PAUL AZINGER WAS the perfect choice to be the U.S. captain in 2008. He had been an excellent Ryder Cup player, as fiery in his own way as Seve Ballesteros had been on the European side. That had led to a couple of shouting matches between the two men in 1989 and 1991.
Azinger also knew something about real adversity, having beaten cancer in 1993—a diagnosis he received not long after finally winning his first major title, the 1993 PGA, and playing a key role in the U.S. victory that year at the Belfry.
Not long after he was named captain, Azinger—as he recounts in his book Cracking the Code—happened to watch a TV show about Navy SEALs. He quickly took note that SEALs were divided into pods of three or four men and that the small size of the groups seemed to bring them closer together.
The first person Azinger asked about the SEALs and their pods was Tiger Woods. He knew that Woods had become almost obsessed with the SEALs and had trained with them at times.
“He loved the idea of the pods,” Azinger said. “He thought applying it to our team was a great idea.”
As it turned out, Woods didn’t play on Azinger’s team. After winning the U.S. Open at Torrey Pines in June 2008 for his fourteenth major title, he underwent knee surgery that ended his year. It would be the first Ryder Cup team since 1997 that Woods wouldn’t play on. Whether he was disappointed or relieved, no one knew for sure.
Azinger had another thing going for him at Valhalla, the golf course outside Louisville, Kentucky, that the PGA had chosen as the site of the matches. “Valhalla” is from the Old Norse for “heaven”—“a place of honor, glory or happiness,” according to the dictionary.
The golf course named for honor, glory, and happiness was a fairly ordinary track, but it was owned by the PGA. Jim Awtrey, then the CEO, had decided to buy it in the early 1990s because he believed the PGA needed a backup golf course that would be quickly available in case of an emergency caused by catastrophic weather or an emergency like the one at Shoal Creek in 1990.
That had occurred when Hall Thompson, who had founded the club outside Birmingham, Alabama, was asked about the club inviting an African American to become a member. Thompson was quoted in the Birmingham News as saying, “That would never happen in Birmingham.”
In the ensuing national uproar, the PGA initially wanted to move the championship to Muirfield Village. At first, Jack Nicklaus said yes but later changed his mind because, according to Awtrey, he didn’t want to offend Thompson—who was also a member of (then) all-white Augusta National.
Hall, after first insisting he wouldn’t apologize for the comment, capitulated and a local African American insurance executive named Louis J. Willie was invited to join the club. That calmed the waters enough to allow the tournament to be held at Shoal Creek.
Awtrey made the decision to buy Valhalla in the wake of Shoal Creek. The PGA then staged its championship there in 1996 and 2000. Both events had ended in playoffs: Mark Brooks beating local hero Kenny Perry in ’96, and Tiger Woods dramatically holding off unknown Bob May four years later.
Playing at Valhalla was an advantage for the U.S. because the fans in Kentucky were thrilled to host the Ryder Cup and even more enthusiastic when Perry made the team, as did fellow good ole boys J. B. Holmes and Boo Weekley. They set a tone for the week quite different from the deadly serious approach previous U.S. teams had taken.
Azinger had one other thing going for him: Nick Faldo.
Arguably Europe’s greatest Ryder Cup player—along with Ballesteros and Montgomerie—Faldo was Europe’s captain in 2008, which made absolute sense. Montgomerie was warming up in the bullpen for 2010. This was Faldo’s year.
Even before the Europeans arrived in Kentucky, there were signs of trouble. Faldo had named José-María Olazábal and Paul McGinley as his vice captains. Montgomerie wasn’t on the team for the first time since 1991 and, even though the European “system” made him a logical choice as a vice captain since he was a lock future captain, his old playing partner didn’t select him.
Then, a year out from the matches, McGinley resigned as vice captain. “I just didn’t feel right about it” is all McGinley will say, even now, about the decision.
Faldo never named a replacement for McGinley and came to Louisville with only Olazábal assisting him. Azinger had three vice captains: Raymond Floyd (past U.S. captain), Dave Stockton (past U.S. captain), and Olin Browne.
