Histrionics on the golf green culminate in a rousing American victory.
Americans shouldn’t read too much into the resounding U.S. victory in golf’s Ryder Cup this past weekend. But for the short term at least, it is indeed a Bidenesque “big [bleeping] deal.”
Not just golf fans but most American sports fans know that for the better part of two decades in golf’s U.S.-vs.-Europe team matches, a certain politician’s lament that Americans “just don’t win any more” has been painfully, ignominiously true. Americans have lost at times by unprecedented, outlandishly large margins. We’ve lost excruciatingly when we enjoyed leads going into the final day. We’ve even lost on home turf when holding a seemingly insurmountable lead. We’ve lost when the Europeans holed a cornucopia of absurdly long putts; we’ve lost when Americans gagged and coughed and spluttered at the very moment it counted the most.
But not this year. This year, Europe curiously placed six Ryder Cup rookies onto their twelve-man team. This year, their canniest veteran (Lee Westwood) was the one painfully missing a handful of almost easily short putts. This year, it was the Americans sinking putt after putt after putt instead of watching their balls defy gravity by failing to fall into the cup.
Oh — and this year, Arnold Palmer’s spirit was hitching up his pants and taking charge like he did at Cherry Hills in 1960. If the Americans had lost the week after the death of the single most transformative figure in the history of the game — the man (somewhat uncomfortably) nicknamed “The King” — it would have proved forever more that there is no God, or at least no golf gods and that there really is no “golf in the kingdom.”
Throughout the week, there were eerie parallels to Arnie’s last direct Ryder Cup experience. Palmer had served as the American captain in 1975; his 1975 golf bag, name prominently stitched onto it, was ceremoniously placed beside the first tee as the competition began. The ’75 Euro team (or, rather, Great Britain and Ireland) also fielded six rookies. That team also was the last until this year to lose all four of the opening morning matches to the Americans. And that team also ended up tallying just eleven total points (then out of 32 possible, now of 28).
Yes, the end result was a shellacking. But the lopsided American win shouldn’t obscure the sometimes stupendously thrilling nature of much of the competition until the U.S. won a series of key holes just when it seemed as if another Euro comeback might be at hand. In particular, it’s almost certain that no single match in Ryder Cup history has ever seen the conglomeration of histrionics that marked Sunday’s opening face-off between Northern Ireland’s Rory McIlroy and brash young American Patrick Reed.
McIlroy — usually even-tempered — and the always-fiery Reed already had spent two full days as clearly the two best players on the course, and both of them woofed and goaded the spectators to turn an already raucous crowd into a frenzy. But when Reed sank a 20-footer just to tie the first hole with a par, letting out a primal roar upon doing so, the crowd sounded more like it was attending an Ultimate Fighting Championship than a golf contest.
McIlroy birdied the third hole to go one-up — and then, two holes later, the craziness began. Reed drove the par-four fifth green and sank his eagle putt to beat McIlroy’s birdie. McIlroy holed a ten-footer to birdie the sixth, but Reed sank a five-footer to match him (and then bowed to the crowd in an in-your-face mockery of a bow McIlroy had made when holing an eagle two days earlier). On the seventh, Reed birdied from 14 feet; so McIlroy rolled in a ten-footer of his own.
On the eighth hole, McIlroy left himself a hideous 45-footer, and somehow putted it dead center for his fourth straight birdie. The Irishman started leaping around the green, putting his hand to his ear to yell “I can’t hear you!” at the already roaring crowd, pumping his fists as if in a fit of raging and vengeful triumph. So what did Reed do? He calmly buried his own 20-footer right in the cup. Then he wagged his finger at McIlroy as the crowd went bonkers.
Just when the viewer thought that these guys hated each other, though, the two competitors gave each other a friendly fist bump, to show that each was actually enjoying the other’s performance.
By then, McIlroy had gone four-under par in a four-hole stretch — yet actually lost his advantage.
