THE WIN AT Oak Hill for the European team was the start of an almost twenty-year stretch that became a biennial nightmare for American golfers and their fans. There was a pattern to the European victories: The Americans would be clear favorites going into the matches based on world ranking and the names of the players on the U.S. team—notably Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson. But the Euros always seemed to find players like Philip Walton, David Gilford, and Paul McGinley—unknowns in the U.S.—who would be transformed into stars on Ryder Cup weekends.
Woods made his Ryder Cup debut in 1997, six months after winning the Masters by twelve shots and becoming the name in the game. “Tiger-mania” was the phrase, and it was a very real thing. It was as if everyone else in the sport ceased to matter.
“I’ve had players suggest to me we call it the TGA Tour—the Tiger Golf Association Tour,” PGA Tour commissioner Tim Finchem joked—sort of—at the height of Tiger-mania.
To most, adding Woods to the American team that went to Valderrama in Spain (the first Ryder Cup held on the European continent) meant the U.S. was adding five almost automatic points. Except it wasn’t that simple. There was really only one player on the American team comfortable playing with Woods—Mark O’Meara, his neighbor in Florida who had become his unofficial mentor on the Tour—and Woods was an almost silent presence in the team room, clearly not comfortable around his teammates.
“It wasn’t that he didn’t want to win, Tiger Woods always wants to win,” said Mickelson, whose relationship with Woods in those days was famously unfriendly. “It was more about him being taught by his dad that his job was to go out and beat up on everyone. I think it was difficult for him to let go of that, to say, ‘Okay, for one week we’re all in this together, and I’ll do whatever it takes to get everyone playing well.’ That went against all his instincts.”
O’Meara and Woods won their first match, but lost their next two. With the U.S. trailing 8–4 going into Saturday afternoon’s foursomes, U.S. captain Tom Kite decided he needed to mix things up. He paired Woods with Justin Leonard, who had won the British Open two months earlier. They faced two European rookies: Ignacio Garrido and Jesper Parnevik, meaning all four players were first-time Ryder Cuppers. Two had won major championships that year—the Americans. And yet the match was halved, a big psychological boost for Europe, even if it didn’t really need it.
Trailing 10½–5½, the Americans staged a mild rally on Sunday, but any real chance for a miracle turnaround evaporated when Costantino Rocca beat Woods, 4 and 2. The score was 14–10 with four matches to play before the U.S. rallied late—helped greatly by another rookie, Jim Furyk, shocking Nick Faldo—to make the final score 14½–13½.
As it turned out, that was Seve Ballesteros’s last moment in the Ryder Cup spotlight. His game had faded badly in the years leading to Valderrama, and it was natural for him to be named captain for the matches in Spain. The joke among the players was that Seve not only picked the team and made the pairings, he selected every club, read every putt, and might have hit every shot had he been allowed to do so. Regardless, it was a triumphant and fitting climax for Ballesteros.
Two years later, in 1999, the Americans had their one real moment of glory, rallying from 10–6 down at the Country Club in Brookline, a Boston suburb. The win became a thing of legend, beginning with Captain Ben Crenshaw pointing his finger at the media during his Saturday evening press conference and saying, “I’m gonna leave y’all with this: I’m a big believer in fate. I have a feeling about this.”
There were hundreds of stories later about everyone in the U.S. team room—wives included—getting up that night to deliver inspirational messages and former president George H. W. Bush and then–Texas governor George W. Bush speaking to the team. The younger Bush read a poem about the Alamo. Fortunately, few if any of the American players knew that every American who had been at the Alamo had died there.
Everyone spoke. It fell to Robin Love, Davis’s wife, to speak last. Remembering how much Davis Love Jr.’s old friend and colleague Harvey Penick—who had taught Crenshaw, Tom Kite, and her husband—had meant to all of them, she quoted Penick’s famous line on how to play golf: “Take dead aim.”