When the Europeans arrived and went to pick up their golf bags, they all noticed that Søren Hansen’s name had been misspelled. The bag said, “Soren Hanson.” Then Faldo mispronounced Miguel Ángel Jiménez’s name in his opening press conference.
“Neither one was a big deal in itself,” David Feherty said later. “But to the players it was symptomatic. If there’s one thing a Ryder Cup captain has to do, it’s pay attention to detail. They didn’t feel as if Nick did that.”
Azinger did. He set up his team in four-man pods, sending them out to practice in those groups and telling them well in advance that they would be playing with those in their pods. He allowed the eight players who had made the team on points to help him choose the captain’s pick—or picks—who would be part of their pods.
“We all felt included,” Phil Mickelson said. “I told Paul that I wanted Hunter Mahan in our pod and we got Hunter in our pod. Basically he said, ‘This is your team as much as it is mine.’ We all felt invested after that.”
Mickelson uses the word “invested” often when talking about the role he believes the captain should play. He used it when talking about his feud with Tom Watson during the 2014 Ryder Cup.
What’s confusing about this is the notion that the captain somehow has to get his players to feel “invested” in winning the Ryder Cup.
“I think the Americans were a bit later to the party when it came to thinking of the Ryder Cup as a must-win event,” said Chubby Chandler, the former European Tour player turned agent who has represented Darren Clarke, Lee Westwood, Danny Willett, and Rory McIlroy—among others. “The Europeans have been all in dating to Seve. I don’t think the Americans really got it until they started to lose all the time.”
Clearly, there’s something to that notion. If Woods and Mickelson had been paired together in 2016 as the number-one and number-two players in the world, they would have put aside their differences to try to win.
In 2008, Azinger brought a new approach to being the captain—and it worked—at least if he’s judged by the result, which is exactly how all captains are judged. Win, you’re a genius; lose, you’re a moron.
“That’s what was unfair about Medinah,” said Brandt Snedeker, referring to 2012. “Davis did everything right for two days, handed us a 10–6 lead going into the singles, and we couldn’t finish. Somehow, that became his fault.”
In 2008, the lead Azinger handed his team after two days at Valhalla was 9–7. The Americans dominated on Sunday, winning the singles 7½–4½. There were a few nervous moments early in the day for the U.S. After Justin Rose had beaten the “invested” Mickelson 3 and 2, the lead was down to 10½–9½. But the self-described “redneck” trio of Perry, J. B. Holmes, and Boo Weekley won the next three matches to regain control and the U.S. won easily, 16½–11½.
Azinger was a genius and all was well in U.S. Ryder Cup land again.
Until the Americans lost the next three Cups.
The loss in Wales in 2010 had a surreal quality to it. There was so much rain the first three days that the captains—Colin Montgomerie and Corey Pavin—agreed to two sessions in which six matches were played—meaning all twenty-four players were on the golf course at once. The singles were postponed until Monday in the hope that the sixteen foursome and four-ball matches could be completed by Sunday.
They were—barely.
The Keystone Kops feeling was added to when the U.S. broke out its rain gear on Friday. The gear had been selected by Pavin’s wife, Lisa, who had been dubbed (and had embraced) the nickname “The Captainess” because she was so involved in everything her husband did leading to the matches.
There was just one problem with the Captainess-selected rain gear: it didn’t stop the rain. The American players were almost comically soaked by the time the rain became so heavy that it forced a stoppage in play on Friday, and PGA of America employees were sent on a buying spree for off-the-rack rain gear that wasn’t as eye-catching as what the Captainess had selected but had the distinct advantage of keeping the players and caddies dry.
The sun finally came out on Monday, and Europe held off an American rally when Graeme McDowell, who had won the U.S. Open earlier in the year, scored the clinching point in the final match against Hunter Mahan.
“I think I had a one-footer to clinch the match, and my hands were shaking,” McDowell said later.
There were a total of eleven Ryder Cup rookies involved that weekend—six on the European side and five on the American side. One of Europe’s rookies was Rory McIlroy.
McIlroy had been a golf prodigy almost from the time he could walk. He had grown up in the tiny town of Holywood in Northern Ireland and had learned the game from his father, Gerry, who was a low-handicap player most of his adult life. Gerry was a bartender who worked two jobs—one at the golf club, the other at a local pub. Rosie, Rory’s mother, worked a nightshift at the 3M plant. Their three salaries enabled them to have enough money so that young Rory could travel to junior golf tournaments in Great Britain and around the world.
