The two greatest comebacks in the history of the Ryder Cup Matches happened in America, thirteen years and a thousand miles apart. The first went to the Americans, the second the Europeans, and only an exorcism could have prevented either one. Ben Crenshaw, the captain of the U.S. team in 1999 at The Country Club, kissed the seventeenth green where Francis Ouimet had turned back the British eighty-six years before Justin Leonard holed the putt that made the Americans lose their collective minds. At Medinah in 2012 European captain José Maria Olazábal, who was standing on the seventeenth green with a putt to halve the hole the day the Americans lost their minds, dressed his team in blue and white as an airplane spelled Seve Ballesteros’s name in the sky sixteen months after the death of Europe’s greatest champion. There are times when the game isn’t won, it’s written.
Once the Ryder Cup expanded to include all of Europe in 1979, it became competitive in just four years, the amount of time it used to take to get a college undergraduate degree. In the following thirty years or so, the Europeans would go on to get a doctorate in kicking America’s ass. With Ballesteros, Nick Faldo, Bernhard Langer, Sandy Lyle, and Ian Woosnam as the core, and two-time major champion Tony Jacklin as the captain (a position he would hold in four straight Ryder Cups), the visiting Europeans nearly beat U.S. captain Jack Nicklaus and his Americans at PGA National in West Palm Beach in ’83. Ominously, one supposes in hindsight, as Lanny Wadkins was polishing off the challengers, bolts of lightning discharged on the horizon. Two years later Europe won the Ryder Cup for the first time in twenty-eight years at The Belfry, and two years after that they won for the first time on American soil, dealing the U.S. captain, Nicklaus again, a defeat on his own soil, too, Muirfield Village in Dublin, Ohio. From the ’83 matches until ’99 at The Country Club, the Europeans won the cup four times and the United States won it three times, and once the matches were halved, though, that tie was as good as a win for Europe since they already had it and got to keep it. Only ’85 was a blowout, with the Euros winning by five. Four times the margin was a single point.
The Age of Nicklaus was waning, though Jack had one more spectacular curtain call in ’86 at Augusta National, and with it names like Lee Trevino, Raymond Floyd, Tom Watson, Lanny Wadkins, and Hale Irwin were aging out, too. The best players in the world hailed from Europe, just as they had in Ouimet’s day. In the seventeen Aprils from ’83 through ’99, the Masters was won by a European player ten times. America reclaimed the golden cup it had lost in ’85 in the lamentably jingoistic atmosphere of Kiawah Island with its tableau of sea oats and desert camouflage. America then successfully defended its title in Europe but was upset two years after that when the Europeans came from behind in the singles at Oak Hill in Rochester, New York, as two old foes, Faldo and Curtis Strange (who had won the second of his back-to-back U.S. Opens at Oak Hill after beating Faldo in a playoff at The Country Club for his first), took turns throwing up on each other’s golf shoes, with Faldo managing to keep enough bottle to win a crucial point. At the closing ceremony Strange buried his face in his hands. Two years after that, with Ballesteros as captain, wildly driving his cart around Valderrama GC like it was the Monaco Grand Prix while U.S. captain Tom Kite politely chauffeured Michael Jordan to good vantage spots, Europe won again. And so it was that the United States, swallowed up in the black hole of defeat in a contest it had once dominated, sought to reclaim the Ryder Cup at the course where the amateur Ouimet became the totem of American golf, defeating the best professionals in the world, the invading Brits Harry Vardon and Ted Ray, in the 1913 U.S. Open.
Ouimet grew up at 246 Clyde Street, across from The Country Club’s seventeenth hole. He was the second of four children born to an immigrant Quebecois, Arthur, and his second wife, Mary, a daughter of Irish immigrants. The Ouimets had no attachment to the club or the game, other than as a place for young Francis and his older brother, Wilfred, to earn money caddying or for their father to obtain the kind of odd-lot work that allowed him to scrape together a modest living. At first the golf course was nothing more to Francis than the shortest distance between two points—a shortcut to the Putterham School. He became obsessed with the game, and by the time the U.S. Open rolled around to The Country Club, the twenty-year-old Francis had already won the Massachusetts Amateur Championship and had gotten as far as the quarterfinals in the U.S. Amateur, losing to Jerome Travers. It was a fine résumé for someone barely out of the caddie yard, but Vardon, forty-three by then, had already won the Open Championship five times (he’d win it the next year, too), and Ray, seven years Vardon’s junior, had won it once. The task of keeping the British stars from dominating America’s National Open attracted another twenty-year-old, a young professional from Rochester, New York, named Walter Hagen, whose florid taste in clothing would have made a clown fish look like a cod. As self-effacing as popping a champagne cork, Hagen announced to anyone in the locker room who might be interested, including Johnny McDermott, who was going for his third U.S. Open title in a row and had just dusted both Vardon and Ray to a fare-thee-well in the Shawnee Open, that he’d made the trip from upstate New York to help them stop the British. And until he made a double-bogey seven on the fourteenth in the final round and slipped out of contention on the soggy closing holes, he’d been in a position to do it, too. His day would come. This one belonged to the ex-caddie from the other side of the street, who didn’t drink, smoke, swear, or rattle.
Ray and Vardon both finished the fourth round ahead of Ouimet, posting dueling 79s and a 304 total. To catch them Francis would have to play the last six holes in two-under par, a daunting task with his opponents already on the veranda with their feet up. He chipped in on the thirteenth for a birdie; parred the fourteenth, where Hagen had come undone; and saved par on the fifteenth when he got up and down from a tough lie. He still needed one more birdie. At the sixteenth Ouimet had to make a nine-foot putt to save par. On the seventeenth he played his approach, what writer and historian Herbert Warren Wind described as a jigger-shot (a club between a midiron and a mashie), to the back level of the green, twenty feet beyond the pin. In The Story of American Golf, Wind wrote, “The ball took the roll nicely, slipped rapidly down the slope, struck the back of the cup hard, and stayed in. The keyed-up spectators crammed around the seventeenth green could not control themselves. They yelled, pummeled each other joyously, swatted their friends with umbrellas, and shouted delirious phrases they had not thought of since boyhood. Jerry Travers, the icicle himself, jumped three feet in the air.” The only things the American Ryder Cuppers left out in their ’99 celebration were the umbrellas and Jerry Travers, who’d been dead for nearly a half century.