The Americans won the first six matches the next day, aided greatly by the fact that European captain Mark James had opted to sit three players who hadn’t been playing well coming into the matches throughout the first four sessions.
All three lost badly: Mickelson beating Jarmo Sandelin, 5 and 3; Love crushing Jean van de Velde, 6 and 5; and Woods, who had gone 1-3 on Friday and Saturday, beating Andrew Coltart, 3 and 2.
Mickelson and Sandelin was a true grudge match. They had played each other in the Dunhill Cup at St. Andrews three years earlier, in 1996. Sandelin had developed a routine where he would aim his putter at an opponent as if shooting him after making a key putt. Mickelson didn’t like that in general and thought it especially tasteless given that St. Andrews was about sixty miles from Dunblane, which had been the site of a horrific school massacre earlier that year in which sixteen kindergartners had been shot and killed by a crazed gunman.
When Mickelson told Sandelin he needed to stop with the mock-shooting routine, Sandelin, by his own admission, told Mickelson to fuck off. That was the last time they spoke.
Waiting for Sandelin on the first tee that Sunday morning at Brookline, Mickelson was tempted to say to him, “Okay, I know you haven’t played the golf course in a few days, so the first hole is a slight dogleg left…”
On the 2nd hole, after hitting his second shot to five feet, Sandelin reached into his pocket for the lucky coin he always carried. Apparently, it had dropped from his pocket. Neither he nor his caddie had another coin. Sandelin finally said, “Anyone have a coin?” and was promptly bombarded with coins tossed from the crowd. He missed the putt. The match was pretty much over after that.
Although the Americans’ victory at Brookline was dramatic, the day wasn’t without controversy. Both the crowd and many of the American players went over the top with their behavior, most notably in the final match between Colin Montgomerie and Payne Stewart.
Montgomerie had long been a target for American fans, and his play in the Ryder Cup—usually brilliant—made him an even larger target. Throughout the day he was subjected to brutally profane shouts and taunts. On a number of occasions, Stewart had security remove fans.
That, however, wasn’t the worst moment of the day. Justin Leonard, playing the eleventh match, was 4 down to José-María Olazábal after eleven holes. Inexplicably, Olazábal went 5-6-5 on the next three holes (double bogey; bogey; bogey) to let Leonard back into the match. Given new life, Leonard holed a 35-foot birdie putt on 15 to draw even. Then, on 17, with the U.S. needing him to halve the match to clinch the Cup, Leonard rolled in a miraculous 45-footer for birdie. That meant Olazábal needed to make his putt from 25 feet to keep the match all square and give Europe a chance.
But before Olazábal could even think about putting, the Americans—players, wives, even a few fans—stormed the green, burying Leonard because they were so overjoyed that he had made the putt. Later, there were some claims that the Americans had stomped on Olazábal’s putting line during their charge to Leonard. They hadn’t, but their reaction was inexcusable—and they knew it.
Olazábal missed his putt and the Americans had the Ryder Cup back—if not their dignity.
A few minutes later, Stewart got some of it back. His match with Montgomerie had become meaningless, but was played out anyway. They were even on the 18th green, and Stewart had a short putt for par; Montgomerie had a long birdie putt. A halve seemed likely.
Instead, Stewart walked over to Montgomerie, gesturing with his hands. “Pick it up,” he said. “It’s good.”
Stunned, Montgomerie clapped for his opponent as he walked up to him, hand extended, to congratulate him on winning the match.
“We’d won the Cup, which was all that mattered to me,” Stewart said. “After what Colin had been through that day, no way was I going to make him putt that.”
As it turned out, that was Stewart’s final moment on an international golf stage. Four weeks later, he was killed in a plane crash.
Among those watching that day were a ten-year-old Irish golfing prodigy and a six-year-old Texan who was only just beginning to play golf.
Rory McIlroy was devastated when Leonard’s putt went in.