At the age of ten, Rory won the nine-and-ten-year-old division of the World Junior Golf Championships at Doral Park Country Club in Miami. He was the number-one-ranked amateur in the world at seventeen and turned pro at eighteen after playing in the 2007 Walker Cup matches.
He won on the European Tour in February 2009 and made his American debut as a pro a couple of weeks later when he reached the quarterfinals of the World Match Play Championships. Then he tied for twentieth at the Masters—still a month shy of turning twenty.
What was noticeable about McIlroy, right from the beginning, was his comfort with the spotlight. Clearly his parents had raised him to respect everyone he met—not just those he might think important.
In 2010, a reporter walking through the hotel lobby at the PGA National Resort and Spa, the site of the Honda Classic, noticed McIlroy talking to an older man who was showing him something on his cell phone.
“She’s absolutely beautiful,” the reporter heard McIlroy say. “Is she your first?”
The next day, the reporter ran into McIlroy and asked him who he had been talking to in the lobby the night before. McIlroy looked at him blankly.
“The guy who was showing you pictures on his cell phone,” the reporter said. “I’ve never seen him before.”
“Oh, that guy,” McIlroy said with a smile and a shrug. “I have no idea who he was. He just walked over and asked if we could take a picture together and then started showing me pictures of his granddaughter.”
McIlroy also had—and has—a penchant for telling the truth. When he’s asked a question in a press conference, he almost never answers the question quickly. He will think about it and then answer. Occasionally his answers get him into trouble.
One such occasion came in 2009 when it was becoming apparent he was going to make Europe’s Ryder Cup team in 2010. Just before he was scheduled to play in the 2009 Irish Open with Montgomerie, he was asked how important it was to him to make Montgomerie’s team the next year.
“It’s not a huge goal of mine,” he answered. “It’s an exhibition. In the big scheme of things, it’s not that important an event to me.”
McIlroy went on to say he wouldn’t change his schedule or add events in order to make the team. To his credit, Montgomerie answered very calmly—and smartly—when he was asked about McIlroy’s comments.
“Rory will understand when—and that’s not an if—he’s a Ryder Cup player.”
Montgomerie was right. From the moment he stepped inside the team room in Wales, McIlroy figured out that this was far more than an exhibition. He felt the tension and he felt the camaraderie. Seeing how much the matches meant to men like Clarke, Westwood, McDowell, and Poulter—all of whom he looked up to—he quickly came to understand what all the hype was about.
“I knew I’d been wrong pretty much right away,” he said, smiling sheepishly at the memory. “Looking back, what I was said was pretty selfish. I had always thought of golf in terms of individual performance—winning majors, accomplishing things on your own. I suspect to some degree there was an only-child aspect to it too.”
He paused and smiled. “Can you imagine that?” he said. “A golfer being selfish. Has to be a first, right?”
McIroy went 1-1-2 in Wales—paired with fellow Northern Irishman Graeme McDowell in the first three sessions before halving his singles match with Stewart Cink on Monday. Because of the rain, no one played more than four times, so McIlroy played in every session.
The most frustrated man in Wales might have been Mickelson. He went 0-3 in the four-ball/foursomes sessions before winning his singles match against Peter Hanson. Mickelson had thought that Azinger’s captaincy and the win at Valhalla would mean a change in the way captains approached the matches and in the outcomes. He got neither in Wales.
“I sat down with Corey after they named him captain and I said to him, ‘Look, the pod system worked. We all felt prepared and ready even before we got to Louisville.’ Corey just looked at me and said, ‘We have a twelve-man pod.’ I can’t tell you how frustrating it was to hear that.”
Mickelson had wanted Azinger to be named captain again after the victory in 2008. During the celebration at the Brown Hotel on Sunday night in Louisville, he had cornered Julius Mason—the PGA’s keeper of the future-captains list—and told him the PGA should name Azinger right away as the 2010 captain. Although Mason was highly respected inside PGA headquarters, he technically had no say in naming captains. Back then, the decision was made solely by the president of the PGA, presumably with input from the executive board and the staff. Pavin was named captain on December 10 at a lavish press conference at Tavern on the Green in New York City.
