Ryder Redux

Just when you thought it safe to go back into the water...Don't blame me, it's Wally's fault, as I'll explain...

Friend, golf buddy and loyal Unplayable Lies reader Warren ("Wally" or "The Great Walloon") writes to suggest this Alan Shipnuck article about the messy coda to the Ryder Cup.  Since Wally is the only man on the planet that watches more golf than your humble blogger I did so, notwithstanding that I had already blogged the piece in this post.  We'll come back to this later, but it included these two little previously-excerpted tidbits:

Mickelson vented his frustration on Sunday night in a team press conference that was

exquisite in its awkwardness. “Nobody here was in any decision,” Mickelson said of his teammates. In a text message to me later that night, one U.S. team member amplified the thought, saying of Watson, “Although he’s rarely right, he’s never in doubt!”

This pass-the-buck reflex has become endemic on the U.S. side, and it was Watson’s continued blaming of the players that helped push Mickelson over the edge. He was not alone in being miffed with his captain. A veteran of multiple U.S. teams told me in the aftermath, “A lot of s--- went on behind the scenes that people don’t know about. It will all leak out eventually. People talk about Hal Sutton and Lanny Wadkins, but Watson is going to be remembered as 10 times worse.”

Well, now we know thanks to Bob Harig at ESPN.  Want the worst of it? Of course you do:

Despite the 10-6 deficit, the U.S. team was fairly upbeat Saturday evening looking ahead to the Sunday singles, the pairings for which had just been announced. Fresh in the players' minds was the fact that Europe had come back from the same margin two years earlier at Medinah. And two players in the room, Mickelson and Jim Furyk, were on the 1999 U.S. team that also came back from that score on the final day at The Country Club in Brookline. 

They gathered in the team room that night -- a hotel ballroom at the lavish Gleneagles Hotel with TVs, ping-pong tables, food and drink. They were joined by their wives or girlfriends (except for Fowler), as well as their caddies and their significant others. Some of the hotel staff were in the room, as were a few members of the PGA of America staff. In all, more than 40 people were there when Watson returned to the team room after speaking to the media about the Sunday pairings. 

Watson started by saying, according to all of the sources: "You stink at foursomes.''

OK, that might have actually worked if he said it with a smile and if he had added the good news that they weren't going to play any more foursomes... But Tom doesn't often go for the laughs, does he?

After praising the rookie team of Patrick Reed and Jordan Spieth, Watson went through the Sunday singles pairings and ridiculed several members of the European side as he went through the matchups. Soon after, Watson was presented a gift by Furyk, a replica of the Ryder Cup trophy that was signed by every member of the team. Instead of thanking them, the sources said Watson said the gift meant nothing to him if the players didn't get the real Ryder Cup on Sunday and that he wanted to be holding it aloft on the green in victory. 

Said one of the sources: "That's almost verbatim. He said it basically means nothing to me.'' 

Added another: "It was fairly shocking that he treated this thoughtful gift with such disdain.''

I do hope we ultimately find out which Euro players he was trashing, as that's rather hard to understand.   

As we circle back to the Shipnuck piece, I'll remind the reader that my criticism of Phil has never been a defense of Watson's captaincy.  I suspected from the get-go that he would prove to be a poor fit with the modern player both by temperament and the circumstances of his selection, i.e., being hired less as coach and more as savior.  So I quite agree with this from Shipnuck:

\Watson made little effort to get to know his charges or do any team building beyond a few get-off-my-lawn speeches. He was a remote and disengaged figure in the run-up to

the Cup, and once the competition began, he had little understanding of how his players were feeling, physically or emotionally. (It didn’t help that two of his vice captains -- Ray Floyd, 72, and Andy North, 64 -- are decades removed from playing the Tour and the third, Steve Stricker, 47, is now a part-timer.)

I remain convinced that it was the wrong time and the wrong messenger.  If you doubt the former, check out the reaction shots of Hunter Mahan, who had the misfortune to sit next to Phil at the presser.  If you quibble with the latter, check out Phil's Ryder Cup record.  Phil has been on every one of these losing teams and hasn't distinguished with his play.

Now the message is a far more subjective issue, though I've no problem with Phil making his case in a different forum.  And to state the obvious, I obviously understand Phil's frustration, I don't expect or want him to be happy about being held out of a full day's play and I think it's better for the Captain to communicate better to and perhaps be more solicitous of the players, who after all are donating their time whilst others re making a pretty penny off their toils.

But how do you react to this from Shipnuck?

Over the last 20 years the talent on both sides of the Atlantic has been more or less even. That the U.S. keeps losing is due to problems that are structural and cultural, which Watson’s disastrous captaincy highlighted. The PGA of America has long had a rigid template for its captain: a major championship winner in his late 40s. He is selected by the PGA’s president, vice president and secretary. These are ever-changing outsiders who have no real knowledge of the inner workings of the Ryder Cup. Outgoing PGA president Ted Bishop, 60, is a self-styled maverick who wanted to defy convention during his two-year tenure, and it’s revealing that he conjured in Watson a man who is as out-of-touch with the modern Tour pro as Bishop is.

Remember, Shipnuck also wanted to use the President's Cup as on-the-job-training for Ryder Cup captains, ignoring that the Tour has no interest in the latter event (about which they remain miffed).  And the Euros have used largely the same template for picking captains, as it's hard to see where Monty, Faldo and Olazabal differ all that much from Pavin, Love and Azinger.  Monty was a horrible captain who made several huge mistakes, but somehjow his players were still able to take the club back.  Go figure...  And there was no one that thought Davis Love was a bad captain, before Sunday that is...

 So, what's the silver bullet?  This is where it all gets a little vague...

So who will be the next Yank on the hot seat? Mickelson and Furyk, both 44, are certain to be captains in the future, but in the short term they want to focus on competing. (Tiger Woods, 38, is a natural to follow them and could be a game-changing presence if he embraces the role. Big if.) Stricker is well-positioned for 2016 but may be too soft for the job; he expressed no desire to play in this Ryder Cup, so why would he want to captain the next one?

Anyone inspired by those choices?  I especially love the thought of Tiger as captain, though we have a decade before we have to deal with that issue.  And this is Shipnuck's close:

As messy as this Ryder Cup was, on and off the course, the silver lining for the U.S. is that it has created a mandate for change. Azinger believes victory is readily attainable. “It’s a razor-thin difference between winning and losing,” he says. “We’re not miles away.” But with a rueful chuckle, he added this coda: “If you play perfect blackjack, the house has only a 1% advantage. But in Vegas they build great big casinos on that 1%. Right now Europe is the casino and America is the guy sliding up to the table with a fistful of 50s.”

Anyone know what his point is there?  I agree that the margin is razor thin, especially since each match is in and of itself virtually a coin-flip, and there's no reason to be pessimistic about 2016.  But the casino analogy seems merely gratuitous filler.

But try this on for size.  Maybe our guys need to stop blaming their captains, rainsuits, pairings, or you fill in the blank and, you know, play better.