2

IN THE ARENA

WHEN THE CONCORDE carrying the American Ryder Cup team set down on the tarmac at Birmingham Airport at a few minutes before 9 o’clock on a rainy Monday evening, everyone breathed a deep sigh of relief.

Not that the flight had been bumpy. In fact, it had been very fast and quite enjoyable. It was just that when the plane departed from Dulles Airport in Washington that morning, it had left behind several weeks of controversy and embarrassment.

It all started because the president of the United States, an enthusiastic golfer, wanted to meet the Ryder Cup team before it went off to do battle with Europe. There was just one small problem: most of the team had no desire to meet him.

There wasn’t a single member of the team who had voted for Bill Clinton in 1992. None of them liked the Clinton plan to tax the wealthy one bit. The politics of the team were probably best summed up by U.S. Open champion Lee Janzen, who said, “Where I grew up you were better off telling people you were a garbage man than a Democrat.”

That’s true for most of the PGA Tour, not so much because all the players grew up with Republican silver spoons in their mouths, but because most of them grew up around country clubs and business people who tended to fall on the conservative side of most political issues. If an open election for president were held on the PGA Tour, the winner would probably be Rush Limbaugh.

When the word first got out that Clinton had invited the team to come to the White House on the Monday they were scheduled to fly to England, several players were asked how they felt about such a visit.

Paul Azinger, who not only had voted for Bush but had canceled his subscription to his hometown newspaper after it endorsed Clinton, was diplomatic when he was asked about the trip. He said he would certainly go as part of the team and that a trip to the White House was an honor no matter who was president. But Azinger also told his close friend Payne Stewart, “I don’t want to shake hands with a draft dodger.”

The reference was to Clinton’s failure to serve during the Vietnam War. Azinger’s father had fought in Vietnam, and he still had memories of talking to him on the phone from there as a little boy. “I remember you always had to say ‘over’ when you were finished talking,” he said. “Once I forgot to say ‘over,’ and Dad didn’t say anything. I guess you weren’t allowed to. It scared the hell out of me. Finally, I remembered and said ‘over,’ and he started talking. The whole thing blew my mind.”

Azinger’s mind was also blown when he found that his buddy Stewart had repeated his crack about Clinton to a reporter and it had shown up in print. Later, when he was able to joke about the incident, Azinger shook his head and said, “I guess I should have told Payne that we were talking off the record.”

Others had spoken on the record. John Cook had said that Clinton’s tax plan penalized people who worked hard in order to help those who did not. Janzen, jokingly, had said he wanted to make the trip but wouldn’t be able to afford it after he paid his taxes. Others had simply said they didn’t want to go.

A public firestorm ensued. Here was a team going off to represent the United States saying it didn’t want to meet the president. Here also was a group of wealthy men complaining about having to pay taxes.

It was Watson who finally put an end to all the talk. “It doesn’t matter who the president is, if you’re invited to the White House, you go,” he said. “The president is the country’s First Golfer. We’ll be there.”

Watson’s political background was a little different from that of his players. He had grown up in a Republican household but had gone through a radical period at Stanford, taking part in antiwar marches while letting his hair grow long. He graduated in 1971 and a year later voted for George McGovern for president. When he informed his father of his intent to vote for McGovern, his father looked at him and said, “You’re an idiot.”

Twenty-two years later, after having voted twice for Ronald Reagan and twice for George Bush, Watson laughed at his father’s words. “He was right,” he said. “I was an idiot.”

Watson’s conservatism isn’t lockstep vote-your-pocketbook stuff. For one thing, he believes drugs should be legalized so that the U.S. can at least reap the tax benefits from their sale. “We can’t seem to curb their use,” he said, “so why not legalize them, collect the taxes, and say that if you break a law while on drugs you are subject to a stiffer penalty? That’s what we do with alcohol, isn’t it?”

Watson’s players knew nothing about his politics. Except for Floyd and Wadkins, none of them knew him very well. He was someone they all respected but couldn’t quite get a handle on. Watson was always friendly, but never very warm or open. He was not an easy person to talk to once the conversation went beyond small talk or locker room humor.

One of Davis Love’s first memories of Watson dated back to the 1988 British Open. He had been working on the putting green the day before the tournament began when Watson arrived and began putting. After a few minutes, Watson asked Love if he would mind taking a look at his stroke.

Only in golf do players who are, after all, playing against one another, routinely help one another out during practice sessions. Love was nervous though. He was twenty-four years old, in his second year on tour, and here was the great Tom Watson asking him for a putting lesson. “I didn’t want to tell him something that was going to mess him up the day before the British Open started,” he said. “I wanted to help if I could, but I also thought I better be careful.”

Love stood behind Watson and watched him stroke a few putts. Suddenly, something his father had told him many times as a boy flashed into his head. “You know, Tom, almost all the great putters keep their eyes directly over the ball or inside the ball,” he said. “Yours look to me like they might be outside the ball.”

Love was pleased with himself. “I knew what I was saying was right and it was simple. It couldn’t possibly mess him up.”

Watson didn’t even look up when Love had finished with his tip. “Nah,” he said. “I don’t buy that. You’re wrong.”

Love walked away baffled. “If he knew the answer,” he said later, “why did he ask me the question?”

It was a more open Watson who greeted the players when they began turning up on Sunday evening at the Sheraton-Carlton Hotel in Washington. At dinner that night, he spoke emotionally about the adventure they were about to embark on together and how difficult it would be. But he also told them he had no doubt they were up to the task.

The players were a bit nervous about the next morning’s White House visit. Clinton was bound to be aware of their comments about him. “So what?” Watson said. “Believe me, he’s used to people disagreeing with him. It’s his job to deal with people like that every day.”

The group arrived the next morning just as Chelsea Clinton was leaving for school and the president was returning from his run with his Secret Service/media entourage trailing in his wake. Socks the Cat was playing on the lawn. “Well,” said Azinger, who’d arrived at dinner the night before with Bill and Hillary masks, “I think I’ve seen enough.”

Watson had thought long and hard about what he should say to Clinton. A week earlier, he had bolted awake one morning with the answer. After all the players had been introduced to Clinton, he gripped a golf club and said, “You know, Mr. President, the golf grip is a lot like politics. If you hold the club too far to the right, you’re going to get in trouble on the left. If you hold it too far to the left, you’re going to have trouble from the right. But if you hold it in the middle…”

“You’ll get it just right,” Clinton said, finishing the thought for him on cue. Everyone laughed. The tension broke. Watson had said the right thing.

All the politics and pressure were forgotten when the Concorde landed in England and the players saw that every nook and cranny of the airport was filled with golf fans. Two barricades had been set up so the players could walk unimpeded through the lobby to the curb where a car and driver awaitèd each of them. As each player made his way through the crowd, a cheer went up—the loudest, of course, for Watson. This was the opposition, but it was respected and—in the case of Watson—revered.

“It made you realize once and for all,” John Cook said later, “that this was a really big deal.”

At the Belfry, a light dinner awaited them after check-in and then the players started playing their favorite board game, Pass the Pigs. Since the flight had only been about three hours and their bodies were still on East Coast time, they weren’t the least bit tired. Shortly before midnight, Watson walked in, tapped his watch and said, “It’s eleven forty-five, boys. Let’s get a good night’s sleep and an early start tomorrow.”