Ouimet, with a one-shot lead over Vardon and five on Ray, would birdie the seventeenth again in the playoff when Vardon was forced to take a bogey five after driving into the fairway bunker at the crook in the dogleg. It put Ouimet three ahead with just the eighteenth to play. Vardon doubled the last. Ray birdied it. Ouimet’s 72 was five shots better than Vardon, six ahead of Ray. The deed was done. It’s fair to say Ben Crenshaw and Herb Wind, if not quite pen pals, enjoyed a robust mutual bond. Ben was a lover of golf history and an admirer of Wind’s telling of it. Wind, one of golf’s gentlest souls, was fond of Crenshaw and appreciated his abiding love of the game. He encouraged the young player’s interest in golf course architecture. There is a group photo taken after the 1913 playoff with the four-foot ten-year-old caddie Eddie Lowery in the foreground and Francis, holding a horseshoe, perched on the shoulders of some spectators. After Crenshaw kissed the seventeenth green following Justin Leonard’s make and José Maria Olazábal’s miss in ’99, Lanny Wadkins, one of Crenshaw’s assistant captains, turned to Ben as they walked to the eighteenth hole and said, “You’ve always had a horseshoe up your ass.” The double meaning, intended or not, would not have escaped Crenshaw.
Lowery, the caddie that day and the son of Irish immigrants himself, moved to California and became wealthy in the automobile business. He was the main benefactor of Ken Venturi and Harvie Ward, two of the finest amateurs of the 1950s, even as amateurism faded from the game in favor of Arnold Palmer hitching his pants and charging into the lead on television. Ward won the British Amateur in ’52 and would win the U.S. Amateur back-to-back in 1955–56. Venturi would finish second in the Masters in ’56, but his crowning achievement was his brave victory in the stifling heat at Congressional CC in the ’64 U.S. Open. In January 1956, however, after Ward and Venturi had spent a rather long evening carousing about the Monterey Peninsula in a fashion very similar to the way Robert Louis Stevenson spent half of 1879 chasing Fanny Osbourne there, Lowery knocked on the door of their hotel room and told them to get out of bed; he had arranged a money game for them at the Cypress Point Club. After clearing the previous evening’s cobwebs out of their young heads, they learned their opponents would be Ben Hogan and Byron Nelson, who won by a shot in one of golf’s most celebrated private four-balls.
British Airways supersonic jetliner Concorde was retired from service in 2003, but it was still the preferred mode of transport for the European Ryder Cup team in ’99. When Jacklin first accepted the captaincy offered by the European Tour, he insisted on first-class treatment for his team, something it had lacked previously. Concorde was the tip of that spear. The flight from London to Boston would take just over four hours. Normally, because of noise concerns, Concorde was not allowed to land at Boston’s Logan Airport except in the event of an emergency. Of course, there are rules and, then, there are rules. In ’89 Concorde transported French president François Mitterrand from Paris to Boston so he could deliver the commencement address at Boston University. According to the Boston Globe, a similar exemption was granted the European Ryder Cup team, because “there’s a dignitary at the head-of-state level traveling in the aircraft and that makes it a military aircraft. Therefore, it’s not within Massport’s authority to deny it access.” And besides, whether Prince Andrew was on board or not, it’s the freakin’ Ryder Cup for godsakes.
Crenshaw came to Boston by limousine after spending time with the Bush family at their compound in Kennebunkport, Maine. Former British prime minister John Major was there, too, along with Jimmy Patino, one of Spain’s richest men and the owner of the Valderrama GC, where Ballesteros had led the European team two years before. At the PGA Championship at Medinah CC in August, a controversy over whether players should be compensated for representing the United States in the matches oozed out of the locker room and into the media. Ever the traditionalist, Crenshaw was appalled. If the flag is on the bag, money should have nothing to do with it. It’s for honor and country and golf. The PGA of America, the sponsoring entity on the U.S. side of the Atlantic, was, to be sure, making money with both hands, like one of those game shows where they stuff a contestant in a glass box and blow bills of various denominations around inside as the person greedily, and unbecomingly, snatches as much out of the air as they possibly can in sixty seconds. The issue was eventually put aside when the PGA of America promised to address it after The Country Club, which it did. The end result was that team members were allowed to designate substantial sums—it has grown over the years—to the charities of their choice. It’s a formula the Presidents Cup adopted as well.
Still, the Americans had the taint of avarice about them. That didn’t diminish the way they were received in Boston one bit, however. In one of the country’s great sporting cities, the U.S. side was cheered from their first public team meal at the Union Oyster House, where they were outfitted with Ryder Cup lobster bibs, right up until the privacy of the team room Saturday night at the Four Seasons Hotel, when it looked to all the world as if they’d been rolled up like crabmeat in a tortilla.
Ryder Cups, all Ryder Cups, have more undercurrents than the Colorado River rapids, and Brookline was a class 6 in two twelve-man rafts. While the Americans were trying to avoid being labeled rapacious, pampered, and spoiled, the Europeans were wondering why on earth their captain, Mark James, had left aging stalwarts Nick Faldo and Bernhard Langer (both forty-two at the time) off the side, picking a surprising rookie, Andrew Coltart, and the more defensible Swede Jesper Parnevik instead. When Faldo sent a letter to the European team expressing his best wishes for their success, rather than pass along the message, James tossed it in the trash. In the coming years as the results mounted in favor of the Europeans, they were often portrayed as a more cohesive unit, a team of jovial, backslapping colleagues, rather than a collection of entitled individuals, as the Americans were accused of being. The truth, however, is that the picture of victory is as pretty as a Renoir portrait, while failure resembles an oil painting of two dead pheasants hanging from a nail. When things didn’t go right, a European locker room could get just as testy as an American one, and losing captains were excoriated on both sides of the Atlantic. The European “system” was a lot like Hogan’s secret. It helped them for others to believe it helped them. Who would have known the “system” better than Nick Faldo, who was berated as the worst English captain since Bligh after the Euros lost at Valhalla in ’08? Well, the worst since James, that is.
