In 1979, after twenty years of thrashings by the USA, the British and Irish Ryder Cup team was strengthened by the inclusion of players from continental Europe. Six years later, at The Belfry, a team boasting such European legends as Ballesteros, Langer and Faldo wrested the trophy from US hands for the first time in twenty-eight years. Since then, a once moribund Anglo-American contest has reinvented itself as an intercontinental clash of golfing titans, with Europe - eight victories to the USA's four - comfortably edging it in terms of Cups won. Gavin Newsham not only describes thirty-one years of the expanded Ryder Cup, culminating in Europe's nerve-shredding 2010 triumph at Celtic Manor, he examines how the event has changed from Samuel Ryder's original conception of the Cup when he began it in 1927. He also analyses why the competition had become so uncompetitive before 1979, and explains how Europe's golfers have succeeded in turning the tables so effectively since 1985.Drawing on interviews with a world-class line-up of Cup heroes past and present (from Wadkins to Floyd, from Jacklin to James and from Watson to Westwood), Two Tribes captures the essence of three passionate decades of the Ryder Cup - its dramas, duels, triumphs, traumas and more than occasional moments of controversy. Fast-paced, richly informative, and crammed with quotes and anecdotes that are as enlightening as they are diverting, Two Tribes is the most authentic and revelatory history of the Ryder Cup so far published.