The interior of the St.Regis Hotel in Abu Dhabi, in a small corner of which two dozen eager golf journalists spent Tuesday evening coralled in a state of mounting agitation, speaks the international language of conference rooms and corporate retreats. It’s quietly, blandly opulent; a riot of beige and brown. The interesting stuff is all on the outside, where the facade, a tiered mass of whitewashed columns, marble and tiled rooves, calls to mind the architecture and scale of imperial Rome. As a venue for boardroom intrigue and political shicanery, the Emirates can boast of few more fitting venues. Such an observation would likely have gained little purchase with the small group of players and officials on hand to convene Tuesday’s meeting of the European Tour’s Tournament Committee, but theirs was a drama tailor-made for high-falutin’ analogy. They’d gathered, after all, to accomplish the messy business of selecting a new Ryder Cup captain, bringing to an end weeks of speculation, off-the-record wrangling and frenzied multimedia canvassing.