On Saturday night of the 1999 Ryder Cup, James’s captaincy looked as much like a fiasco as the discovery of penicillin. While the payoff doesn’t come until the twelve singles on Sunday, the essence of the Ryder Cup is forged in the foursomes and four-balls when players who ordinarily spend their entire careers hunting as lone wolves find themselves stalking their quarry in pairs. In the first two days at The Country Club, the Europeans fed on American lamb. Leaping uninhibitedly into the arms of his partner, Parnevik, Sergio Garcia, who had given Tiger Woods such a run at the PGA Championship just over a month earlier, helped deliver two points for Europe the first day, defeating Woods and his partner, Tom Lehman, in the morning and following that with a meal of Phil Mickelson and his partner, Jim Furyk, in the afternoon. Colin Montgomerie, the best of all the Europeans and one of the all-time-great Ryder Cuppers, and his partner, Paul Lawrie, contributed another point and a half. Of the Americans it seemed as though only Hal Sutton was rising to the occasion, but it wasn’t close to being enough. Europe had blitzed the Americans and taken a four-point lead.
The United States knew it needed to cut into that advantage on the second day—no team had ever come back from four points down in the singles to win—but they couldn’t do it. The foursomes were halved 2–2, as were the four-balls. Parnevik and Garcia were the stars again. They were unbeaten in their four matches, bringing Europe three and a half points and propelling the side to a 10–6 advantage at the end of Saturday. The Fat Lady was apparently singing for the Boston Pops. Europe needed just four of the twelve points in the singles to retain the cup. The Americans would need pitons and pickaxes to climb this Bunker Hill.
James was asked about the chances of Europe winning. “I think it would be a disappointment if we didn’t,” he said. “I came here with the objective of getting 100 percent out of this team, the most points I could. I feel we’ve gone about it the right way. Time may prove me wrong.” Indeed, it did.
While the European team was justifiably confident, the Americans were staggering like a heavyweight fighter pinned against the ropes, absorbing a terrible beating. None seemed punchier or more dazed than Captain Crenshaw.
Crenshaw had won the Masters twice, in 1984 and then eleven years later just a few days after the death of his longtime instructor, Harvey Penick. He and fellow Texan Tom Kite were at Penick’s funeral the day before play began in Augusta. As one longtime golf writer, Tom Callahan, put it before the Masters even started, “I’ll take low pallbearer.” Crenshaw was acknowledged to be one of golf’s all-time-great putters with a low, silky stroke that fanned the blade open on the way back and closed it on the follow through. It was a motion that could be devilishly untrustworthy from just a few feet, but no one holed more putts of distance than Crenshaw. Though he did win those two Masters, the world of golf had expected much more from a man who, with his longish blond hair, was in that police lineup of Next Nicklauses whose records would never be mistaken for Jack’s. Perhaps it was the Graves’ disease he struggled with through much of the ’80s that held him back. In his amateur days Crenshaw was a force majeure. He’d won three NCAA individual titles, one in a tie with Kite. He had a reputation for showing up minutes before his tee time, pulling his clubs out of the trunk of his car, scraping his shoes on his feet as he hurried to the first tee, and then breaking par like it was the glass covering on a fire alarm. At one amateur event a fellow competitor named George Haines, who was nicknamed the Mapper for his unique depictions of golf holes, was asked how he reckoned the distance of a particular par three that was all carry over water. “I wait until Crenshaw walks across and I count his steps,” he said. Crenshaw’s nickname, Gentle Ben, was the most comical thing about him because his rage on the golf course could run hot enough to peel the paint off a Ford pickup. He was a legend even before he won in his professional debut in the Texas Open in 1973 but would, ultimately, become better known for his contributions to simple, elegant golf course design than even his two Masters titles. With his team trailing by four points and only the singles to play, Ben sat in front of the media and, more or less, babbled.
As gracious a fellow as Crenshaw was, when it came to the art of oratory, he would never have been accused of being the Texas Churchill. This, however, was like putting a microphone in front of someone with a grade-2 concussion. He rambled. He paused. He strayed. He blathered. The team had already left to return to the sixth floor of the Four Seasons Hotel. His assistant captains and old friends Bruce Lietzke and Bill Rogers were watching Ben on the television in the locker room. They looked at each other and quickly agreed they needed to give him the hook, get him off the stage. They bolted to the interview room to save Crenshaw from himself. Before they could get there, though, Ben began wagging his finger.
“I’m going to leave you with one thought. I’m a big believer in fate. I have a good feeling about this. That’s all I’m going to tell you,” he said, then rose quickly from his chair and left the dais as if he’d delivered Macbeth’s soliloquy. It was a stunning moment, as likely to be interpreted as a nervous breakdown as a prophecy.
Pairings in the Ryder Cup, as opposed to the Presidents Cup, are done by blind draw, but the only option for the Americans couldn’t have been more manifestly apparent. Crenshaw would have to front-load his singles order, get all his best players out on the golf course as fast as possible, trust that they would do what they were supposed to do, and hope that they could build enough momentum to pull the back end along. Trailing by such a large margin, this gambit would be about as surprising as the sun rising in the east.
Though he could dangle his feet from the catbird seat, James had two problems of his own making. He’d chosen not to play three members of his team, Andrew Coltart, Jean Van de Velde, and Jarmo Sandelin, at all until the Sunday singles. Would they be ready for the pressure? And the pairs of Sergio Garcia and Jesper Parnevik, Colin Montgomerie and Paul Lawrie, and Lee Westwood and Darren Clarke had played in every session. Would they tire, emotionally or physically? There had been a time when Europe tried to hide players. The greatest European captain, Tony Jacklin, had similarly held Gordon Brand Jr. out of the matches until the singles in the ’83 Ryder Cup. That was the only time Jacklin did it, however, and he never held out as many as three.
Van de Velde was the Frenchman who had lost the Open Championship that summer at Carnoustie in one of the greatest one-hole collapses the game had ever witnessed, rivaled only by Sam Snead’s triple bogey at Spring Mill in the 1939 U.S. Open. Van de Velde took a three-shot lead into the eighteenth of the final round but wound up losing in a playoff with Justin Leonard and the eventual champion, Paul Lawrie. Van de Velde’s collapse began at the tee when he hit driver into the right rough rather than taking less club and putting the ball safely in play. He compounded the error when his second shot caromed off a grandstand to the right of the Barry Burn. The ball landed in knee-deep rough, and from there, he dumped it into the burn. Van de Velde took off his shoes and socks, rolled up his pants legs, and climbed down into the shallow water to see if he could play it, but it would have been impossible. Instead, he elected to take the penalty drop. His fifth shot found one of the greenside bunkers, where he managed to get up and down just to tie. Sandelin, another rookie, was born in Finland but grew up in Sweden and earned his way onto the European team with victories in the Spanish and German Opens, while Coltart, a Scot, had been one of James’s captain picks over the more experienced Faldo or Langer. His sister Laurae was Lee Westwood’s wife.
