DAVIS LOVE GETS almost apopleptic when he hears people say the reason Europe has dominated the Ryder Cup for most of the last two decades is American apathy.
“If anything, our problem has been we’ve wanted to win too much,” he said. “At times, we’ve tried too hard.”
Love’s right—up to a point.
There is no doubt that the loss at Muirfield Village in 1987 left a bad taste in the mouths of the American players. It also focused real attention on the Ryder Cup in the media and with fans for the first time.
The matches at the Belfry in 1985 hadn’t been on American television at all. Two years earlier, in Palm Beach, ABC had televised the last four holes of the singles matches, and while there was certainly some drama, the result was the same as always: a U.S. victory. With the five-hour time difference between Great Britain and the U.S., no one bothered to televise the ’85 matches live or on tape. Europe’s victory might as well have happened in an empty forest as far as most of the American public was concerned.
In 1987, the matches were televised late in the afternoon on both Saturday and Sunday. For the first time, American golf fans not only saw the matches, they saw the U.S. lose. And they saw the joy of the Europeans when it was over.
That was when people began to care. Two years later, when U.S. captain Raymond Floyd introduced his team, he did so by saying, “Ladies and gentlemen, the twelve greatest players in the world.”
Floyd was mimicking Ben Hogan, who had introduced his team in 1967 as “the U.S. Ryder Cup team—the finest players in the world.”
The Americans backed Hogan up with a 23½–8½ victory. But that was 1967 in the Great Britain and Ireland era, and the venue was Houston, Texas. This was 1989 in the British Midlands with the U.S. facing a European team that included five major champions who would win sixteen majors in all—including a rookie named José-María Olazábal, who paired with Seve Ballesteros to go 3-0-1 in the debut of arguably the greatest Ryder Cup pairing of them all.
The U.S. team was stacked—with nine men who had or would win majors. But once again they were doomed by not being able to “friggin’ finish.”
After Paul Azinger had started the singles by stunning Ballesteros with a one-up victory, the Americans lost four straight matches decided on the final hole. When José-María Cañizares beat Ken Green in the last of those matches, Europe had a 14–10 lead. Even though the Americans won the last four matches, all that did was give them a tie—meaning Europe retained the Cup. That was the first time American players cried in defeat—because, score notwithstanding, it was a defeat.
Fred Couples, one of the 18th-hole losers, wept uncontrollably on Floyd’s shoulder.
Having won the Cup twice and retained it once, Jacklin decided it was time to hand the mantle of the European team’s captaincy to someone else. Bernard Gallacher, who had first made the European team as a twenty-year-old in 1969, was chosen to captain for the matches to be played in 1991 at a brand-new golf course on Kiawah Island in South Carolina.
Those matches have been glorified in both books and documentaries as “The War by the Shore.” There’s no doubting that the tension on the final day was as great as anything ever seen in golf, but the tone of the matches was far from what Samuel Ryder—or Jack Nicklaus—had in mind.
It began when a number of American players showed up dressed in camouflage outfits, the message being they were ready to “go to war” to get the Cup back. That opened the door to some boorish crowd behavior and some hard feelings among the players, notably Azinger and Ballesteros.
The two men had scuffled at the Belfry two years earlier when Ballesteros had tried to take a ball he said was scuffed out of play and Azinger objected. This time, it was an American ball that caused a ruckus. On the 7th hole Friday morning, Ballesteros complained that the American team of Azinger and Chip Beck had been using golf balls with different compressions—which is against the rules in foursomes play—and Azinger angrily denied the charge, then admitted later he’d made a mistake.
There was also the case of Steve Pate. He had injured his ribs in a car accident on Wednesday while being driven to the gala banquet. There was talk of replacing him on the U.S. team before the matches started, but Captain Dave Stockton stuck with him and paired him with Corey Pavin on Saturday afternoon in a match the Americans lost. The next morning, Stockton said Pate was unable to play. Under the rules, his singles match against David Gilford was declared a halve—each team getting a half point. The Europeans would insist later that Stockton had stolen a half point by holding Pate out on Sunday.
There was no doubt that the Ryder Cup had become a big-time event by then, although David Feherty, who played for Europe that year, did get a little bit confused about just how big when the Concorde carrying the Euros landed in Charleston.
“I looked out the window of the plane and there were people everywhere,” Feherty said. “I mean, there were thousands of them, hanging from the rafters, taking up every spot available to them.
“I was sitting next to Sam Torrance and I nudged him and said, ‘Sam, look at this. I had no idea the Ryder Cup had become this big in the U.S.’
“He just looked at me and said, ‘You idiot, they’re here to see the fucking plane.’ ”
Feherty loves and reveres the Ryder Cup, so much so that he wrote a slightly off-the-wall history of the matches. He was also, in spite of his insistence these days that he barely knew how to hold a club, a very good player before back problems ended his career prematurely. As it turned out, 1991 was the only Ryder Cup he played in. But he remembers it well.