He turned to walk out, then stopped. “In case you were wondering, that was a subtle hint,” he said.

The game stopped. Tired or not, the players headed for bed. Their captain had spoken.

The next two days were routine. Watson assigned practice groups each day and spent some extra time on the range with John Cook and Chip Beck, both of whom were struggling with their swings. The players weren’t certain who would play with whom on Friday, but they had ideas. Love and Kite were campaigning to play together. Everyone assumed that Fred Couples and Raymond Floyd, who had been unbeatable at Kiawah, would stay together, and it seemed likely that Corey Pavin and Wadkins, both scrappers, would be paired. That would leave Azinger and his press spokesman Stewart as the likely fourth team, with the rookies Cook, Jim Gallagher Jr., and Janzen sitting out the first morning along with Beck.

The European lineup also seemed set. Ballesteros and Olazabal, as always, would be paired, and Nick Faldo and Colin Montgomerie were also a lock. Gallacher also had four rookies and he seemed to be leaning toward leaving all of them out of the morning matches. That would probably mean that two British veterans, Sam Torrance and Mark James, would play together with Bernhard Langer and Ian Woosnam—three Masters titles among them—as the fourth team.

The Americans spent a lot of time learning and relearning the Belfry’s Brabazon Course. The reason the Ryder Cup was being staged here for a third time was simple: money. The Belfry had offered the European PGA huge dollars to establish its headquarters at the resort and to play the Ryder Cup on the Brabazon Course every four years.

Everything at the Belfry was built around the Ryder Cup connection. Each wing of the hotel was named after a different Ryder Cup captain. The Americans were in the Lee Trevino wing, the Euros in the Tony Jacklin wing.

The Brabazon Course is a fairly ordinary golf course with two fabulous match-play holes: the short par-four 10th, where players had to decide whether to risk hitting a tee shot over water to a narrow green, and the long, difficult 18th. How much did the Ryder Cup connection mean to the resort? Well, if you wanted to play the other Belfry course, the Derby, the cost was £18. But if you wanted to tread the Brabazon, the same ground where Ryder Cups had been decided, you had to come up with £50.

The players who had played at the Brabazon before noticed two things: a wet summer and early fall had left the course soft and playing longer than they remembered. And there was almost no rough.

“Seve rough,” Azinger said one day walking through it. “They’ve got it set up so he can play.”

Seve Ballesteros loomed as the biggest question mark on the European team. He had been the unquestioned spiritual leader for the Europeans throughout the 1980s but he was having a miserable year. Always wild off the tee, he was now so wild that even with his unparalleled ability to manufacture shots, he couldn’t recover well enough to score. The lighter the rough the better it would be for Seve.

Everything was set up according to a very precise schedule and every desire of the players was met almost immediately. Watson did request one change in the dining room that had been set up for the team to eat in. Three tables that could sit about ten people each were in place when the team arrived. Watson wanted one long table. The team would eat together.

They ate together on Wednesday but not at the new table. Instead, they all put on their best dress clothes (PGA-supplied of course) and traveled ten miles down the road to the Metropole Hotel for the gala dinner. Eight hundred people would pay £150 apiece for the privilege of eating in the same ballroom as the two teams.

Watson dreaded the gala dinner. Tradition called for the teams to sit through not only the dinner and speeches but also the musical acts that came afterward. It would be after midnight before they returned to the Belfry, and he knew that was bound to make everyone a little cranky with barely more than twenty-four hours left before the matches began.

He also knew from experience that the gala dinner tended to turn into an autograph fest for the paying public. Inevitably, they would line up at the two team tables to have their menus signed. Watson made a decision: his players would not spend their evening signing autographs. He told them that if anyone asked, they should politely ask that menus or anything else people wanted signed be sent to the American team room with the promise that everything would be signed and returned before week’s end.

The players felt awkward about this. On the one hand, they liked the idea that Watson was willing to play bad guy for them and give them an excuse not to spend the whole night signing menus. On the other hand, they knew that saying no to a crowd that had paid big bucks (or heavy pounds) to rub shoulders with them would probably be uncomfortable.

Sure enough, shortly after the meal was served, the fans began lining up at the two tables. The Europeans dutifully signed. The Americans politely said no. The evening might have passed with only a few feelings mildly hurt if Sam Torrance had not asked Watson to sign his menu.

Torrance was the most outgoing member of the European team, a forty-two-year-old chain-smoking Scotsman with a keen, dry wit. When he leaned over Watson’s shoulder and asked him to sign a menu, Watson shook his head.

“You know what will happen if I sign, Sam,” he said. “We’ll spend the whole night signing.”

“But, Tom, it’s part of the tradition of the night to sign menus for one another.”

Watson shook his head again. “No, Sam, it’s not,” he said. “At the victory dinner on Sunday we do that. Not here.”

Insulted and hurt, Torrance stalked back to his team’s table, indicating that Watson had snubbed him. Sensing a problem, Watson followed him back to the table. “Look, Sam, I don’t want you to feel insulted,” he said. “If you send the menus to our team room, I promise we’ll sign every one of them.”

Torrance waved him off. “Forget it, Tom,” he said. “Just forget it.”

Boom! The very thing Watson wanted so desperately to avoid, controversy and tension between the teams, had just arrived full force because of a decision he had made. There was no way this would stay secret, not with eight hundred people in the room, many of them smarting from being snubbed for signatures. Watson knew the British tabloids would run wild with the story. He returned to the table shaken and upset.

“I was trying to make things easier for my team,” he said later. “I probably made a mistake, but it didn’t have to become as big a deal as it did.”

By the next morning it had become a huge deal. The tabloids were—of course—running amok. “Fork Off!” read one headline. Another said, “Tom Watson You Are A Disgrace!”

Watson walked into breakfast looking ashen. He hadn’t slept well at all, waking up from different dreams throughout the night. The players had never seen the Tom Watson they saw that morning. “I got myself into this and I’ll handle it,” he said. “You guys just go out and play and don’t worry about it.”

The words were Watson, but the tone wasn’t. His voice was soft, filled with sadness and uncertainty. Some of the players thought he sounded choked up. “It did shake me up,” he said. “I know how the tabloids are over there, but some of the things that were said by people hurt. It was exactly what I didn’t want to have happen. I just couldn’t understand why people would get upset with me for not wanting my team to have to sign eight hundred autographs during a formal dinner. I know from experience that I can sign three hundred and twenty-two autographs in an hour. That means you’re signing for two and a half hours. Asking people to do that is rude.”

Watson knew the only way to put the incident behind him was to deal with it. So when he met with the media that day for the traditional captains’ press conference, he brought the subject up. He apologized to Torrance (even though he was angry with him for not letting the issue die) and to anyone else who had been insulted by his decision.