Back at the Four Seasons, the Americans dined on P. F. Chang’s carryout, railed at the acerbic commentary of NBC’s Johnny Miller, and watched a video that was a mixture of poignant personal moments and film clips like George C. Scott’s opening speech in Patton and John Belushi in Animal House saying, “What? Over? Did you say ‘over’? Nothing is over until we decide it is! Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor? Hell no!” The evening featured George W. Bush stopping in the team room to read William Barret Travis’s letter from the Alamo. “I am besieged by a thousand or more of the Mexicans under Santa Anna,” it says.
I have sustained a continual bombardment and cannonade for 24 hours and have not lost a man. The enemy has demanded a surrender at discretion, otherwise, the garrison are to be put to the sword if the fort is taken. I have answered the demand with a cannon shot and our flag still waves proudly from the walls. I shall never surrender or retreat. Then, I call on you in the name of Liberty, of patriotism and everything dear to the American character, to come to our aid with all dispatch. The enemy is receiving reinforcements daily and will no doubt increase to three or four thousand in four or five days. If this call is neglected, I am determined to sustain myself as long as possible and die like a soldier who never forgets what is due to his own honor and that of his country. Victory or death.
Of course, Bush no doubt skipped Travis’s postscript about bushels of corn and heads of cattle, beeves as he called them.
Benching 25 percent of a twelve-man side, even if they were all rookies—particularly because they were rookies—was an extraordinary gamble by James. The risk was highlighted when the pairings came out. He sent Westwood out first, putting a heavy burden on the tough Englishman to get a quick lead, since he was being followed by two of the three players who had yet to see action. Westwood would face Lehman. Perusing the lineup, the Americans suddenly saw a glint of hope. If Lehman, who had won the Open Championship three years before at Royal Lytham and St. Annes, could capture his point against Westwood, and if the Americans could take advantage of Van de Velde and Sandelin in the next two games, three points of James’s four-point lead would be gone right out of the blocks. Suddenly, it looked to the Americans like they had a chance after all.
Following the two rookies, James installed Darren Clarke and Jesper Parnevik as his firewall. If the Americans knew they had to seize momentum, James knew they had to keep that from happening. It couldn’t have gone worse for the Europeans. Lehman did, indeed, beat Westwood. Unsurprisingly, Davis Love III steamrolled Van de Velde, 6 and 5, and Mickelson beat Sandelin, 4 and 3. Sutton beat Clarke. David Duval swamped Parnevik, 5 and 4. As he closed out the Swede, Duval, who previously had referred to the Ryder Cup as “just an exhibition,” stomped around the green with his hand up to his ear, pleading for all the noise the rowdy Boston crowd could deliver. Tiger Woods beat the last uninitiated player, Coltart, 3 and 2, while Steve Pate defeated Miguel Ángel Jiménez, 2 and 1. The United States had won the first seven matches. A tie would be good enough to keep the cup, but Europe needed four of the last five points to get it.
Padraig Harrington, the Irishman who would win three major championships in 2007–8, the last two while Woods was nursing his damaged left knee following his U.S. Open win at Torrey Pines, put Europe’s first point on the board against O’Meara. Crucially for the Americans, Furyk beat Garcia, who had been the emotional star of the first two days. Lawrie, the Open champion, gave Europe a second point. That left just José Maria Olazábal playing Justin Leonard and Colin Montgomerie playing Payne Stewart still on the golf course. America needed a half point. If Europe won both, they would keep the cup.
Leonard, a Dallas native, had been an All-American at the University of Texas, just like Crenshaw. He’d won both an NCAA title and a U.S. Amateur. He was small, with an unusually rigid lower body in his setup that seemed to rob him of whatever power he might have been able to produce. He made up for it, however, with a controlled iron game and sheer tenacity. He hadn’t played particularly well the first two days, though he had managed two half points, the first paired with Davis Love III and the second with Hal Sutton, who had both played well, particularly Sutton. Crenshaw had paired Leonard with Sutton on a hunch. Johnny Miller, in the booth for NBC said, “My hunch is that Justin should go home and watch on television.” Through eleven holes of his singles match, Leonard was four down to Olazábal. If O’Meara couldn’t pull it out against Harrington (he hooked his tee shot at the eighteenth, pulled his second into the greenside bunker, and lost the point when he couldn’t get up and down), it could well come down to Europe’s best, Montgomerie, against Payne Stewart, who had won the U.S. Open in June on Pinehurst’s No. 2 Course.
Olazábal, however, had been struggling with his driver all week, and the weakness resurfaced at the worst possible moment, as he bogeyed the eleventh through the fourteenth holes. When Leonard rolled in a thirty-footer for birdie on the fifteenth, he’d won four straight holes and evened the match. They halved the sixteenth and came to Ouimet’s seventeenth. They both hit the fairway. Leonard’s approach spun fifty feet back down the slope of the green from a pin tucked on the upper shelf. Olazábal was half that distance away for his birdie. Putting from the opposite direction Ouimet had faced, when Leonard’s ball hit the back of the cup and dropped, the Americans lost their minds. Leonard turned and ran to the edge of the green. Players, caddies, wives, even a stranger or two, ran after him. Olazábal stood frozen behind his marker, watching them. If he made it, they would halve the hole. Among the spectators was thirteen-year-old Keegan Bradley, the nephew of LPGA Hall of Famer Pat, who was up on the shoulders of his father, Mark. The Americans regained their composure. Olazábal missed. The United States was guaranteed the half point that would win the cup. Crenshaw kissed the green. Later, the Americans were accused of stampeding across Olazábal’s line. Though what did happen was an appalling breach of etiquette, that didn’t. “That kind of behavior is not what anybody expects,” Olazábal, known as one of the game’s true gentlemen, said. “It was very sad to see. It was an ugly picture to see.”
With the matter now truly decided, Olazábal and Leonard played the eighteenth. Behind them Montgomerie and Stewart were finishing a match that, as it turned out, didn’t matter. All day Montgomerie had been treated in the most reprehensible way by the Boston crowd. It was so abysmal that his father couldn’t bear to remain on the golf course. At one point Stewart had a fan removed from the gallery. All even, when they reached the eighteenth green, Stewart picked up Montgomerie’s coin and conceded the match to him. “That’s it,” Stewart said. The gesture, and in fact the way Stewart had tried to blunt the crowd all day, was not lost on Montgomerie, who remained forever grateful.