It was a choice that made sense. Like Azinger, Pavin had been an excellent Ryder Cupper and had played a key role in 1993—the last U.S. win in Europe—at the Belfry. His nickname was “The Gutty [or Gritty] Little Bruin,” a reference to his size, five-nine and 155 pounds, and his alma mater, UCLA.
The toughest part of Pavin’s job in Wales in 2010—other than the rain gear debacle—may have been deciding what to do with Tiger Woods. In the wake of the Thanksgiving night accident (nine months earlier) that led to explosive revelations about his personal life, Woods had become something of a missing man on tour in 2010.
He had played in only eight tournaments that year prior to the PGA Championship and wasn’t going to come close to making the team on points, even though he had finished tied for fourth at both the Masters and the U.S. Open. But there had been a number of un-Woods-like performances: a rare missed cut at Quail Hollow; a walk-off with an injury during the final round of the Players Championship—which turned out to be the beginning of what would become a familiar sight the next few years—and a tie for seventy-eighth place at the Bridgestone Championships, meaning he beat one player in an eighty-man field, on a golf course (Firestone Country Club) where he had won seven times in the past.
All that left Pavin with a dilemma: If Woods had been anyone but Woods, he wouldn’t have even considered picking him. But Woods was Woods, which led many people to say, how can you not pick him?
The simmering controversy blew up during the week of the PGA when Golf Channel’s Jim Gray reported on Tuesday that Pavin had told him he would definitely pick Woods—regardless of how Woods played that week. Pavin flatly denied saying that, and Gray confronted him as he left the podium following his pre-tournament press conference.
There was a good deal of shouting—some of it involving Lisa Pavin—and both men left angry. Gray has always had a reputation for very aggressive reporting—especially for a TV reporter—but no one had ever accused him before of making something up.
Bottom line: Pavin picked Woods.
And then the twelve-man pod went to Wales and lost. Woods actually played better than he had in any previous Ryder Cup, going 3-1. The U.S. still came up a point short. Four months later, Davis Love was named the American captain for the 2012 matches at Medinah.
That same week in January 2011, José-María Olazábal was named to captain Europe. Four months after that, Seve Ballesteros, Olazábal’s partner in Ryder Cup brilliance (they were 11-2-1 as a team), his mentor, and the father of European Ryder Cup golf, died after a long battle with cancer.
All of which set the stage for 2012 and, arguably, the most emotional Ryder Cup matches ever played.
The two teams that arrived at Medinah Country Club, which is located about thirty miles north and west of downtown Chicago, were both on a mission: The U.S. team wanted to win the Ryder Cup back and wanted to make certain that Davis Love, as respected and well liked as any player in golf, did not lose the Cup on home ground.
Europe’s players knew how much José-María Olazábal wanted to honor Seve Ballesteros’s memory by following in his footsteps as a winning Ryder Cup captain.
“The notion that we wouldn’t win for José, who wanted so much to win for Seve, was almost unthinkable,” Ian Poulter said. “I think for a while, we were trying too hard.”
The U.S. led 5–3 on Friday night after winning the afternoon four-ball session, 3–1. That night, Olazábal surprised his players by giving them a tongue-lashing. Since he was normally one of golf’s truly gentle souls, it was completely out of character for him.
“What was important was that nobody doubted his sincerity,” said Paul McGinley, who was a vice captain. “They knew it came from the heart and they knew he was right.”
Even so, things got no better for Europe the next morning, the U.S. again winning the session 3–1 and extending the lead to 8–4. It was during that session, though, that the matches began to turn—slowly—in Europe’s direction.
Love hadn’t put together any pods à la Paul Azinger, but he had made a point of talking to each player he thought might be on the team about how often he wanted to play and whom he might want to play—or not play—with. He didn’t want to “surprise” anyone the way Mickelson and Woods had been surprised in 2004.
He and Mickelson had talked at length about whom Mickelson would play with and, more important, how much he would play. Mickelson was forty-two, and the notion that he might play five times was pretty much out of the question, largely because both men agreed he might be tired on Sunday if he played thirty-six holes on both Friday and Saturday.