Later, Gallacher made light of the whole thing, saying he had taken care of Torrance by forging Watson’s autograph on his menu since he was quite familiar with it. Someone asked if signing autographs had ruined his team’s evening. Gallacher grinned wickedly. “Well, Seve did struggle a bit with his fromage…”

The American players did as they were told. They went out and played and let Watson handle the situation. By now, the crowds had grown huge and the players signed autographs all day long. “Remember, we’re bad guys, we don’t sign,” Azinger said as he waded through a crowd signing everything in sight.

By the time the opening ceremony was held late Thursday afternoon, the hue and cry had quieted. Torrance, after telling reporters in the morning that he intended to show Watson and the Americans how he felt about being insulted when the matches began, had backed off—no doubt under orders from Gallacher.

Sixteen years after getting chills as the flags went up at Lytham and St. Annes, Watson led an American team into another flag-raising ceremony. When he had finished introducing his team, Watson turned to the players and said, “Gentlemen, I cannot tell you how proud I am to be your captain.”

The flags went up, the anthems were played. Finally, it was time to play golf.

Even so, the autographing incident had already had a tangible effect. At nightfall Wednesday, the British bookies had made the Americans 11–10 favorites. Twenty-four hours later, the Europeans were favored by the same odds. Menugate had replaced Clintongate as everyone’s favorite topic.

If the players had any doubts about how intense Watson was about this competition, they were erased when they saw, at the bottom of their schedules for Friday, September 26—the opening day of play—his “thought for the day.”

It was simple and direct: “Remember,” it said, “everything they invented, we perfected.”

That, they thought, is the way he really feels about this whole thing. The sportsmanship and good feeling are all well and good, but once the first ball is hit, winning was what they had come for.

“What we all liked about it,” Davis Love said, “was the message that the niceties are over; let’s go kick their butts.”

That was exactly the message Watson wanted to deliver.

By the time the matches finally began, everyone was having trouble with his nerves, even the most experienced players. The two-hour fog delay heightened the tension. As Watson stood on the first tee waiting for Pavin and Wadkins, who would lead off for his team against Torrance and James, he tried to force a smile. “Usually I don’t worry about what I can’t control,” he said. “But in this case, I have to worry.”

The Ryder Cup format is simple: On Friday and Saturday there are eight matches. The four morning matches are alternate shot, the four afternoon matches are best ball. Ironically, the Americans had done well in recent years in the alternate-shot matches even though it was a format they never played. It was in the best-ball matches—the format most Americans play week in and week out at country clubs and the pros play in their practice-round betting matches—that the Europeans had dominated.

Even so, the Americans didn’t feel too bad when the first morning ended in a 2–2 tie, for one reason: the supposedly unbeatable Spaniards, Olazabal and Ballesteros, had been beaten by Tom Kite and Davis Love.

Ballesteros had become a legendary Ryder Cup figure over the years, not only for his brilliant play, but for his gamesmanship. He was famous for coughing at the wrong (or right) moment, for creating a confrontation (like the one with Azinger in 1991) to throw off an opponent’s concentration, for somehow finding a way to get to the psyche of the opposition.

He also made Olazabal a better player. The younger Spaniard had also had a difficult year, but Ballesteros had spent the whole week building him up, saying he was the best player in the world. When the two of them played together, they paced the fairway shoulder-to-shoulder as if connected by an invisible cord.

Kite and Love knew all this. Just before the match began, several of the American wives had handed Love a package of cough lozenges. “First time he coughs,” they said, “take this out and give it to him.”

It never came to that. On the first hole, Kite had a putt of less than two feet to halve the hole. Ballesteros waited until he had marked the ball and started lining the putt up before he said, “That’s good.”

Kite picked the ball up without a word and walked to the tee. “Tom, you didn’t hear me say the putt was good before you put it down?” Ballesteros said.

“No, Seve, I didn’t,” Kite said, smiling. “I guess the crowd was just so loud I couldn’t hear.”

That set the tone. The Americans weren’t going to be drawn into any arguments. On a couple of occasions when Love started to charge down the fairway at the same accelerated pace as the Spaniards, Kite slowed him down. “No need to rush,” he said. “They aren’t going anywhere without us.”

Love, quaking legs and all, played extremely well in his Ryder Cup debut. The Americans took the lead on the second hole with a birdie and the Spaniards never caught them. What’s more, they won the match with the kind of bravura that Ballesteros and Olazabal were famous for.

Having reached the turn one up, the two Americans watched in amazement as Ballesteros, after what seemed like an endless discussion with Olazabal, pulled out an iron and laid up short of the water on the 10th. Seve laying up? Unthinkable. Apparently, he still lacked confidence off the tee.

Kite didn’t pause a beat before he grabbed his three-wood and took dead aim at the green. The ball rose in a high arc and several thousand people held their breath as the ball hung over the water for a split second, then landed softly on the green and rolled to a stop six feet from the pin.

“Yeah!” Kite screamed, jumping straight up into the air. Maybe he had been this excited when he won the U.S. Open. Maybe. Racing down the fairway, his wife, Christy, shook a fist herself and said, “Who says he’s conservative?”

Kite’s shot wouldn’t mean much if the Americans didn’t win the hole. Olazabal wedged the ball to within nine feet, and Ballesteros sank the birdie putt, looking at Love as if to say, “The pressure’s all on you now.”

Love calmly stroked the putt in for an eagle two. The Americans had the hole and a two-up lead. They had also given the Spaniards a large dose of their own medicine. Ballesteros and Olazabal never got any closer, and Love finished the match off with a three-foot par putt at 17.

Pavin and Wadkins had won their match to open the day, but the two American teams that should have been strongest, Azinger-Stewart and Couples-Floyd, had both been beaten soundly. Watson decided to shake things up in the afternoon. He sat Stewart and Floyd, paired Couples with Azinger, and brought two of the rookies, Janzen and Gallagher, off the bench together.

Pavin and Wadkins came through again, but Kite and Love, matched a second time with the Spaniards, didn’t have the same luck in best ball as they had in alternate shot, losing on the 15th hole. Janzen and Gallagher lost a tough match on 18 when one of the European rookies, Peter Baker, rolled in a 25-foot birdie putt. That put the Europeans up 4–3 with one match still on the course: Azinger-Couples against Faldo-Montgomerie.

Golf rarely gets any more melodramatic than this. There was no love lost in this foursome. Faldo was so obsessed and intense that he almost never spoke to anyone on the golf course, even his partner. Montgomerie wasn’t much of a talker either unless he was snapping at someone. Azinger talked all the time but was wound just as tight as Faldo. Couples, for all of his laid-back appearance, wanted badly to make up for his Sunday failure on this golf course four years before.

Birdies flew everywhere. When Azinger stuffed an eight-iron one foot from the flag at 16, the Americans went one up. It was now virtually dark and everyone on the grounds was following this match. Azinger walked off the 16th green, his face a mask of tension, and said to Watson, “I want to beat these guys so bad…”

Easier said than done. With everyone literally feeling his way, Faldo somehow knocked a five-iron to five feet at 17 and made the birdie putt. The match was even and it was pitch black. The captains agreed to finish at 8 o’clock the next morning.

“It’s gonna be a long night waiting to play one hole,” Azinger said walking up 18 in the dark. “I’m already exhausted and we’ve got two days to go.”