“My most vivid memory of the week is Seve,” he said. “Every night in the team room he would talk to us, reminding us that we were now the dominant team. He would tell stories about past matches—funny ones, poignant ones, inspirational ones. It was just unbelievable. He would walk around the room, giving guys shoulder rubs and telling us all how good we were, how he knew we could get the job done.
“I mean, for someone like me, it was unreal. I remember thinking, ‘Wow, this is so cool, I’m actually Seve’s teammate and his friend.’ He was so warm, so giving. It was just great.”
David Feherty paused. “Of course the next week the European Tour was in Stuttgart and I saw him in the locker room. I said, ‘Seve!,’ greeting my new mate. He looked up and said, ‘Donald! great to see you.’ Back to earth.”
Feherty ended up beating Payne Stewart in an early singles match on Sunday. What he remembers—much like all the players—is the near chaos getting from hole to hole because of a lack of security and the wildness of the fans.
“I was trying to get from 16 green to 17 tee and I simply couldn’t get through the crowds,” he said. “I finally got up to the tee and a security guy did show up and said, ‘Hey, pal, where do you think you’re going?’ For a second I thought he was kidding, but then he started to push me backward away from the tee.
“At that moment, Payne appeared, almost like magic. He put his arm on the guy and said, ‘I completely understand your sentiment, pal, but I actually need him on the tee with me since I’m playing against him.’ ”
Feherty returned the favor by closing the match out on the 17th green.
When all the dust and bile and anger finally cleared, the entire weekend came down to match twenty-eight: Hale Irwin against Bernhard Langer. Each was a major champion and a future Hall of Famer. Neither had ever played in a match like this one.
Mark Rolfing, who is the expert on the Ryder Cup among TV commentators, was walking with that match. With about six holes to go, Tommy Roy, NBC’s golf producer then as now, told Rolfing that he wanted him to leave the match to try to interview American Mark Calcavecchia.
Calcavecchia had blown a 4-up-with-four-holes-to-go lead against Colin Montgomerie and had been so beside himself after halving the match that he had to be dragged off the beach where he had gone looking for solitude and—perhaps—salvation. Calcavecchia was now willing to be interviewed, and Roy wanted Rolfing to hustle back to the clubhouse and talk to him.
“No,” Rolfing told Roy. “I can’t leave this match. It’s going to decide the Ryder Cup and it’s going to be unbelievably dramatic. Calc’s interview can wait. This is too important for me to leave.”
Roy decided to trust Rolfing’s instincts. Rolfing knew what was going on. He could see Irwin, one of the calmest players in the game, bending over and taking deep breaths on each tee. At one point, Rolfing asked Irwin if he was okay.
“No,” Irwin answered. “I’ve never felt like this on a golf course.”
The match seesawed to the final hole. Irwin was 2 up through 14 but Langer made tough putts on 15, 16, and 17 to bring the match to all square on the final tee. By then, all the other matches had finished and all the players, wives, and caddies were walking inside the ropes trying to will their man to victory.
The U.S. led 14–13, meaning Irwin needed only to halve the match for the U.S. to take back the Cup. Langer had to win the 18th hole and the match to get Europe even at 14–14, meaning it would again retain the Cup as it had done two years earlier.
By then the late afternoon wind was howling and everyone understood that par would be a great score on that final hole. Langer managed to find the green with his second shot, leaving himself a 45-foot birdie putt. Irwin missed the green, chipped to 20 feet, and missed the par putt. Langer had two putts to win. His first putt—much like Martin Kaymer’s putt twenty-one years later, slipped six feet past the hole. Kaymer was six years old on that afternoon and had never heard of the Ryder Cup.
As Langer and his caddie, Peter Coleman, stalked the putt, the green was completely surrounded by everyone involved in the matches. Feherty found himself lying on the ground right next to Lawrence Levy, an American photographer who had covered golf for years.
As Langer stepped to the putt, the silence was deafening, the only sound the howling wind. Suddenly, Feherty felt Levy poke him in the ribs.
“The last German who was under this kind of pressure committed suicide in a bunker,” Levy cracked.
Given how tasteless the comment was, Feherty didn’t want to laugh. But he had to clap his hand over his mouth to keep from doing so.
Years later, Langer said he and Coleman had read the putt with a slight left-to-right break but noticed two spike marks in that line. So he tried to putt the ball through the break, dead straight into the hole. The read had been correct; the ball broke inches to the right. The Americans had won.
They jumped on Irwin—who was too exhausted and drained to do much of anything except smile in relief—and on one another. They reminded the still-shaken Calcavecchia that his half point had been the difference.
The Ryder Cup had clearly gone to another level—as evidenced by the tone of the matches, the tension between the players, and the behavior of the fans. It was time to pull it back.
Tom Watson was the man chosen to do that. It wasn’t because the PGA of America asked him to fix the problem when he was named the U.S. captain for 1993; it was because he believed it was his job to fix it.