Finally running out of magic, the two played like mere mortals for the next seven holes (with Reed taking a one-hole lead via a par on the twelfth), but then Reed birdied 16 for a two-up lead — only to bogey 17 and give McIlroy one last chance at 18. Both were up to the task: Reed stuffed his approach shot at 18 to just six feet from the pin; McIlroy ludicrously matched it with a shot exactly one inch closer (but from a different angle). With the Irishman a seeming dead cinch to hole his own putt, Reed knocked his dead center for the closing, winning birdie.
Meanwhile, several groups behind them, the two most recognizable figures in the whole competition, American Phil Mickelson and Spaniard Sergio Garcia, were playing even better golf than McIlroy and Reed. Mickelson, long the face of American Ryder Cup futility, somehow scored ten — count them, ten — birdies on the storied Hazeltine layout on Sunday, hiccupping only once with a three-putt bogey on number eleven. But Garcia, if anything, swung his clubs even better and notched an astonishing nine birdies of his own, including the final four holes in a row. Even without a single bogey on his card, all his heroics accomplished was a halve (a tie) with the veteran American.
Still, many of the remaining matches were close, with Europe rarely trailing a match by more than a single hole. Americans had blown leads like this before.
That’s when unassuming Ryder rookie Ryan Moore stepped up for the coup de grâce.
Moore had been the final player selected for the squad, finding out only last Sunday night that he had been chosen. While a solid pro for a dozen years, with a quiet five victories to his credit, he was probably the least recognizable, and least imposing, player on the U.S. team.
Casual fans didn’t know what golf junkies long had recognized: Moore, on his game, is a stone-cold killer.
Casual fans didn’t know what golf junkies long had recognized: Moore, on his game, is a stone-cold killer. Back in college in 2004, he had produced one of the greatest years of any amateur in history, sweeping the Western Amateur, the U.S. Public Links title, the NCAA championship, and the U.S. Amateur all in a single annum.
Two holes down with three to play against England’s Westwood, Moore came alive with an eagle at 16 and a birdie at 17 to pull even — and then watched as Westwood hacked up the final hole to give Moore a one-up win. It was the win that clinched the Cup for the Americans, for only the third time in the last eleven tries.
Still, nobody should assume the 17 to eleven American triumph is a sign that the golf world finally has returned to American dominance. This was a Euro team in transition, and one burdened by some odd choices made by its captain, Darren Clarke.
Through the complex points system, some of Europe’s fiercest competitors didn’t qualify for the team, and Clarke didn’t use his captain’s picks to bring them aboard. Gone was Ryder Cup maniac Ian Poulter, who had won eight of his eleven matches. Not chosen was England’s Paul Casey, a veteran who had been playing quite well of late. Frenchman Victor Dubuisson, a match-play specialist and short-game wizard, also was missing. So were Italy’s Molinari brothers, Ireland’s fading Padraig Harrington (a three-time major winner), England’s Luke Donald (a winner of 23 tourneys worldwide), and Northern Ireland’s gritty Graeme McDowell — not to mention the fiercely competitive Clarke himself.
Thus, on paper, the Americans had entered the competition looking like the clearly stronger team. On paper, their win should have been no surprise.
But the Americans almost always look stronger on paper. For eight of the previous ten times, they had certainly not been stronger on the course itself.
#related#And that’s why this win meant so much, not only for American pride but for the Ryder Cup itself. Observers already sensed that the repeated losing was draining American fans’ interest from these biennial competitions. Had the United States lost yet again, the subsequent contests might have re-entered the realm from which the Cup emerged in the 1980s — merely a pleasant little sideshow, a curiosity dominated by one side while everybody pretended to be jolly old friends.
The high quality of play this week combined with the, well, indecorous (but hugely entertaining) behavior of Reed and McIlroy, culminating in American victory, will add new oomph and intrigue to the Cup.
Arnie wouldn’t want it any other way.