Dinner in the Belfry’s Stafford Room—the U.S. team room—was very quiet that night. The uncertainty surrounding the postponed match had left everyone a little bit nervous. A 4–4 tie was possible, but so was a 5–3 deficit. Everyone remembered what a Waterloo the 18th had been in 1989. The hole had come into play only once on Friday and the Europeans had won it on Baker’s birdie.

Normally a voracious eater, Davis Love had been having trouble eating all day. He knew it was just nerves, but when he noticed his wife not eating at dinner he wondered what was going on. Unlike some wives, Robin didn’t get nervous about golf.

“You okay?” he asked.

“I don’t feel great,” she said. “I think I could use some Tylenol.”

Almost seven months pregnant, Robin Love had walked the entire 18 holes that morning. During the lunch break, Davis had suggested that she take the afternoon off or just walk a few holes. Robin walked for a little while, started to feel weary, and went back to the hotel to rest. That was fine with her husband. The doctor at home had told her she could walk but should quit if she started to tire.

Love wanted to go over to the fitness trailer to get stretched before he went to bed, so he suggested Robin walk there with him to get some Tylenol. When they arrived, the trainers said they didn’t have any Tylenol but suggested that if they checked with the front desk some could surely be found.

Robin went back to find Tylenol while Davis got stretched. A little while later he walked back to the team room. Robin wasn’t there. Neither was Linda Watson.

“Where did Robin and Linda go?” he asked.

“They went to find Tylenol” was the answer.

Love wasn’t sure why Robin needed Linda’s help to find Tylenol and the tone of the answer told him that it wasn’t that simple. Something’s going on here, he said to himself and went upstairs to find out. There were security guards patrolling the floors to make sure no unwanted fans or media could get up there. Love asked one of them if he had seen his wife.

“They’re in your room,” the guard said.

They?

Love opened the door and found three people crowded into the small room. Linda Watson was sitting next to the bed. A doctor was standing over the bed, and his wife was lying flat on her back with her legs in the air.

Instinctively, Love told himself to stay calm. He knew if he started panicking that Robin would panic too. “What’s going on?” he asked quietly.

“It looks like the baby has dropped,” the doctor said. “Your wife has overdone it. I’ve checked the baby’s heartbeat and it’s fine. But she may be leaking amniotic fluid. Right now, I think she just needs to stay in bed for the next twenty-four hours. If she starts to feel any worse, there’s an OBGYN right nearby we can call.”

Love thanked the doctor and, as soon as he had left, called Robin’s doctor at home in Georgia. He explained what had happened and the local doctor’s theory. “If it was amniotic fluid, it would just keep coming,” the doctor said. “My guess is that the baby’s dropped and is pushing on her bladder. She’s probably leaking urine. If she keeps leaking, you’re going to have to take her to the hospital and she’s going to have the baby. Otherwise, she should be okay if you can convince her to stay in bed.”

That wouldn’t be easy. Within a few minutes of the doctor’s departure Robin was claiming she felt fine and wanted to get up. “I thought I might have to get straps for her,” Love said.

The other wives were put on call to keep Robin company the next morning while the matches were going on and to make certain she stayed in bed. Love slept fitfully during the night. He kept rolling over in bed thinking it must be morning only to learn that it was fifteen minutes later than the last time he had thought it was morning.

Azinger had predicted a long night. Interminable was more like it.

It was 7:55 the next morning when the carts carrying Azinger, Couples, Faldo, and Montgomerie pulled up to the 18th tee. It was overcast, but at least there was no fog. It was also freezing. The official temperature reading at 8 o’clock was 49 degrees with gusty winds. Everyone knew what was at stake, including the fans who had already turned out in force and had started jostling for position at sunrise.

Montgomerie hit first, pushing a weak but safe shot into the right rough. With his partner dry, Faldo was able to aim down the left and bite off a large chunk of the water. For a split second, it looked as if he had bitten off too much. But the ball landed safely in the left fairway and a huge cheer went up as the ball bounced into the view of the gallery.

Couples led off for the Americans. The minute his ball left the club it was dead. It started left and hooked. It splashed into the water as another cheer went up. One American down, one to go.

Azinger had not been this nervous during his PGA playoff a month earlier against Greg Norman. He had to get the ball into the fairway in position to reach the green. He couldn’t let Faldo win the hole with a par and put the Europeans two points up.

He was shaking with nerves and the cold. “My Florida bones can’t take that kind of cold,” he said. “When I saw Freddy’s ball get wet, I thought, Oh boy, it’s all on me now.”

Under the circumstances, the shot may have been as good as any Azinger has ever hit. It flew on almost the same line as Faldo’s ball, landed in the fairway, and rolled 15 yards beyond Faldo. The crowd applauded appreciatively, knowing a great shot under pressure when it saw one.

“Great tee shot,” Watson said, his hands stuffed in his pockets to ward off the cold.

They made their way up the fairway. Montgomerie was first to play. From a bad lie, he hit his ball weakly into the water. Groans. Faldo, standing behind his ball in the fairway, showed no emotion at all. Mentally though, he flinched.

God, now it’s one against one, he thought. I bloody well better hit this one well and put some pressure on Azinger.

He didn’t. His seven-iron shot reached the green well short of the pin, leaving him with a 50-foot uphill putt. Azinger was 163 yards from the pin. Watson walked up next to him. “Great tee shot,” he said again.

Azinger stood behind his ball for what seemed like forever, tossing grass into the air to check the wind over and over. He and his caddy, Mark Jiminez, finally decided on an eight-iron. The shot was almost perfect. It landed pin high, but just a tad right—about 18 feet from the flag.

Advantage, U.S.

The other twenty players, having finished their warm-ups for the matches that would begin at 8:30, were now sitting greenside. Couples and Montgomerie, both now spectators too, joined them. The green, the stage and pendulum of the match, belonged to Azinger and Faldo.

Their rivalry stretched back to 1987, when Azinger had bogeyed the last two holes of the British Open to give Faldo a one-shot victory and his first major title. Azinger had carried that wound with him for years. It had been exacerbated when Faldo was quoted as making fun of Azinger’s unorthodox grip. During the last round of the PGA when Azinger had seen Faldo’s name at the top of the leader board along with his and Norman’s, his resolve had seemed to double.

“It was nothing personal,” he claimed. “But I didn’t want to lose another major to him.”

He didn’t. Now the two men were face-to-face in a totally different situation. Each was a millionaire and there wasn’t a penny at stake. But both could feel the almost unbearable tension as they walked onto the 18th green. Their teammates were yelling encouragement, but neither man heard a word.

Faldo putted first. The 18th was probably the slowest green on the golf course, especially early in the morning. Faldo knew it was slow, but not how slow, and his putt stopped 10 feet short. No one on the American team thought for one second that he would miss the second putt, no matter how difficult it might be.

They were all hoping that Azinger would make Faldo’s putt irrelevant. He walked around the ball, lining it up from all angles. Kneeling nearby, Watson heard a TV technician’s walkie-talkie crackle.

His head snapped around. “Turn that thing down!” he demanded.

Azinger’s putt looked like it was in until it got to within a yard of the hole, when it started to slide just right. Azinger threw his head back, his eyes closed, and let out a deep sigh of frustration. He walked up and tapped the ball in for par.