“The funny thing was, I had kind of pulled for the U.S. in ’97 at Valderrama because I was so taken by Tiger that year at the Masters,” he said, many years and Ryder Cups later. “I think I watched every shot he hit there. So I was a little bit torn at Valderrama. I certainly wanted Tiger to win his matches, so I was probably leaning U.S. that weekend.
“Two years later, I was all about Europe. I understood what it meant for Europe to win. Darren Clarke [like McIlroy, a northern Irishman] was my hero by then. When Justin made that putt, I took it very hard. In fact, I kind of held a grudge against him for years. Whenever I watched him play, I wanted him to lose—to not play well.”
McIlroy smiled. “Then, when I started playing on tour and met him, he was one of the nicest people in the world. I felt kind of guilty that I’d rooted against him all those years.”
The six-year-old from Texas—Jordan Spieth—didn’t completely understand what the Ryder Cup was about when he watched it with his parents that year. Two months earlier, he had turned six and was much more into baseball at that point in his life than golf.
But he knew who Justin Leonard was because, like the Spieths, Leonard was from Dallas.
“It was one of those things where we knew people who knew Justin and, needless to say, that putt became the stuff of legend,” Spieth said. “In fact, after Justin made that putt I think everyone living in Dallas claimed to be a friend of Justin’s. Even at six, I knew it was a very big deal.”
It was a very big deal. Crenshaw’s finger-pointing is still repeatedly relived on video to this day, and so is the 17th-green celebration. The one person who wasn’t criticized for that moment was Leonard—he was almost as much of an innocent bystander as Olazábal.
The 2001 matches, scheduled for the Belfry, were postponed for a year because they were supposed to begin on September 28—seventeen days after the 9/11 attacks. Everyone agreed there was absolutely no way to go ahead with the matches.
A year later, at the Belfry in 2002, Europe won the Cup back, 15½–12½. Again it was relative unknowns chipping in with key points: Paul McGinley was supposed to sit out all day Saturday, but when Thomas Bjørn struggled in the morning, Captain Sam Torrance inserted him into the afternoon lineup and he made several critical putts late to give him and Lee Westwood a halve with Scott Hoch and Jim Furyk.
That left the matches tied going into Sunday. On Sunday afternoon, Woods and Mickelson, the top two players in the world, combined for a half point: Mickelson lost one of the day’s critical matches, 3 and 2, to another unknown, Phillip Price. Woods halved with Jesper Parnevik in a match that was rendered meaningless because Europe had already clinched the Cup when McGinley made a 10-foot par putt on 18 for the half point that put Europe over the top.
Two years later—2004 at Oakland Hills outside Detroit—Europe won in an embarrassing rout, 18½–9½. For the U.S. to lose on home ground was bad enough, but the score was stunning.
Captain Hal Sutton had decided that week that it was time for the world’s top two players to form what should be an unbeatable team—regardless of whether they liked one another.
Nowadays, Woods and Mickelson play down the notion that they didn’t get along, and they have become friendly—if not friends. Back then, though, everyone knew they were hardly friends.
“Exaggerated,” Mickelson insisted. “Exaggerated by the media. I think we both kind of liked the idea of playing together. But we weren’t given enough time to prepare. We found out two days out we were going to play together.”
Mickelson made these comments in May 2016—more than four months before the matches at Hazeltine began and before he took Sutton down with similar comments in his pre–Ryder Cup press conference. Sitting in the champions’ locker room at TPC Sawgrass on the Monday of the Players Championship, Mickelson had talked at length about his frustrations with various U.S. captains—starting with Lanny Wadkins in 1995.
“Everyone talked about the fact that I went and played a different golf course for two days before the matches in ’04 and I was somehow not being a team guy,” he said. “Not true. I needed to go off alone to play with Tiger’s golf ball, so I could get used to how far I hit it as opposed to how far I hit my own ball.”
In foursomes play—alternate shot—players must play each other’s golf ball. Each player uses his own ball to tee off and the players alternate shots with that ball the rest of the hole.