When it was over a cadre of victorious Americans made their way through a storage room above the pro shop and out onto a seldom-used balcony to spray champagne on each other and the crowd below. After the closing ceremonies the party moved to the Four Seasons. By the time Crenshaw got there, Stewart was already in full celebration mode in his chili-pepper lounge pants. A month later he was dead.
In the ensuing months, years in fact, a parade of apologies for the scene at Ouimet’s seventeenth, a scene everyone on both sides viewed as unacceptable, never seemed to mollify the Europeans. In the Ryder Cup even small slights are magnified in defeat but forgotten in victory. Conspiracy theories blossom like Augusta National’s flowering shrubs. Gamesmanship becomes a hanging offense, alleged as if a capital crime had been perpetrated against either the Crown or Congress. And, in just two years, they were quite prepared to do it all over again.
If the comeback at The Country Club momentarily blunted the ascendance of the Europeans, its effects didn’t last long. Four of the next five Ryder Cups fell into European hands, including back-to-back blowouts at Oakland Hills outside Detroit and the K Club outside Dublin. The first matches after The Country Club were scheduled to be played in September 2001, but the terrorist attacks of 9/11 in New York, in Washington DC, and on United Airlines Flight 93, which crashed near the Diamond T coal mine in rural Pennsylvania after a courageous uprising of its passengers, forced a postponement for a year.
In 2002 at The Belfry, the fourth time the matches had been staged there, the Americans and the Europeans went into the Sunday singles tied 8–8. In a bit of serendipity peculiar to the blind draw, the European captain, Sam Torrance, put his strength out first, while the American captain, Curtis Strange, put his strength out last. Torrance’s team was able to get four and a half out of the first six points and held on down the stretch, with the decisive blow being struck by little-known Philip Walton, who beat the world number two, Phil Mickelson, 3 and 2.
Two years later the landslides began. The Americans were beaten on their home soil by a staggering nine points, 18.5–9.5. The U.S. captain was Hal Sutton, who had been the backbone of the team at The Country Club. A product of Shreveport, Louisiana, Sutton had a square jaw, square smile, and forearms as thick and hard as sandbags. He won the 1980 U.S. Amateur at the Country Club of North Carolina in Pinehurst, and his father, Harold, a wealthy Louisiana oilman, wanted his son to be the next Bobby Jones. Instead, after winning the 1983 PGA Championship at Riviera CC in Los Angeles, Sutton was yet another brawny blond nominated—though not elected—to be the Next Nicklaus. He went through wives with Nick Faldoian dispatch, eventually piling up four divorces. At Oakland Hills Sutton showed up in a black cowboy hat, a stylistic faux pas in its own right, but his strategic misstep was pairing Phil Mickelson, who had changed his equipment company on the very brink of the matches and practiced off by himself, with Tiger Woods, putting the world’s number-one and number-two players, who were none too fond of one another, together. This, in and of itself, wasn’t a sin. In 1977 Tom Watson and Jack Nicklaus were paired together in foursomes, and in 1981 they played two foursomes matches and a four-ball together and were unbeaten. But when you put your two biggest names together in the morning four-ball and they lose, with the team gaining only a half point out of four, well, you don’t send them back out in the afternoon. Sutton did. They lost again, and the Americans were five points down after the first day. The rout was all but accomplished.
Two years later at the K Club it was all about Darren Clarke. A burly (except when he would succumb to the occasional bout of fitness and lose enough stone to build a cathedral), cigar-smoking, Guinness-drinking Northern Irishman, Clarke had the reputation for being jovial one minute and bilious the next. His wife, Heather, was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2001 and again in 2004. She succumbed to the disease six weeks before the matches at the K Club. Ian Woosnam was the European captain, and following Heather’s death Clarke called the stout Welshman, a former Masters champion with a taste for the brown stuff himself, to tell him he’d be ready if he wanted him on the side. Clarke later said it had been Heather’s dying wish that he play. Woosnam picked Clarke and Lee Westwood and paired them twice in four-balls, and twice they won. They each won their singles. The Europeans took a four-point lead into the final wet, sloppy day and dominated, winning eight and a half of the twelve available points. When Clarke closed out his opponent, Zach Johnson, there were tears in his eyes as Woosnam raised his arm high like a referee at a prizefight. Europe had now won five of the last six Ryder Cups, with its only loss coming in the largest comeback in the history of the matches.
At Valhalla GC in 2008 America was on the verge of Ryder Cup irrelevance. Paul Azinger was the captain, and he grouped his players into four-man units he called pods. The idea was that these semi-self-contained groupings would be invested in the captain’s picks, in the foursome and four-ball pairings, and, ultimately, in each other. It was team building based on a military model, the navy SEALs. Meanwhile, the Europeans were being led by Nick Faldo, who seemed the walrus to America’s SEALs. While Faldo had played more matches and won more points than any other European player, he stumbled with names and with pairings. Two of his best seemed out of sorts. Sergio Garcia had not recovered from the breakup of his relationship with Greg Norman’s daughter, Morgan-Leigh, and Padraig Harrington had won two major championships that summer and seemed physically and mentally spent. Azinger’s team was bolstered by two native Kentuckians, Kenny Perry and J. B. Holmes, who helped draw out the crowd, and a rookie, Anthony Kim, whose enthusiasm was able to draw out Phil Mickelson’s. With a good ol’ boy dash of Boo Weekley, the Americans took a two-point lead into the singles and stretched it to a five-point victory. America was back.
It didn’t last long. Out-twitted, outdressed, outinterviewed, and, in the end, outplayed by a distance no greater than the gap between the fs in Cardiff, the United States left the Ryder Cup behind in Wales but got to keep their pride and the rain suits they had to buy to replace the ones they brought with them that weren’t Wales-proof. Pushed into Monday by a monsoon that turned the Usk Valley into the Mekong Delta, the Americans needed a Boston-size rally to climb out of the quagmire they found themselves in after being very nearly shut out in the third session of foursomes and four-balls. Trailing 9.5–6.5, the United States rallied in the singles, pressing the issue all the way to the final match, the first time the fate of the cup had come down to the final twosome since Kiawah Island nineteen years before. The same man who took America’s national championship home from Pebble Beach took their golden trophy, too, when U.S. Open champion Graeme McDowell coaxed in a downhill fifteen-footer on the sixteenth hole to go two up on Hunter Mahan and then closed him out on the seventeenth to reclaim the Ryder Cup, 14.5–13.5. Following his U.S. Open triumph, McDowell expressed his desire to find a proper pub to celebrate. He was taken to Brophy’s Tavern in Carmel, a known caddie hangout. His autograph from that night is still under Plexiglass on the wall. He added a pelt in Wales.