The Americans could do no worse than tie. If Faldo somehow missed, the first day’s play would end 4–4 and the U.S. would start day two with a full head of steam. But Faldo’s putt was never going anywhere but dead center. The crowd screamed for joy and the Europeans surrounded him on the green. Europe was ahead, 4½–3½.

Faldo grabbed Torrance’s hand as if he was going to fall over. “What’s for breakfast?” he said. Then his knees buckled and he bent over and let out a huge sigh of relief.

The rest of the morning was a disaster for the Americans. Seemingly spurred by Faldo, the Europeans won three of four matches. The only U.S. victory came from the newly created team of Raymond Floyd and Payne Stewart. By lunchtime, Europe led 7½ to 4½ and it looked like a rout was in the offing.

Watson had to come up with something for the afternoon. He still hadn’t played Cook and Beck, and he knew they were losing their minds waiting. But who should he pair them with? He remembered what Roy Williams had said about putting a confident player with a player who tended to get down on himself. No one was more up or confident than Beck. Cook was much more mercurial. He decided to gamble and put them together.

The two men were on the driving range when a PGA official came up to them carrying a walkie-talkie. He handed the walkie to Cook and said, “Tom wants to talk to you.”

Cook heard Watson’s voice crackle at the other end. “Cookie, you ready to go?” he asked.

“Dying to,” Cook answered.

“Good. Let me talk to Chip.” He repeated his question to Beck, who repeated Cook’s answer. “Fine then,” Watson said. “You guys are going out in the first match against Faldo and Montgomerie. We could really use a boost.”

Cook looked at Beck. “Nothing like skipping the frying pan and going straight into the fire, huh?” he said.

“Don’t worry about a thing,” Beck said. “No reason why we can’t whip them.”

It may well be that there has never been a golfer with a more positive attitude than Beck. Other players say that he is the only man on tour who can knock a ball in the water and say, in all seriousness, “Boy, this is great. Now I get a chance to get up and down from there for a par!”

Beck had been subjected to severe criticism from the media and other players when he had laid up from the 15th fairway at Augusta during the last round of the Masters earlier in the year. He had trailed Langer by three shots at the time, and a lot of people felt that by not going for the green and a possible eagle, he had been protecting second place rather than going all out for first. Beck had said a million times that he just didn’t think he could get the ball over the water from where he was and thought laying up was the best way to make birdie. A lot of people didn’t buy it, and Beck had literally had his manhood questioned for months.

Here was a chance to make everyone forget all that. The Americans’ situation could not have been much worse. A split of the afternoon matches simply wasn’t going to be good enough because a three-point deficit going into the twelve singles matches would probably be too much to overcome.

When Faldo knocked in a birdie putt at the first hole it looked as if the afternoon would be a continuation of the morning. Cook didn’t blink. He rolled his birdie putt in right on top of Faldo.

That set the tone for the match. Every time it seemed the Europeans might grab an advantage, Cook or Beck came up with a shot. On the fourth hole, Cook was lining up another birdie putt. He asked Beck if he wanted to take a look at it for him.

“Heck no,” Beck answered. “I don’t need to look at that putt, you know what it will do. You’re going to knock it dead center.” He pointed across the green where Faldo and Montgomerie and their caddies were lining up a putt from a hundred different angles, circling the ball and the hole over and over again. “Look at those guys. They got everyone in the world trying to figure out what to do over there. John, we got ’em confused! They’re shaking over there! We got ’em!”

Cook cracked up. He also made his putt after both Europeans had missed. The Americans were one-up. The rest of the afternoon was fraught with peril, but Cook and Beck never gave up their slender lead. When Cook went cold on the back nine, Beck kept the team in the match. He got up and down at 12, 13, and 14 for pars, then blasted out of a bunker to five feet for a birdie at 15 that matched Faldo. The Americans were still one-up when they arrived at the 18th. It had been ten hours since Faldo and Azinger had confronted one another on this hole.

The scoreboards tracking the other three matches showed that Pavin and Gallagher were easily beating Mark James and Costantino Rocca, but Ian Woosnam and Peter Baker were doing the same to Couples and Azinger. Stewart and Floyd had a slim lead on Olazabal and Joakim Haeggman. Ballesteros had asked Gallacher for the afternoon off to work on his swing for the Sunday singles. With a three-point lead, Gallacher had felt comfortable granting the request.

If Cook and Beck could hang on at 18, the Americans would have a shot at a 3–1 afternoon margin, which would bring them within one. If both remaining matches were halved, the Europeans would have a two-point lead going into Sunday.

Beck had carried the team for most of the back nine. Now, though, Cook stepped up again. He hit a perfect drive and crushed his second shot to almost the same spot where Azinger had hit his second shot in the morning. Montgomerie was out of the hole again, but Faldo being Faldo stuck his shot 10 feet below the hole. If he made the putt, Cook would have to make his to win the match.

This time, though, Faldo turned human. The putt slid right at the last second. Cook now only needed to two-putt. Faldo didn’t even ask him to go through the exercise. He walked over and shook hands, conceding the match. Cook and Beck had turned the entire match around. When Stewart rolled in a birdie putt at 17 a few minutes later to give the U.S. its third victory of the afternoon, you never would have known that the Europeans were still leading 8½ to 7½. The Americans were jubilant—and relieved.

“If I were a betting man,” Azinger said, “I’d have bet all I had on us right then. John and Chip just turned the whole thing around.”

One other thing that had picked up the Americans’ spirits immeasurably was the near-miraculous recovery of Robin Love. After staying in bed all morning, she had announced at lunchtime that she felt 100 percent better and wanted to get up and walk around a little. Okay, everyone said, but just a little.

When Davis Love found out that Watson was going to sit him out in the afternoon, he suggested to Robin that they rest together and then walk out to the ninth green to watch the afternoon matches come through. Robin said that was fine. She was going to walk out to the first tee with Tracy Stewart and then she would come right back to the room. Exhausted and drained, Love went upstairs and promptly fell asleep. When he awoke almost two hours later, Robin was nowhere in sight.

He walked to the ninth green. Robin wasn’t there either. The first two matches had already gone through, and Couples and Azinger were standing on the green trailing Woosnam and Baker by three holes. Watson was there watching. He told Love that Robin was fine and, he thought, with Linda.

At that moment, Watson was more concerned with Couples than anything else. Except for the epic Friday night/Saturday morning match, Couples had played poorly. After the morning matches, he had asked Watson to let him sit out the afternoon so he could practice and try to get his game in shape for Sunday. Unlike Gallacher, Watson didn’t have the luxury of a three-point lead. Couples had to play.

But Couples hadn’t come around. He and Azinger were getting waxed by the red-hot Baker and Woosnam. As the players came off the ninth green, Watson tried to give Couples a pep talk. “You’re only three down, Fred. There’s plenty of time to come back,” he said. “Don’t get down on yourself.”

Couples had been hearing pep talks and encouragement for two days now. Everyone meant well. But there’s nothing a golfer hates more than being told everything is just fine when he knows it isn’t. As languid as he may look on the golf course with his long, easy swing and ambling gait, Couples gets down on himself as quickly as anyone. The difference has always been his ability to bounce back.

