, a splendid vista of one of the view cities I’ve been to that rivals Cape Town in its ability to take your breath away. Alcatraz, the Golden Gate Bridge, the view across the Bay: catch it on a day of clear blue skies, and it’s impossible not to be smitten.

It’s also hard not to leave your liver, rather than your heart, in San Francisco, local wines complemented by an array of microbrewed lagers with inventive names that flirt shamelessly with you from the bars, restaurants and cafes that rival Sydney and Paris for sheer volume. Throw in the old world charm of the trams, the sense of history of a gold rush town made good, and people vested of a warmth more deep south than urban metropolis, and you have possibly my favourite city outside of Cape Town. Which, given the golf that’s playing out just beyond the city limits this week, has me daydreaming of being back on the Californian coast.

I was in San Francisco on January to have a look at Harding Park, the unlikely venue for the Ryder Cup’s poor cousin, now underway for the third time in succession in North America, a fact that’s not lost on the international team. It’s an unlikely host course not because of its quality — Harding Park is an exceptional layout in sublime surroundings, and is more than up to the challenge of testing the world’s finest players — but rather because it’s a public course. Which, in an era where the Ryder Cup has inspired an Olympic-style bidding process (think Celtic Manor next year, or Gleneagles in 2014), is a pleasant surprise.

As is the course, one with which — provided you’re golf mad, a raging insomniac, or prone to catching some television before wrapping up a heavy Thursday night — you’ll now be familiar with. Good as it is, though (and it’s even more alluring when you’re there), the course isn’t the focal point on the rare occasions golf becomes a team sport. Instead, it’s the teams themselves, and an alien format that places a new spin on the usual game.

Whether the Presidents Cup should exist at all is a regular question when the tournament rears its head. There is an unquestionable sense of the artificial to it in the context of the history and tradition of the Ryder Cup, and asked privately, most of the players would be quite happy to leave it off the calendar. But once the competition has begun, the rivalry tends to heat up very quickly, and while it lacks the underlying edge of nastiness that so often creeps in to the Ryder Cup, the innate sense of competition that runs to the core of all professional sportspeople kicks in.

And so this week an eclectic team of internationals, clear underdogs, takes on an in-form American line-up that will be followed furiously by flag waving Americans baying for a home victory. Three South Africans notwithstanding, it’s hard to see anything but an American triumph in San Francisco, even if Tiger’s notoriously poor team form continues. I’ll be watching closely nonetheless, partly because memories of the magic of 2003 at Fancourt are still vivid, but mainly because I’ll be wishing I was back in the city of trams, clam chowder and lightly wooded chardonnay. And a rather nice golf course called Harding Park.

Contact Dan at dan@metropolis.co.za

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