No one strides with as much purpose as Montgomerie when he’s stalking the Ryder Cup. There’s a harrumph in every step, as though someone had run Seve through the Ministry of Silly Walks. Yet the brilliance of the man in the event, as a player and, then, a captain, went undisputed, even by him. “There was method in everything I’ve done here, from the moment I’ve been selected as Ryder Cup Captain. There’s been method in what I’ve been doing here, all right,” he said confidently before the rain-delayed singles when the United States nearly snatched his method away.
Having now lost in upstate New York, Spain, England, Detroit, Ireland, and Wales in the previous seventeen years, winning convincingly in Kentucky and fortuitously in Boston, the Americans were set on reclaiming the Ryder Cup they’d left on the soggy fields of Wales at the Medinah CC outside Chicago. In discussing America’s first golf boom and its country clubs, Herb Wind wrote:
The clubhouse, of course, was the assistant that became the star of the show. Starting as Stanford White’s modest lounge and locker-room at Shinnecock, the clubhouse had now become the center of the social life of America’s middle-middle, upper-middle, and upper classes. At the clubhouse you lived with the people you wanted to associate with, played your bridge, drank your gin-and-tonic, ate your guinea hen, danced your foxtrot, traded your tips on stocks, and gave your daughter away in marriage. . . . In Chicago, a thousand Shriners, building the Medinah Country Club at a cost of $1,500,000, planned to have the whole works, plus toboggan slides and ski runs.
With the possible exception of Royal Birkdale’s sprawling white edifice that resembles a supersized Tastee Freez, the Shriners produced a clubhouse of such singular character that it ranks as the most eccentric in all of championship golf. This Baghdad on the Lake, designed by Richard Schmid, is sixty thousand square feet of redbrick, spires, arches, minarets, and a sixty-foot-high rotunda fit for a faux sultan of the most incomprehensible taste. So it was that after two PGA Championships and three U.S. Opens, the world of golf was, at long last, able to figure out a suitable use for the byzantine structure. It made a perfect mausoleum for the hopes of the 2012 U.S. Ryder Cup team that was bagged, stuffed, and mounted by captain José Maria Olazábal’s European squad, 14.5–13.5, in the most breathtaking bushwhacking in the history of hugs and high fives.
Thirteen years earlier it had been Olazábal who stood stone-faced as a herd of fashion-don’t Yanks wearing their wretched sepia-toned shirts depicting team photos of Ryder Cuppers gone by bounded like mindless gazelles across the seventeenth green on their way to what was the previous greatest comeback in Ryder Cup history. This time instead of Francis Ouimet, it was the spirit of his late friend and partner Seve Ballesteros who guided Europe to a Boston Tea Party of its own, spraying magnums of champagne all over the northwest suburbs of Chicago. The European team rebounded from the very same 10–6 deficit the Americans faced in ’99 at The Country Club and won by the identical final score, only they did it in front of a U.S. crowd on American soil dressed in Seve’s trademark navy-on-navy with his silhouetted figure stitched on their sleeves. It happened, in some measure, because both sides remembered that it could but only one believed that it would, and in a place where there was no enchanted green for Olazábal to drop to his knees to kiss. He would have to kiss the sky.
All those years ago Ben Crenshaw wagged his finger and said he believed in fate, but so did Ollie, and he had one important bit of flesh going for him, too, Ian Poulter. On Saturday morning, before the first foursome match went out, a skywriter spelled out “Do It for Seve—Go Europe” in white dashes against a crisp, blue autumn sky. The United States believed it had a thirteenth man in the crowd. Europe’s was watching from another place altogether. Halfway through the day’s afternoon four-balls, the United States had built a commanding 10–4 lead. It couldn’t have looked much worse for the visitors. First, Chicago resident Luke Donald and Sergio Garcia managed to hold off the rally of Tiger Woods to gain a point for Europe. Then, as Rory McIlroy looked on in grinning wonderment, Poulter made five straight birdies, finishing in the dark on the eighteenth with his double fist pump and his singular facial contortions that made him look like Cujo was inhabiting the body of a spiky-haired shih tzu. From that moment on it was as if the entire European side was possessed.
When the Euros fell behind 5–3 on Friday, Olazábal tore into them in their team room. After Poulter’s heroics Saturday, it was unnecessary. “I said last night if we had lost any of those two matches, today would have been mission impossible but thanks to what Poulter did, well, the trophy goes back to Europe,” said Olazábal, as he stood in the middle of the celebrating throng on the eighteenth green after Europe had won eight and a half of the twelve singles to retain the cup they’d brought with them from Wales and, frankly, thought for the longest time they’d lost. “When we got together last night I made it clear to the players we still had a chance. That the most important thing was believing in it.”
But overcoming the largest lead America has held going into the Sunday singles in more than thirty years was a big ask, particularly on U.S. turf, and especially if they’d had to do it without the number-one player in the world. In what was certainly the first time in Ryder Cup history the United States ever got its ass handed to it by police escort, McIlroy very nearly missed his tee time when he confused eastern for central and pulled up to the Medinah clubhouse at 11:14 a.m. for an 11:25 match in the front seat of a state police car with a trooper as his chauffeur. “At least I wasn’t in the back,” said McIlroy. “He said, ‘Have you got motion sickness?’ I said, ‘I don’t care if I’m sick just get me to that tee.’ It’s my own fault, but if I let down these 11 other boys and vice-captains and captains this week I would never forgive myself.” McIlroy had been slated to play Keegan Bradley, who had been the American counterbalance to the pop-eyed Poulter with his own screaming fist pumps. When it became clear McIlroy was running perilously late, Bradley informed the officials that if the number-one player in the world should miss his tee time, it wouldn’t matter. Their match would simply go off when he arrived. No harm, no foul—and certainly no penalty.