“Freddie can go out and have a good dinner or watch a good ball game and get in a good mood just from that after a bad round,” Love said. “The rest of us have to go figure out what’s wrong. Freddie can just show up the next day and turn wrong into right.”

It wasn’t happening this weekend, though, and Couples was aggravated. When Watson added his voice to the chorus of “everything’s all right, don’t worry about a thing,” Couples snapped. “Just leave me alone, Tom,” he said angrily. “I don’t need any pep talks right now.”

He stalked to the 10th tee. Love turned to Watson. “You think I should try to talk to him?” Watson wasn’t sure. Love found Couples’s caddy, Joe LaCava, and pulled him aside. “Do you think I should talk to Freddie?” he asked. LaCava shook his head emphatically.

“He told me a couple holes ago that he was sick and tired of pep talks and the next person who said something to him he would probably kill.”

That person had been Watson. Love decided to follow the match. Couples and Azinger didn’t get any better, and Baker and Woosnam closed them out on the 13th hole, winning 7 and 5. Cook and Beck had just won, and Pavin and Gallagher had won too. The only match left on the course was Floyd and Stewart against Olazabal and Haeggman. One of the caddies suggested that everyone should race over to 16 to watch that match. Couples shook his head. “I’ve had enough golf,” he said. “I’m going in.”

He began walking over to a cart that would take him back to the clubhouse. Love took a deep breath and followed him. “Look, Freddie, I know you’re pissed off, but I really think you should come out and watch Payne and Raymond. You’re very important to this team, especially to the young guys like me, and if you go around with a bad attitude, especially tonight, it’s going to affect everybody. You’re one of the leaders of this team.”

“I got you,” Couples said, and he nodded to the driver that he was ready to go.

Love put a hand on his arm. “No, Fred, I’m not sure you do get me. You are important to this team. Your attitude the rest of today and tomorrow will affect how the other guys feel.”

Couples didn’t say anything. The driver started the cart. Love followed the others to the 16th green. As the players approached the green, he noticed a familiar figure walking with the wives: Robin.

“What in the world?” he demanded.

She put a hand up. “I know, I know. I started out to walk one hole, but it was just too exciting. I had to keep going. I still feel great, so don’t worry.”

Love didn’t know whether to worry, to feel angry, or to feel happy. His wife had never in her life found golf exciting. “I’ve never wanted her life to go up or down based on me making or missing four-footers,” he said. “But it was kind of nice that she was so into this. Payne told me later that seeing her out there really gave him a lift.”

Love got a lift of his own a few minutes later. As he and Robin walked up 17, he noticed Couples and his girlfriend, Tawnya Dodd. “Thanks for coming out,” he said to Couples.

“I did get your message,” Couples said.

Love didn’t say another word. He had been disappointed when Watson had told him he wasn’t playing in the afternoon. Now he felt like it had been worth it.

The mood in the American team room that night was 180 degrees different than the night before. One point down with twelve matches left, having taken back the momentum in the afternoon, confidence was soaring. Cook and Beck, the forgotten men of Friday and Saturday morning, were now heroes.

“You know, positive thinking can overcome a mechanical breakdown,” Beck kept saying. “And I was having a mechanical breakdown out there.”

With his North Carolina accent, Beck is easy to imitate. That became the rallying cry for the evening: “Positive thinking can overcome a mechanical breakdown!”

The only down note of the evening came when Watson returned from the captains’ meeting. Gallacher had informed him that Sam Torrance had an infection of his big toe that had flared up on him. There was a good chance he might not play on Sunday.

Under Ryder Cup rules, if one player cannot play in the singles, the other team removes one player from its lineup and each team is credited with half a point for the match not played. The U.S. had benefitted from this rule in 1991 when Steve Pate, who had been injured in an automobile accident en route to the gala dinner, sat out the singles. Since Pate had played on Saturday, the Europeans had wondered if the Americans weren’t trying to steal half a point. Now, since Torrance had played Friday—and played poorly—the same thought occurred to some of the Americans. What, they wondered, would have happened if Faldo had an infected toe? Would he sit out? Not likely. More likely he would play on a broken leg if necessary.

This wasn’t Faldo, though, it was Torrance, and given his toe injury, the possibility that he would sit out was quite real. When Watson walked into the team room with the news, the first two people he told were John Cook and Lee Janzen. They looked at one another. Each man had the same thought: I’m going to be the one who sits out.

Under the rules, Watson had to place the name of one player in an envelope. The next morning, if Gallacher announced that Torrance couldn’t play, Watson would hand over the envelope. Before Watson had a chance to give much thought to who should go into the envelope, Wadkins came into the room. He had just heard about Torrance. He grabbed Watson, took him aside, and said, “Put me into the envelope.”

That was unthinkable. Wadkins was as accomplished a Ryder Cup singles player as the team had and he was scheduled to play Sunday against Ballesteros. The Americans were convinced that if anyone on the team was certain to beat Ballesteros, it was Wadkins.

But as Wadkins talked, Watson realized his argument made sense. The player in the envelope, Wadkins said, should be either him or Floyd because the other ten players had earned their spots on the team while he and Floyd had been selected by Watson. Floyd had played superbly on Saturday, Wadkins not so well. Watson thought about it briefly and decided Wadkins was right.

“Lanny made a very difficult situation a lot easier for me,” Watson said later. “The more he talked, the more I realized it was absolutely the right thing to do. I think the other guys understood the sacrifice he was making, because no one wanted to play more than Lanny. It was one of the great gestures I’ve ever seen anyone make.”

Wadkins knew he was making the right gesture, but at the time, he was thinking that was all it was—a gesture. “I went to bed that night convinced Sam would play and I would be playing Seve,” he said. “It wasn’t until Tom came back the next morning and said Sam was out that it really hit me that I wasn’t going to play.”

The Europeans had a potentially far more serious problem than Torrance’s toe to deal with that night. Peter Baker’s eleven-month-old daughter had been rushed to a hospital with what appeared to be spinal meningitis. Under the rules, if two players from one team could not play, the opposition was entitled to claim a forfeit of the second match. When they heard about Baker’s daughter, the Americans discussed that possibility.

“It wouldn’t be right to do that,” Floyd said. “That’s not in the spirit of the Ryder Cup. If Peter can’t play because his child is sick, I’ll sit out too.”

While that was being bounced around, Love asked Watson if it would be appropriate to send a note to Gallacher asking him to let Baker and his wife know that they were in the thoughts of the American players. Having dealt with a crisis involving an unborn child the night before, Love had an idea of the anguish and fear Baker had to be feeling.

Watson liked the idea. Love wrote the note, walked it across the hall, and asked a security guard to deliver it to Gallacher. The next morning he received a thank-you note from Gallacher with the news that all was well. Baker’s daughter had an ear infection, nothing more, and was doing just fine.

With that settled and with Torrance definitely out, there were eleven singles matches to play and the day would begin with the Europeans now leading 9–8, each team having picked up half a point for the unplayed match. The U.S. needed 6 points to create a 14–14 tie, 6½ to win the cup again outright.