“We actually discussed the possibility of him playing only once on Friday and Saturday,” Love said. “Eventually, though, we agreed he’d play the first three sessions and then rest Saturday afternoon to be ready for singles on Sunday.”
Mickelson wanted to play with Keegan Bradley. He had taken Bradley under his wing, especially after Bradley won the PGA in 2011 and it became apparent that he was going to be part of the team a year later.
Mickelson loves to play Tuesday money matches, and often he does it with younger players he thinks need to be put under pressure—specifically match-play pressure—to give them some sense of what the Ryder Cup will feel like.
There is, of course, no gambling allowed on the PGA Tour. But if there were gambling, Mickelson’s group would play for $1,000 a hole with automatic presses. That meant there were times when several thousand dollars might be at stake on the last hole, and, even though that was chump change to players on the PGA Tour, no one wanted to have to hand over cash—the games are cash-only; pay as soon as it’s over—to anyone, especially Mickelson, who is one of the kings of tour trash talk.
Mickelson and Bradley had partnered often on Tuesdays, and Mickelson told Love he wanted to play with the energetic and talented Ryder Cup rookie.
They turned out to be a spectacular team. On Friday morning, once Bradley overcame the nerves that were so bad he had considered fleeing the premises, they beat the previously unbeaten foursomes team of Luke Donald and Sergio García. That afternoon, in four-balls, they beat McIlroy and McDowell.
Then, Saturday morning, they completely humiliated Donald and Lee Westwood, 7 and 6. It was during that match that Mickelson, seeing Love watching from his cart, went over to talk to the captain.
“I told him he shouldn’t change the plan,” Mickelson said later. “I knew the temptation would be there to send Keegan and I out in the afternoon because we were playing so well and I understood that. But I told him that Keegan and I probably wouldn’t be mentally ready to play because that hadn’t been the plan all week and that we wanted to be fresh for Sunday.”
Love agreed. In hindsight, many have pointed to that moment as the turning point of the matches, even though both Love and Mickelson always bring up the fact that the team Love put out instead of Mickelson and Bradley—Webb Simpson and Bubba Watson—won their match.
But what those people don’t know is that Love and his vice captains gave considerable thought to putting Bradley out with Tiger Woods—and benching Steve Stricker, who was struggling with his game. Bradley, who was only twenty-six, had enough energy to play ten matches if need be, and he was on fire, breathing energy into his partnership with Mickelson, into the crowd, and into the U.S. team.
It wasn’t until later, after the matches were over, that Bradley found out that he had almost been paired with Woods on Saturday afternoon. “It was so disappointing to hear they almost did that but didn’t,” he said. “I wanted to play—period. I understood Phil needing to rest. To go out there with Tiger would have been amazing.”
In the end, with what looked like a comfortable lead, not wanting to embarrass Stricker, and not sure how a Woods-Bradley partnership would play out, the leadership group decided to stick with Woods and Stricker. They lost to García and Donald.
“When you have a team down, you should step on them,” McGinley said. “That’s the way I look at it. We were all a little bit surprised they weren’t back out there. We understood Davis’s thinking, but we were surprised anyway.”
That afternoon proved to be the turning point of the weekend. After the U.S. had upped its lead to 10–4 in the first two matches, the European rally began with García and Donald’s win on the 18th hole and then the remarkable turnaround by Poulter and McIlroy to win their match from Zach Johnson and Jason Dufner.
“The funny thing is, I think Poulter fed off our crowd,” Zach Johnson said. “He was enjoying every second of it.”
McIlroy—as he points out—did birdie the 13th hole to start the rally. Poulter birdied the next five.
“I always tell Rory that we birdied six in a row,” Poulter said. “And he got us started.”
That win sent an absolute jolt through the European team room.
“It was more like we were up 10–6 than down 10–6,” said Darren Clarke, also a vice captain that year. “We knew the U.S. had won from 10–6 down at Brookline, although that had been at home. But we didn’t care. I think everyone in that room that night felt like we were going to win.”