It was no secret the Europeans would have to go out fast on Sunday, but lights and sirens? Really? Just as Crenshaw had done when he was in the same hole, Olazábal put his best out early. Unlike James, U.S. captain Davis Love III thought he had countered with his hottest players, too, only the heat they’d generated in the first two days flickered and died in the singles. The Euros delivered the first five points, twice winning the seventeenth and eighteenth holes. Luke Donald beat Bubba Watson convincingly; Poulter won the last two holes to beat Webb Simpson; without so much as a good-morning waggle, McIlroy played his best golf of the week, making six birdies to take out Bradley; Paul Lawrie, in his first Ryder Cup since Brookline, trounced Brandt Snedeker; and Justin Rose birdied the seventeenth and eighteenth holes to cut the legs out from under Phil Mickelson.
“The last two holes were as good putts as I’ve ever holed in my life,” said Rose. “Seventeen was just a beautiful moment but 18 was a real clutch putt. That’s where I was shaking. I said to myself, ‘Rosie, this is the moment. Win, lose or draw your Ryder Cup comes down to this putt.’” Rose, an Englishman born in South Africa, would win the 2013 U.S. Open at Merion GC, playing his approach on the eighteenth hole from very nearly the exact spot Ben Hogan had played his famous iron shot in his 1950 comeback. Hogan’s finish, framed by the gallery on each side of the fairway, was captured in Hy Peskin’s well-known Life magazine photo. While it’s usually written that Hogan played a one-iron, others maintain it was a two-iron. Golf writer Charles Price was on the ground right beside Peskin and always insisted it was a two-iron, as did another writer, Dan Jenkins, who was even closer to Hogan personally. “I only know what Ben told me,” Jenkins would say. When Rose won at Merion, he pointed to the sky, a gesture to his father who had passed away. The sky in Chicago had already been filled with Seve’s blue.
Mickelson and Bradley, who was the emotional spark for the Americans all week, had been 3-0 in foursomes and four-ball, and U.S. captain Davis Love III sat them out Saturday afternoon—at Mickelson’s insistence—to be fresh for Sunday. The theory was, why risk two points to chase one? As it turned out the United States had taken a pass on winning the point that could have put the Ryder Cup out of Europe’s reach only to come up empty in the singles. Live by the plan, die by the plan. It was second-guessed as much as Mark James’s strategy of sitting three in Boston.
Dustin Johnson, who was best known for his long drives and his missed opportunities in a PGA at Whistling Straits and U.S. Opens at Pebble Beach and, later, Chambers Bay; Zach Johnson, who had won the 2007 Masters with a magnificent wedge game into Augusta National’s par fives; and Jason Dufner, who won the 2013 PGA Championship at Oak Hill with an equally impressive iron game, kept American hopes alive at Medinah. Lee Westwood had been in poor form all week, but he beat Matt Kuchar to nudge the Euros closer. That meant the golden trophy would rest in the hands of two of Love’s captain’s picks—forty-two-year-old Jim Furyk and forty-five-year-old Steve Stricker—and Tiger Woods, who was the U.S. team’s anchorman just as Montgomerie had been in Boston. Furyk became the third American of the day to lose the seventeenth and eighteenth holes, both with bogey, and fell to Garcia. Stricker went one down to Martin Kaymer when he, too, bogeyed the seventeenth. Kaymer’s par on the eighteenth secured at least a tie, which meant Europe would retain the cup. And, yes, as he stood over the eight-footer, he thought about his German countryman Bernhard Langer and his miss at the Ocean Course at Kiawah Island in ’91. “I sat down with Bernhard and talked to him a little bit about the Ryder Cup because my attitude wasn’t the right one,” said Kaymer of their Saturday-morning meeting. “But now, after that match today against Steve, I know how important the Ryder Cup became and is.” Kaymer had won that PGA Championship at Whistling Straits when Dustin Johnson grounded his club in a hazard—every grain of sand on the course beside Lake Michigan was defined that way. He had been going through a swing change for much of 2012, and had he not made the team on points, his form was so poor he said he wouldn’t even have picked himself, let alone expected Olazábal to do it. Kaymer’s swing adjustments, developing a dependable right-to-left shot along with his usual left-to-right ball flight, propelled him to a dominating performance in the U.S. Open at Pinehurst No. 2 two years later.
After Kaymer made the cup-clinching putt, bedlam ensued on the eighteenth green. Woods lost the last hole to Francesco Molinari, adding an otherwise meaningless half point to Europe’s total. “It was already over,” said Woods. “This is a team event and the cup was already retained by Europe, so it was over.” The prize is the cup, not a 14–14 tie. As the victorious European team draped themselves in flags on the eighteenth, Love shook McIlroy’s hand. “Glad you could make it on time,” the U.S. captain said with a smile before talking about his team’s loss. “I don’t have a reaction yet, we’re all kind of stunned. We know what it feels like now from the ’99 Ryder Cup. It’s a little bit shocking.”
Stricker was 0-4-0 on the week and the only U.S. player who was completely shut out, though Woods came close with just a half. Furyk’s disappointment cut far deeper. He’d been tied for the lead at the Olympic Club in San Francisco with a good chance to win a second U.S. Open when he snap-hooked a three-wood off the sixteenth tee, failed to birdie the par-five seventeenth, and staggered home on the last. “I’ll be honest,” said Furyk. “It’s been a very difficult year.”
The singles may be the decider, in the words of Bush 43, who was in the Chicago gallery along with Bush 41, but the four-balls and foursomes are just over 57 percent of the points and about 80 percent of the spirit of any Ryder Cup. It’s where most of the hugging, knuckling, fist pumping, chest bumping, and backside slapping goes on. Mickelson could be excused for giving Bradley a friendly swat on the behind in the first day’s afternoon four-ball because, after all, he owns part of a baseball team in San Diego, or a Padre or two anyway. For two days in Chicago they were the majority owners of the Euros.
Bradley was the valedictorian of the 2012 class of the University of Phil, a traveling series of seminars involving practice rounds and enough cash to pay off student loans, all done just to get ready for weeks like the Ryder Cup. At twenty-six and a PGA champion, Bradley approached his golf ball with the kind of decision-making resolve of a squirrel crossing a busy street. His cha-chas behind the ball before stepping in to hit it were only the beginning. When he lined up his putts with his long belly putter, he cocked his head as if preparing to cut the eight-ball into the side pocket. Four years previously at America’s last victory at Valhalla, Mickelson drew energy from another rookie, Anthony Kim, but comparing that to Bradley’s ardor was like saying a AAA battery puts out the same wattage as Vermont Power and Light. Bradley was the American who could go fist pump to fist pump with Poulter. After winning their last foursomes match Saturday morning by a record-tying 7 and 6, and taking into account Phil’s advancing years and Keegan’s rampaging adrenal glands, Love parked his two-seater Ferrari in the garage for the afternoon.