The day was cool, overcast, and windy. Watson’s final thoughts were brief: If you start to feel down do two things: think about Lanny and how much he wanted to play and don’t stop smiling whether you’re four up or four down.

If the Americans were smiling early in the day it was only because they were remembering Watson’s words. At one point, early in the afternoon, the Europeans were leading in the first five matches. But the last day of a Ryder Cup is a roller coaster. At 1 o’clock, Europe looked like a winner; at 2 o’clock the Americans were in control. By three, Europe was in command again. An hour later, it was anybody’s ball game. The day was exhausting and exhilarating with eleven matches on the golf course at once and roars and shouts coming from everywhere. This was golf at its simplest: mano-a-mano, low score wins the hole, add up the holes at the finish.

Couples, playing in the leadoff match, started the American turn-around (the first one) by coming from two down with six holes left to halve his match with Woosnam. Right behind him came Beck, fighting another mechanical breakdown.

Through thirteen holes, Beck was three down to Barry Lane. Watson, bouncing from match to match, showed up on the 14th tee, hoping to give Beck a boost. As Watson approached, he heard Beck yelling at him: “Hey, Tom, where’s your smile?” As instructed, Beck was grinning as if he were three up, rather than three down. Watson hadn’t followed his own orders. “Keep smiling, Tom. I’m gonna get him for you, don’t you worry about a thing.”

Clearly, Beck didn’t need any cheering up. Watson got back in his cart and went to look for someone who did. Beck was as good as his word. He won the 14th hole, eagled the 15th, won the 16th to get even, and then won the 18th to win the match.

That victory was huge for the Americans. Instead of trailing by two points, they were now even at 9½. Around the golf course, checking the scoreboards constantly, the other players shook their heads in wonder thinking about Beck and his unshakable attitude.

“And people questioned the man’s toughness,” Azinger said later. “They ought to look in the mirror.”

The joy over Beck’s comeback was short-lived however. The Europeans won the next three matches, Montgomerie beating Janzen; Baker, completing a remarkable week, beating Pavin; and Haeggman beating Cook. The last result was particularly tough to take. Haeggman and Cook had been even on the 18th tee, and Haeggman’s tee shot looked to be dead in the water the second it left the club. Somehow, he just cleared the corner and reached the fairway. Cook put his drive in the right bunker and, with Haeggman way down the fairway, had to try to reach the green from there. His ball hit the bank on the edge of the water, popped in the air, and then rolled back into the water. Cook stood staring at the spot in disbelief.

At that moment, Europe led 12½ to 9½. But the Americans had comfortable leads in three matches: Payne Stewart was on the verge of closing out Mark James; Tom Kite, playing the best golf of the day, was hammering Bernhard Langer; and Jim Gallagher, playing in Wadkins’s slot, was easily beating Ballesteros.

Without Olazabal around to dig him out of trouble, Ballesteros was almost helpless. He couldn’t have found a fairway with a compass on the front nine, and he shot an embarrassing 42—six over par. Gallagher took the lead on the first hole and never looked back.

With those three matches in hand, the U.S. also had 12½ points. In the remaining matches, Floyd was leading Olazabal and Faldo was leading Azinger. If those two leads held up, each team would have 13½ points. Which explains why all eyes were on Love and Rocca as they walked up 18 with their match even: Love in the fairway, Rocca in the rough.

Standing in back of his ball, arms folded, trying to look as nonchalant as possible, Love couldn’t help but drink in the scene: the packed stands, his friends and teammates standing a few yards away trying to will him to victory. He remembered what his mother had said on the first practice day: “I can’t believe that my little boy is actually playing in the Ryder Cup.”

Now her little boy was probably going to decide the Ryder Cup. Love took a deep breath. He knew now what this was all about. I’ve waited my whole life for this, he thought, and took one more deep breath.

Rocca had finally decided on a club. It was getting close to 5 o’clock and the temperature, which had climbed at midday, was dropping quickly. He had a long shot from a sidehill lie in the rough and, like John Cook an hour earlier, he had no choice but to try and clear the water.

The ball came out of the rough low and stayed low. It looked for a second like it would drop into the water, but it held its height just long enough to clear the bank and bounce on the hill in front of the green. It stopped there, short of the putting surface, but visible. The crowd screamed with relief. Rocca still had a chance.

Not a very good one, Love was thinking. From where Rocca was, he would have to make a great chip to get close and have a chance at par. Of course the way to take all the suspense out of the matter was to stick this shot close and make a birdie.

He had a nine-iron in his hands but wasn’t entirely sure that was the right club. All week long, he had been hitting long irons into this green. But having crushed the ball downwind, he had only 148 yards to the pin and wondered if perhaps he should hit a pitching wedge.

He decided on the nine. “What I should have done was aimed it left and let it drift back into the flag,” he said. “I didn’t think enough about the slope in front of the pin and the fact that with a short iron, the ball wasn’t going to bounce very much at all.”

Love liked the shot when it came off the club, but when it landed he could see that it was well short of the pin. It began rolling backward off the slope as the cheers got louder and louder. By the time it stopped rolling, the ball was barely on the green, 50 feet short of the pin.

Love stared as the ball rolled in the wrong direction, thinking, whoa, that’s way down there. Then he remembered something. “On Thursday afternoon, we had spent a lot of time practicing long putts from all over the green,” he said. “I knew the putt would be slow, but that if I remembered to hit it I should be able to get it close. And I still thought he was going to have trouble making par.”

Even so, what had been a huge advantage for Love off the tee was now a decidedly smaller one. The noise was deafening as the players walked to the green. Love walked up to the top tier so he would have a good view of Rocca’s chip from below. Cries of “Come on, Rocky, you can do it!” were coming from everywhere.

Love had another thought: In the movie, Rocky came close, but he lost.

Rocca’s chip skittered up the hill and, for a moment, the crowd thought he had knocked it stiff. “Yes!” came the shouts. Standing behind the hole, Love could see that the ball wasn’t going to stop. It rolled 18 feet past the cup.

Love’s turn. He looked the putt over carefully and reminded himself how slow the green was. But he didn’t want to go crazy, knock the putt six feet past, and have to putt downhill coming back. So, at the last second, he eased up just a little. He heard the groans from his teammates as the putt rolled dead, six feet short of the pin.

“Dammit,” he said under his breath. “You knew it was slow and you didn’t hit it.”

Rocca had life again. In fact, if he could somehow curl his putt in, the pressure on Love to make his just to get a halve would be brutal. Rocca’s putt trickled toward the hole but veered left and went 18 inches past. Love thought briefly about making him mark the ball; after all, under this kind of pressure, no putt was an absolute gimme. Then he changed his mind.

I’m going to give him this and knock mine in and this thing’s going to be over, he told himself.

He reached down, picked Rocca’s ball up, and flipped it to him. Then he re-marked his ball and he and Williams took a long look at it. Williams thought the putt would break only slightly, that it should be aimed at the right edge of the hole. Love saw more break in it than that. “It’s just outside right,” he told Williams.