When the captains sat down right after the Saturday matches had ended, their first instinct was to put Poulter out in the first singles match: let the spiritual and emotional leader of the team lead things off and keep the momentum going. It was McGinley who first suggested not doing that.
“We were on the road,” he said. “Poults would get the crowd wound up, especially playing Bubba, who we expected to be out there first,” he said. “We didn’t want that. We wanted to take the crowd out of it early as much as we could because that was when we needed to make our move.
“I suggested we put Luke [Donald] out there first. No one in Chicago was going to get all wound up about Luke. He’s quiet and unassuming and he’d gone to Northwestern. He was one of their own—at least a little bit. They weren’t going to cheer for him, but they weren’t going to get all fired up to cheer against him either.”
Ultimately, Olazábal agreed with McGinley. Donald led off, with Poulter second, McIlroy third, and Justin Rose fourth. Love, expecting Olazábal to front-load with his team behind, countered with Watson, Simpson, Bradley, and Mickelson—the four players who’d had the most success the first two days. He back-loaded his other veterans, figuring they would handle the pressure best if the matches got close: Stricker went off eleventh against the struggling Martin Kaymer, and Woods was last, facing Francesco Molinari.
Saturday night has become a traditional night for the U.S. team to hand out gifts—notably from the players to the captain—with the captain, vice captains, players, and—sometimes—wives and caddies talking. This dates to the ’99 rally at Brookline. In fact, both Presidents Bush were in the team room on Saturday night at Medinah in 2012, just as they had been at Brookline thirteen years earlier.
What happens in the European team room tends to vary from year to year, captain to captain. It was Olazábal who did most of the talking that night, and much of it was about how much he wanted to win for Ballesteros. He had been angry on Friday night. On Saturday, he was filled with emotion, almost pleading with his players to honor Ballesteros by finding a way to rally on Sunday.
“The ghost of Seve was in their team room that night,” Azinger said. “Our guys were giving out gifts.”
Love kept telling his players, “We’ll all be in this room drinking champagne tomorrow night,” almost as if he was trying to convince himself that was the truth.
As it turned out, Europe’s biggest challenge the next day was getting McIlroy to the golf course. Casually watching Golf Channel in his room Saturday night, he noticed that his tee time was at 12:25. He woke up in the morning, had some breakfast, went to the gym for a brief workout, and then went back to his room to FaceTime with his fiancée, Caroline Wozniacki, who was playing in a tennis tournament in China.
He was just getting out of the shower when he heard someone pounding on his door. McIlroy normally gets to the golf course about an hour before his tee time. It was a little before eleven o’clock and he was planning to arrive at about 11:30, give or take five minutes.
There was just one problem: his tee time was at 12:25 Eastern time, which meant 11:25 Central time. He was due on the tee in less than thirty minutes.
At about 10:45, Olazábal had noticed that McIlroy hadn’t arrived. Concerned, he notified the PGA of America and they tracked him down. Two PGA of America officials arranged for a local police officer to pick McIlroy up at the hotel and drive him, lights and sirens blazing, to the golf course.
“It was terrifying,” McIlroy said, years later, able to laugh about it. “I mean, he was taking side streets to make the route shorter, and a couple of times we were up on the sidewalk. He did an amazing job.”
The officer, Patrick Rollins, who was the deputy police chief of the Lombard Police Department, told a local reporter later that he was “just doing my job” in getting McIlroy to Medinah.
McIlroy arrived at 11:15. By then, word had spread that he wasn’t on the grounds. When Love told Keegan Bradley that the U.S. would win the match by forfeit if McIlroy was more than five minutes late for their tee time, Bradley objected.
“I said, ‘No way, we’re not doing that,’ ” Bradley said. “I told Davis that if he was late, we should go off fourth or fifth—whatever. I didn’t want to win that way. Plus, I was dying to play him.”
Whether Love and Olazábal would have gotten together and agreed to push the Bradley-McIlroy match back or if the rules would have been strictly adhered to became moot when McIlroy arrived. He had no time to warm up on the driving range, instead going to the putting green to hit a few putts before walking onto the tee at 11:22 with the entire crowd chanting, “Central Time Zone!” in his direction.
He laughed. They were right.
