Scenes from an American life. Flicking through the television channels around 8am New York time last Monday morning, my eye was taken by the ticker going across the bottom of one of the cable news shows. "Ryder Cup underway in Wales" went the update. No score. No detail. If you didn't know, you'd presume the event was starting that very day. In the car half an hour later, the two sports talk radio channels were forensically analysing the previous day's NFL action. The only mention of golf came during the headlines. It was the fourth item, after Sunday's gridiron round-up, the baseball play-off previews and the speculation about the Mets firing their manager.

When Graeme McDowell delivered the trophy to Europe a matter of hours later, it wasn't like America yawned. It was more like America didn't even notice, much less care. On Tuesday morning, the dramatic denouement at soggy Celtic Manor wasn't enough to make the back pages of the New York tabloids. This absence of profile had nothing to do with the locals xenophobically choosing not to give prominence to a US defeat either. It was exactly the same after Paul Azinger's team won back the trophy two years ago. Aside from a very small minority, most people here didn't even know there was an intercontinental golf match taking place.

Last Saturday and Sunday, I attended three separate sporting events around Long Island. Not once did I hear the Ryder Cup mentioned. Not once. Conversations covered everything from the weekend's Premier League action to the NFL to the Yankees' chances of making it to the World Series. Golf? In October? Never. Americans are slaves to the dictates of their calendar and the precipice of winter isn't a time to be talking driving and putting, no matter how exciting match play can prove to be.

"In a competition with an overwhelming aroma of nationalism, Europe had defeated the big ol' rich USA, which is always special for Europe," wrote Bill Dwyre in the Los Angeles Times. "European sports fans like that a lot. USA fans, with so many more things to choose from and be loyal to, are less invested."

The Ryder Cup's difficulty has always been that it comes at a time when Americans have already switched their attention to other codes. Every Saturday in September and October, this is a country consumed by college gridiron, a game which inspires the kind of passion and loyalty more commonly associated with the GAA championship. From 11 in the morning till midnight, dozens of these matches take place in every state and most are shown live on national television. Fans are too busy with this to notice an event which takes place every two years. Then, autumn Sundays bring a full slate of NFL fixtures and, befitting the largest sport in the country, that inevitably dwarfs all-comers.

Golf has a more traditional problem than just too much competition at this time of year. There's also the fact the vast majority of fans tune in for the Masters in April and turn away from it after the USPGA in August. That's the place it occupies in their lives. The notion of watching a golf tournament in September or October is alien to them. The appalling failure of the Fed-Ex Cup (a ludicrous attempt to foist a play-off on a game not suited to the format) to capture the sporting imagination shows this isn't solely a Ryder Cup problem .

That the final round of the PGA Tour Championship the other week drew a paltry 1.9 on a Nielsen rating system, where the worst NFL match-up scores more than 12, captures the indifference to the sport once the leaves are falling from the trees. NBC decided to show Saturday's action on tape delay rather than live because most viewers wouldn't even notice the difference, much less complain. Beyond a few strident golf journalists, nobody actually cared.

Of course, golf may have larger problems too, beyond the Ryder and Fed-Ex Cups. In a recent survey, one in three active golfers admitted they don't watch if Tiger Woods isn't playing or isn't in contention. Even the audiences for those events Woods competed in this year have been down 10 per cent on 2009. This at a time when four Tour stops for 2011 still don't have title sponsors.

It says much about the prevailing attitude around here that the most replayed moment from the four days in Wales has been Hunter Mahan's tears rather than any of the shots made to win the thing. Indeed, a straw poll of Americans this week would find that the only part of the Ryder Cup most of them saw was the superb action photograph of Tiger Woods' shot, and the subsequent online sensation that is the character from the background of that image, the man now known simply as "Tiger Woods' cigar guy".

Against that background, it was laughable to read Celtic Manor believes it will now enjoy a massive knock-on effect in business from hosting this event. How they expect to attract increased American custom when so few over here tuned in is the question.

dhannigan@tribune.ie