Top players are so precise that they can literally feel the difference between brands of golf balls. Woods’s Nike ball was notorious for not flying as far as most other golf balls—in fact, many players, including Mickelson, had expressed awe that he could be so dominant with both a ball and clubs (also Nike) that were considered inferior.
“When I played Tiger’s ball, there was about an eight-yard difference for me between it and my own ball,” Mickelson said. “That’s a big adjustment. Even though I thought I knew the difference in how far my shots were going to fly, I just never felt as if I could trust it.”
Even if you buy that explanation, it doesn’t explain why Woods and Mickelson lost twice on the first day—losing the opening four-ball match on Friday morning. In four-ball (best ball), you play your own ball throughout. Woods and Mickelson lost 2 and 1 to Montgomerie and Padraig Harrington, setting the tone for the morning (Europe led 3½–½) and, as it turned out, for the weekend. The duo actually played a little better in the foursomes, losing on the 18th hole to Darren Clarke and Lee Westwood.
The fact that they barely spoke to each other for thirty-six holes that day probably wasn’t terribly helpful.
“I thought we won the match because we played better,” Westwood said with a laugh. “Didn’t Phil choose to play with new clubs that week?”
Mickelson had signed a contract with Callaway earlier that year and unveiled his new clubs that weekend in Detroit. Much was made of that decision at the time—especially after he and Woods lost twice.
Even so, Sutton’s decision to team Woods and Mickelson has been criticized for years. How could he possibly consider teaming two players who so disliked each other?
The best answer to that question comes from Poulter, the heart and soul of so many of Europe’s wins in the twenty-first century.
“There’s this myth out there that everyone on Europe’s team have always been best friends,” he said. “We’re not. Some guys are close; other guys get along okay, other guys don’t really like one another all that much.
“But when we get in that room for that one week every two years, any issues between us go away. We leave them outside the door, and they stay there until the week’s over. Then we pick them up again on our way out. The captain doesn’t have to worry about putting guys together who might not get along. That week we all get along.”
Or, as another European player from past teams put it: “We’d all be pals all week long, then when it was over we’d go back to thinking Monty was a pain in the ass.”
Monty is Colin Montgomerie, one of the greatest Ryder Cup players ever. Like Poulter, he never won a major title, but his Ryder Cup record was so good he was voted into the World Golf Hall of Fame in 2013.
Montgomerie was fully aware of his reputation. In fact, he often joked that the reason he and Nick Faldo were always paired together is that no one else really wanted to play with either one of them. Faldo won 25 Ryder Cup points, Montgomerie 23½—meaning they rank first and second on the all-time points list. They didn’t have to sing Kumbaya together to make a great team.
That’s what Sutton was thinking when he paired Woods and Mickelson. But unlike the Europeans, they couldn’t put their personal differences aside.
“I’ll probably get in trouble for saying this,” Poulter said with a laugh many years later. “But you’re the two best players in the world and you’re asked to work together for four hours doing something that’s important. It shouldn’t be that hard to pull off.”
They didn’t pull it off though, and Sutton took the fall for it.
If Sutton can be faulted for anything that week, it was telling his players he didn’t want them signing autographs during their practice rounds so they could stay focused on their preparation.
“When Bernhard heard about that he told us to sign every possible autograph,” Poulter said, laughing. “By the time the matches started on Friday, it felt like we had as many fans as they did—on U.S. soil. It was brilliant.”
Two years later, in 2006, at the K Club in Ireland, the result was just as one-sided, Europe winning by an identical score of 18½–9½. The Woods-Mickelson experiment had been abandoned—forever as it turned out—and American captain Tom Lehman teamed Woods with Jim Furyk. They split four matches.
Woods inadvertently revealed his approach to the Ryder Cup during a press conference early in that week. Someone asked him if he could explain why his Ryder Cup record was so poor compared to his dominance of the sport in all other events. At that moment, at the age of thirty, Woods had already won eleven majors and appeared well on his way to breaking Jack Nicklaus’s record of eighteen major victories. But his Ryder Cup record was 7-11-1.