He stepped up to the ball and went through the routine he had developed through the years working with sports psychologist Bob Rotella: Pick a spot, take aim, take a practice putt, line up, and putt. Don’t overthink.

But just as he was about to draw the putter back, Love felt himself starting to shake. Something in his brain said, “Don’t putt it!”

He stood up and stepped back. By now, no one was breathing. The Americans, seeing Love step back, fidgeted. A player backing off a putt is usually a sign of doubt. Love looked at it differently. Rotella had told him that if you weren’t ready to make a putt, you should always back off. He had backed off a putt in 1990 that he needed to make to win a tournament and, watching on television, his younger brother Mark had panicked. Love made the putt. Later, he told Mark, “If you ever see me back off a big putt, it means I’m thinking clearly about what I’m doing and I’m going to make the putt.”

As he started his routine again, Love thought about Mark. “I knew he was thinking, now Davis is going to make this.”

He picked his spot and took his practice stroke. Now he felt ready. He stroked the ball, and it rolled dead center. “Sometimes, when you make a putt like that, you think later, boy that was easy,” Love said. “Rotella says it’s like driving a car when you let instinct take over and you start thinking about something else. The next thing you know, you’ve driven fifty miles and you didn’t even notice. I let instinct take over on that putt.”

He did the same thing after the putt hit the hole. His arms went straight up into the air and he stood frozen on the spot as his teammates mobbed him. In the midst of the pandemonium he heard Lanny Wadkins’s voice above all the others: “The cup is on the Concorde!” Wadkins kept saying. “The cup’s coming home!”

It was. Floyd had just gone three up on Olazabal with three holes to play. Love’s victory gave the U.S. 13½ points, and since Floyd could now do no worse than halve his match, the Americans had clinched the 14 points that would tie the match and retain the cup.

Love was still listening to Wadkins when it occurred to him that he had never had a chance to shake hands with Rocca. “Where’s Costantino?” he asked. Rocca had waited to shake hands, but when Love was mobbed he had given up and started walking toward the clubhouse.

Love broke away from the revelers and ran after Rocca. He was walking with his arm around his wife and had just reached the gate next to the stands leading back to the locker room when Love caught him. Love grabbed his shoulder. When Rocca turned around, Love could see tears in his eyes.

For a split second, Love felt his despair. After all, he easily could have been in Rocca’s shoes. “I hope you’re proud of the way you played,” he said. “And I hope your country’s proud of you. It should be.”

The two men shook hands and then Rocca hugged Love. He walked away slowly. Love watched him briefly, then was engulfed again.

The cup was on the Concorde, but Floyd still needed to halve one more hole to clinch the victory. Faldo was still one up on Azinger thanks to his hole in one at 14.

The Americans headed out to 17. Floyd was now two up with two holes left. Olazabal birdied 17. Floyd was one up. Could the Europeans still pull out a tie?

No. Olazabal hooked his tee shot on the 18th into the water. A moment later, when Floyd put his second shot safely on the green, he conceded the hole and the match.

As the Americans celebrated, Love walked up to Tom Watson. “Can you hear it?” he asked.

“Hear what?” Watson asked.

Love pointed at the rapidly emptying stands. “The silence,” he said.

Watson grinned. He could hear it. “That,” he said, “is as sweet a sound as I think I’ve ever heard.”

Watson had known for weeks exactly what he was going to say during the closing ceremony—win, lose, or draw. He had read an excerpt from Theodore Roosevelt’s famous “Man in the Arena” speech several years earlier in, of all things, a letter for parents sent home from one of his children’s school. He had been so impressed by the words that he had taped them to the mirror in his bathroom.

Watson often tapes things to his mirror: newspaper columns that he likes, sayings he wants to remember, letters from friends. His wife does the same thing on the kitchen refrigerator. When he started thinking about what he would say at the closing ceremony, Watson thought almost immediately about the speech taped to his mirror.

“It hit exactly the right note for both teams,” he said. “It said exactly what I wanted to say about the competition. The world had seen a great show, but most people were going to forget about it, except for who won and who lost. But for the players, it was different. They were in the arena and they would always remember what they had felt, right to their dying day.

“Golf is such a solitary sport and the Ryder Cup is so much about being a part of a team. The feelings you have for one another because of what you go through together will never go away.”

And so, after he had been presented with the Ryder Cup as the winning captain, Watson read Roosevelt’s words.

It is not the critic who counts, not the one who points out how the strong man stumbled or how the doer of deeds might have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena; whose face is marred with sweat and dust and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again: who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions and spends himself in a worthy cause and who, if he fails, at least fails while bearing greatly so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.

When he was finished, Watson turned to his team and repeated what he had said at the opening ceremony on Thursday: “Gentlemen, I cannot tell you how proud I am to be your captain.”

In the end, it had turned out almost exactly the way Watson had wanted it to turn out. The menu flap had hurt, but it had been buried by the dramatics of the golf and by the fellowship that had grown between the competitors as the weekend wore on.

There had been only one incident of any seriousness and it had been brief. On Saturday, Maria Floyd had heard Ballesteros speaking to Olazabal in Spanish during the afternoon match that Ballesteros didn’t play in. Coaching by anyone but the captain is against the rules.

“I know what you’re doing,” Maria Floyd said to Ballesteros. “I speak Spanish and you’re coaching him.”

Ballesteros hotly denied the accusation and walked away. Nothing more came of it. On Sunday, watching the Azinger-Faldo match—which was by then meaningless—come up 18, Ballesteros had said to Love, “I enjoyed competing against you and Tom [Kite]. It was the way competition should be.”

Love agreed. So did everyone else. The Europeans could not have been more gracious in defeat. They were disappointed to lose, but thrilled with the way all the players had conducted themselves.

“The whole thing was brilliant,” Faldo said later. “I give a lot of credit to Tom Watson. He listened to what we all told him about what was wrong at Kiawah. Everyone on both sides tried like hell and in the end they were a little bit better. Even so, it was a great week of golf.”

Greatest of all, perhaps, for Watson. He called it his biggest thrill in golf, bigger even than the eight major titles. “I couldn’t control a lot of what happened and that’s what made it so tough,” he said. “To be honest, the week stopped being fun for me after the menu flap and didn’t start being fun again until Davis made his putt on Sunday. Everything in between was pressure and nerves and hoping to make the right decisions. I really didn’t have a chance to enjoy myself again until Sunday night. Then I didn’t want to go to sleep.”

He was the only one. Everyone else was exhausted. The victory dinner—during which all menus on both sides were signed—was raucous and even got a little bit rowdy near the end. But by 1 A.M. everyone on the American side was ready for a good night’s sleep. Payne Stewart was the last to leave and Linda Watson told her husband she was going to bed.

A couple of hours later, Lee Janzen woke up from a sound sleep to hear a television set blasting away in the hospitality room that was across the hall from the Watsons’ suite. He walked down the hall to see what was going on and found one person in the room: Tom Watson. A cigar in one hand, a glass of wine in the other, his feet up on a chair in front of him, Watson was watching the BBC replay of the last few minutes of the match with the sound turned all the way up.

“I couldn’t enjoy it the first time,” Watson said when Janzen walked in. “Now I don’t want it to end.”