While the dream team formerly known as Stricker and Woods was going 0-3 on Friday and Saturday—even if there were mitigating circumstances, that is, the stunning play of long-hitting Nicolas Colsaerts—it was the American rookies who largely staked the United States to its 10–6 lead heading into the Sunday singles. Bradley accounted for three points, Jason Dufner and Webb Simpson two apiece, and Brandt Snedeker one. Bubba Watson, the Masters champion, and his rookie partner, Simpson, were a pairing forged the previous year in the Presidents Cup. They lit up both their four-ball matches, making nineteen birdies and winning each 5 and 4. Snedeker, fresh from winning eleven million dollars and pocket change in the FedEx Cup, was the only first-timer not to get a point on Bring a Rookie to Medinah Day. He and Furyk got three down to the Northern Irish twosome of McDowell and McIlroy but managed to pull even before Snedeker’s drive sailed wide right on the eighteenth, leading to the loss of a full point. They came back in day-two foursomes to beat the Irish one up. In essence, they had played Europe’s most celebrated team over two days and thirty-six holes and gotten a push out of it.
Meanwhile, Olazábal was relying on the considerable heroics of two individuals, Colsaerts and Poulter. With Westwood holding his cape, the Muscles from Brussels made a once-in-a-generation Ryder Cup debut, with eight birdies and an eagle to beat Stricker and Woods all by himself in four-ball, one up. Though Colsaerts may have made every putt he looked at Friday, he hit more rims than a Belgian cyclist on Saturday and was shut out. Before Poulter gave his teammates the breath of life, it seemed as though the most important stroke of the day was going to be the long putt Dustin Johnson made for birdie at the seventeenth followed by his par at the eighteenth that gained the United States a full point, putting them up 10–4. But that was the last time anything good happened to America on Medinah’s seventeenth.
“Yeah, we carried Seve on the arm for Sunday for a reason,” said Poulter.
In the European team room there was a picture from another Ryder Cup of Olazábal leaping up behind his partner, Ballesteros, his hands on his shoulders, trying to get a glimpse of something in the distance. Turned out, it wasn’t a flag he was looking for but Medinah. In the scrum on the eighteenth green someone asked Ollie what it all meant to him. He couldn’t get through the answer. “It means everything,” he said, turning away. “For him and for me, yes, everything.”
Olazábal and Ballesteros had been the greatest partnership the Ryder Cup had ever known. In Chicago Jake and Elwood are the only pair that could ever give them a run, with or without a police escort. There were those who criticized Olazábal for not prevailing on Molinari to pick up Woods’s coin, à la Stewart at The Country Club, declare it a tie, and walk off into the sunset. But the man who had stood on the seventeenth green thirteen years before in Boston, icily watching the Americans celebrate while he still had a putt to tie, was never, ever, ever going to allow that.
Two years later at the Ryder Cup at Gleneagles, on the first shot off the first tee of the first match of the first day, Ivor Robson, the elfin-toned starter who has launched a thousand foozles in Open Championships, introduced Webb Simpson as Bubba Watson, and it was more or less downhill from there for sixty-five-year-old U.S. captain Tom Watson, who had been recruited by PGA of America president Ted Bishop specifically to resuscitate America’s lifeless Ryder Cup fortunes. Watson, after all, had captained the ’93 team that won at The Belfry. Success didn’t strike twice. With the European victory of 16.5–11.5 in the Scottish midlands, the United States had struck out in eight of its last ten at bats, relegating America to a golfing status of all field, no hit.
All along Watson maintained he was going to opt for the hot hand, but when push came to shove he sat rookies Jordan Spieth and Patrick Reed, who had won their match in the opening four-ball, 5 and 4. One thing Watson wasn’t going to do was go with the cool ones, something he proved by benching ten-time Ryder Cupper Mickelson and his chosen partner, Bradley, all day Saturday. It led to a very public revolt at the U.S. team’s media postmortem.
When Tony Jacklin first agreed to be Europe’s captain, his initial act was to go see Seve Ballesteros, who’d been left off the 1981 team in a dispute over appearance money. “I knew I couldn’t do it without him, so we met. He felt slighted and hurt by what had happened, and boy was he angry,” Jacklin said. “I said, ‘I can’t do it without you and it’s as simple as that—as far as I’m concerned you’re the best player in the world.’ He agreed to come on board and, by God, did he help.” Thus was formed one of the greatest partnerships in the history of the matches and its most enduring rivalry: Seve versus All Things American.
Jacklin had gotten the buy-in of the man who would be the heart and soul of his team just as Paul Azinger had gotten it at Valhalla. You can believe in pods or not, but once you’ve lost your team, you’ve lost the Ryder Cup. Tom Watson was a great champion, a word Seve wouldn’t have used lightly. But Watson’s solution to America’s Ryder Cup weakness was to just be tougher. It’s the well he drew from after he’d lost a pair of U.S. Opens, simply deciding he would never let it happen again. It turned out his mettle didn’t split twelve ways.
For better or worse, Phil Mickelson has frequently found the bully pulpit of a microphone to be his chosen avenue to advance what he thinks ought to be done, from taxes in California to cell phone cameras in Ohio. Mere moments after Europe’s victory, Mickelson delivered his indictment of Watson. “No, nobody here was in any decision,” he said.
Paul McGinley, the European captain, gave the world’s best player, Rory McIlroy, his comfort food when he paired him with Garcia. Then he gave him the job of pulling up an out-of-form Poulter because McGinley knew he’d need the Englishman’s passion in the singles. Finally, he put McIlroy out third on Sunday, essentially saying to him, if it all begins to go wrong, you’re the firewall. You’re the number-one player in the world. Your job is to put blue on the board. Full stop. Any potential U.S. rally doesn’t get by you. McIlroy, who had become so much more comfortable with his place atop the game than he had been just two years before, took all of it on and then ruthlessly took out his good friend Rickie Fowler in singles, 5 and 4. To whom could Watson turn? If the groundwork goes undone, no one is going to answer that text.
After yet another loss, where could the United States turn? The Americans reached back, too, all the way back to Medinah to give Davis Love III a curtain call in the hopes that, the second time around, it will be written for him at Hazeltine the way it was under a rainbow at Winged Foot, on a green in Boston, or in the sky over Chicago.