“My only thought was that I needed to be even after six holes, just not get blown away at the start when I wasn’t warmed up,” he said. “Fortunately, I managed to get a halve on number one and was 2 up after six. After that I felt pretty confident. Plus, by then, there was a lot of blue on the board [blue being Europe’s color; red being the U.S. color].”
McIlroy pushed his tee shot on the first hole way right but managed to get it on the green and make par—matching Bradley. From that point on, most of the day belonged to Europe.
McGinley’s theory about sending Donald off first proved to be correct. Plus, he beat Watson. Then Poulter beat Webb Simpson, McIlroy beat Bradley, and Rose beat Mickelson in what might have been the key match of the day.
Rose’s win was remarkable. He was one down on the 15th hole and had to get up and down from a tough lie in a greenside bunker to halve the hole. He did. Then he made a 12-footer at 16 to also halve the hole.
“If I don’t get up and down at 15 and make that putt at 16, the match could have been over,” Rose said. “I was barely hanging on.”
At 17, the difficult par-3, Mickelson just missed the green and had about a 50-foot chip. He almost holed it.
“I knew I’d made it,” he said. “I was moving as I watched it track the hole. I knew it was going in.”
Only it didn’t, stopping two inches away. Still, at worst he was going to take his one-up lead to the 18th tee, since Rose had a 35-foot birdie putt and needed to make sure he didn’t get overaggressive and three-putt. That would end the match.
Except that Rose, never known as a great putter, holed the putt. It was one of those European turnarounds where what looked great for the Americans turned out great for Europe. Standing behind the green, Mickelson shook his head for an instant, then gave Rose a thumbs-up and clapped for Rose as he walked off the green.
It was a great Ryder Cup moment—though not so much for the U.S.
Then, on 18, after missing the fairway left, Rose got his second shot on the green and made another putt, this one a 15-footer, to win the match. He had also beaten Mickelson in singles in 2008—but that hadn’t mattered as much in the U.S. runaway at Valhalla.
As they shook hands, Rose, about as nice a person as there is in golf, said softly, “I’m not sure why, but you always seem to bring out the best in me.”
Mickelson smiled. “Yeah, I know. I’m not sure I’m really happy about that.”
Nine months later, Mickelson would finish second in the U.S. Open for the sixth time. The winner was Justin Rose.
By the time Rose beat Mickelson at Medinah, the score was tied and Europe was riding a wave of momentum. Dustin Johnson and Zach Johnson managed to slow things down with wins, as did Dufner. But Sergio García rallied to beat Jim Furyk one up and breathed new life into his team.
By late afternoon, it all came down to Kaymer and Stricker and Kaymer’s unforgettable moment. Watching Kaymer line up his putt, a lot of people flashed back to Kiawah and Langer’s putt twenty-one years earlier. It never crossed Kaymer’s mind.
“I was just thankful to be there in that moment with the chance to make a putt I knew I’d be remembered for making forever,” he said. “I knew I was going to make it.”
When he did, the Europeans celebrated wildly. The first person to get to Olazábal, who was racing up the 18th fairway as Kaymer lined up his putt, was Poulter. As they hugged, Olazábal, with tears streaming down his face, said, “Thank you, thank you, thank you.”
“I’ve had a lot of great moments in golf,” Poulter said. “A lot of them in the Ryder Cup. That was the best one of all.”
There were plenty of American tears that day too, most of them shed in the team room after the Woods-Molinari match had been halved to make the final score 14½–13½.
“Every single person was in tears,” Brandt Snedeker said. “We all felt like we had let the country down and we’d let Davis down. There was just no getting around it. We felt like we should have won and we didn’t and it was incredibly painful.”
That night, after they had celebrated for several hours, the Europeans were ready to carry out the Sunday night tradition of joining their opponents for a toast and some bonding. As a courtesy, they sent word to the Americans that they wanted to come to their room to congratulate them on a great weekend of golf.
A little while later the word came back: “Please don’t come.”
Davis Love learned one lesson that day. “We focus so much on getting the pairings right the first four sessions,” he said. “Sometimes we almost forget singles is 12 points—not just 4. Once, the singles were our strength. At Medinah, they killed us.”