Woods almost snorted when the question was asked: “What was Jack’s Ryder Cup record?” he said in response.
Nicklaus’s record was 17-8-3, albeit in a different era. Nicklaus faced Europe only once (1981), playing against Great Britain and Ireland in his five other appearances. That wasn’t the point Woods was making: Everyone knew that Nicklaus had won eighteen majors. Most people would have to look up his Ryder Cup record. According to Woods’s thinking, that was because the majors mattered first, second, and always; the Ryder Cup was, more or less, just an event he was obligated to play in because he’d be attacked in the media if he didn’t.
Most of the attention prior to the ’06 matches in Wales wasn’t focused on Woods, or on Woods and Mickelson, or on who was going to play with Monty since Faldo wasn’t on the team.
The focus was on Darren Clarke. Six weeks earlier, after a five-year battle with breast cancer, his wife, Heather, had passed away, leaving Darren with two young sons. Everyone in golf had known what was going on, and Clarke had taken several long breaks from the Tour in 2004 and 2005 to be with his family.
Whether he would play was an open question until the week before the matches. He had missed so much playing time because of Heather’s illness that he was nowhere close to making the team on points. But Captain Ian Woosnam had told him he wanted him on the team as a captain’s pick. After a good deal of thought, Clarke decided to go.
“It felt like the right thing to do,” he said. “I thought it would be good for the boys to be there; it would be good for me to be with my mates and focus on golf for a few days. There isn’t any doubt that when you’re dealing with something like that, your escape is when you get between the ropes.”
During that year’s opening ceremony, the players and their wives were asked to line up side by side, one player and wife from each side walking next to one another onto the stage: wife, player, player, wife. Clarke was assigned to walk in with Phil and Amy Mickelson. As the music started, signaling the teams to begin their entrance, Amy Mickelson walked around her husband, stood in between him and Clarke, and took both their hands. The three of them walked in that way.
“It was one of those moments you never forget,” Clarke said ten years later, his voice very quiet. “Neither one of them ever said a word to me. It was quite unbelievable.”
“It was completely spontaneous,” Mickelson said. “Amy and I never discussed it. She just felt like it was the right thing to do for Darren—and clearly she was right.”
Three years later, when Phil and Amy Mickelson made public the fact that Amy was dealing with breast cancer, the first player to call Phil to offer support and help was Darren Clarke.
The Europeans led from start to finish that weekend in 2006, and the only real question on Sunday was which European would score the clinching point. It turned out to be Henrik Stenson, then a Ryder Cup rookie, who beat American Vaughn Taylor to get Europe to 14½ points.
Clarke was 3-0 for the week. He paired with Westwood in foursomes on both Friday and Saturday, beating Mickelson and Chris DiMarco on Friday and Woods and Furyk on Saturday. Then he beat Zach Johnson, 3 and 2, in an emotion-filled singles match, one that was probably as wrenching for Johnson as for Clarke.
“If I wasn’t playing against him, I’d have been pulling for him,” Johnson said. “How could you not? I had very mixed emotions walking on the 1st tee, especially hearing all the cheers for him. I had to put it out of my mind, though, because I had a job to do and we needed every point we could get since we were down [10–6]. I would never say it affected my play, but I was totally drained when the match was over.
“When we hugged on the green, part of me wanted to just walk away and join in the cheering for him.”
The final score was another embarrassment for the U.S.—a third straight Ryder Cup defeat and a fifth loss in six matches, dating to the Sunday collapse at Oak Hill in 1995. Only the comeback at the Country Club in 1999 had prevented Europe from a six-match clean sweep.
Maybe Governor Bush had known what he was doing when he read the Alamo poem seven years earlier, on that Saturday night in Boston not far from Bunker Hill. That famous battle had also been lost by the Americans. Maybe it was time to find a different battle to fight.