Unlike Nicklaus, who says he watches the Ryder Cup in bits and pieces, Watson has always watched the Ryder Cup pretty much nonstop since it became a three-day TV marathon event. He had been thrilled to see the U.S. win the Cup back, but not so thrilled with the direction the event had taken.
“We needed to put civility back into the Ryder Cup,” he said. “What happened at Kiawah, even though the golf was great, was not what Sam Ryder had in mind.”
Which is why Watson spent a lot of time prior to the ’93 matches at the Belfry talking to Europeans. He met with Bernard Gallacher, who had been named captain again for Europe, met with Nick Faldo, by then the best player in the world, and met with Ballesteros.
“It was actually brilliant of Tom,” Faldo said after the matches were over. “He wasn’t saying anyone should compete any less hard, he was saying we needed to play the matches in a good spirit. He thought the American fans had taken their cue from the players at Kiawah. He wanted us to send a different message to our fans at the Belfry.”
The ’93 matches still had their controversial moments. During the gala dinner, Sam Torrance asked Watson to sign his menu. It had become a tradition for the players on each team to sign menus for their counterparts after the dinner.
“Not now, Sam,” Watson said, aware that there were two thousand people in the room—all with menus. “Let’s do it later when it’s just us.”
Torrance was offended and said so. The next day the British tabloids ran wild. One headline read, “Menu-Gate!” Another screamed, “Fork You Tom Watson.”
All that was just fuel for Watson and his team. Watson was already creating an us-versus-them mentality in his team room. Each morning, at the top of the schedule given to the players, was a “thought for the day.” The one the players enjoyed the most was this one: “Remember, everything they invented, we perfected.”
Just before the Americans flew to Europe, Ballesteros had been quoted as saying that the Concorde, as far as he was concerned, was just a taxi to bring the Ryder Cup back to Europe. Watson began a countdown from the minute the plane landed, tracking how many more hours the Cup would be on European soil.
“If I remember nothing else about that week, it’s Tom giving us the hour countdown all week long,” Paul Azinger said. “I can still hear his voice saying, ‘Seventy-five hours until the Cup’s back on the Concorde…fifty-two hours until the Cup’s back on the Concorde…’ ”
When Davis Love made the clinching six-foot putt on the 18th hole Sunday that guaranteed the Cup was staying in the U.S., Lanny Wadkins’s voice could be heard clearly as the Americans surrounded Love on the green.
“Cup’s on the Concorde!” he said again and again. “Cup’s on the Concorde!”
The next morning it was.
The tide, it seemed, had turned again: Europe had held the Cup from 1985 until 1991—two wins and a tie. The U.S. had now won two in a row, including the 15–13 win at the Belfry—the first U.S. win in Europe since Schofield had convinced Jacklin to take over the European team.
It swung back two years later on a Sunday afternoon at storied Oak Hill, outside Rochester, New York. The Americans had taken a 9–7 lead into the singles, and, given their dominance in singles through the years and the fact that they were playing at home, it was almost certain that they would be keeping the Cup for another two years.
Except Europe rallied, outscoring the Americans 7½–4½ in singles to win. The turning point was the match between Curtis Strange and Nick Faldo. With two holes to play, Strange was one up and it appeared the U.S. would—at worst—get a half point from the match. Instead, Faldo won the last two holes to win, changing the momentum of the afternoon.
That was Phil Mickelson’s first Ryder Cup. He was twenty-five and had almost made the team two years earlier. In what might have been a harbinger, Mickelson sat out the morning foursomes on both Friday and Saturday—and wasn’t at all pleased about it. He was even less pleased that he didn’t find out he wouldn’t be playing the first morning until the pairings were announced during the opening ceremony on Thursday afternoon.
“I just thought Lanny [Wadkins, the U.S. captain that year] should have told me himself,” Mickelson said. “I think that’s the way it should always be—captain tells a guy he’s sitting out and why. But he didn’t.”
On Saturday, with the U.S. in the lead, Mickelson told Wadkins he’d like to play last in Sunday’s singles. He had played very well in both his four-ball matches, winning easily with Corey Pavin and then with Jay Haas.
“If it came down to the last match, I wanted to be the guy playing,” he said. “I just felt that confident. I told Lanny that and he agreed.”
At the turn, Mickelson was 2 down to Per-Ulrik Johansson. Wadkins greeted him on the 10th tee.
“You asked for this,” Wadkins said. “Get your butt in gear and beat this guy.”
Mickelson did exactly that, turning the match around and winning 2 and 1. But as he came off the 17th green, he saw Davis Love waiting for him. Love had been another of the American winners that day, but he hardly looked like someone who had just won an important match.
“[Philip] Walton just closed Jay [Haas] out on 18,” Love said. “We lost.”
“It was a kick in the stomach,” Mickelson remembered. “For about thirty seconds I got to enjoy the fact that I’d turned my match around and won. Then I felt awful. I remember saying to myself, ‘I don’t ever want to feel this way again.’ ”
Little did he know that it was a feeling he would become very familiar with over the next twenty years.