The past dogs U.S. at the Ryder Cup
PHIL MICKELSON GIVES PEP TALK TO BREAK LOSING STREAK
In the beginning, there was Phil Mickelson.
Well, maybe not the very beginning. But the Genesis 1: 1 of the great PGA of America task force on how to build a better Ryder Cup team was Mickelson tearing into Tom Watson’s “my way or the highway” captaincy of the U. S. team in its 16½-11½ loss to the Europeans in 2014 at Gleneagles in Scotland.
Everything that has followed has had Mickelson’s fingerprints all over it. He wanted a collaborative process in shaping the team? The task force came up with a formula absolutely bursting with inclusiveness.
Players past and present, past captains and vice- captains, PGA of America officials, caddies — all voices were heard.
“We’re just looking to the future now and not looking at the past,” this year’s captain, Davis Love III, said Tuesday.
But the past isn’t quite ready to let go yet, Davis.
Mickelson, the 46- year- old whose brilliant if erratic golf game has qualified him for his 11th- straight Ryder Cup team, wanted to get a thing or two off his chest Wednesday — and a question about how big an influence a captain can have on a team’s fortunes gave him the opening. He wasn’t about to waste it. “It all starts with the captain,” he said. “You’re saying, ‘ Well, guys just need to play better or they just need to putt better.’ Absolutely you do. But you play how you prepare. Now, I see these looks, like ‘ What are you talking about?’ Let me give you an example, if I may,” he said, to much laughter in the room.
(Note to readers: Pack a lunch, he had a long story to tell.)
“Twelve years ago, OK, in 2004, Tiger and I were paired together and we ended up not playing well,” he said. “We were told two days before that we were playing together. And that gave us no time to work together and prepare. He plays a very high- spin ball and I play a very low- spin ball, and we had to come up in two days with a solution.
“So I grabbed a couple dozen of his balls, I went off to the side and tried to learn his golf ball in a four- or five- hour session on kind of an isolated — one of the other holes out there — trying to find out how far the ball goes. And it forced me to stop my preparation for the tournament, to stop chipping and putting and sharpening my game and learning the golf course, in an effort to crash course and learn a whole different golf ball that we were going to be playing.
“Had we known a month in advance, we might have been able to make it work. But that’s an example of starting with the captain (Hal Sutton), that put us in a position to fail, and we failed monumentally, absolutely.
“I’ve had to be accountable for that decision 12 years ago, which I was not part of. Even a month ago, I hear there’s an analyst on the Golf Channel that accuses me of being a non- team player for having to go out and work on an isolated hole away from the team, away from my preparation.
“I don’t know if you can imagine how frustrating it would be to care about something as much as I do about the Ryder Cup and be accountable for many of the decisions that have taken place when you’re not a part of those decisions.”
It seems such a small thing: which golf ball to play. But Mick- elson said it’s symptomatic of what’s happened on American teams that have lost eight of the last 10 Ryder Cups and three in a row coming into this one at Hazeltine National, though he didn’t say which captains he thought did a good job and which were lousy.
The task force, oddly enough, did not choose the last winning U.S. captain, 2008’s Paul Azinger, to lead the way, but Love, even though he headed the 2012 team that went down in flames in the Sunday singles at Medinah four years ago.
But Love is the very picture of inclusion.
Injury rehab kept Tiger Woods from qualifying? Love made him a vice- captain. By all accounts, he and Mickelson were regaling the youngsters in the team room telling rueful stories of their disastrous pairing at Oakland Hills.
World No. 7 Bubba Watson not putting well enough to persuade Love to make him his final captain’s pick, because the agreedupon “Billy Horschel rule” meant picking the hottest available American, Tour Championship runner-up Ryan Moore?
Well then, let Bubba be a vicecaptain, too, making five of them in all. Why not? Everyone is welcome in America’s Collaboration Station.
Mickelson believes it is how Europe has succeeded so often over the past two decades, and that it gives Team USA a “platform to build on going forward.”
Sounds good. It might even work and if it does, all credit to Phil Mickelson, who surely will be Team USA’s captain the minute he can no longer qualify as a player.
But if it doesn’t, you wonder where the next knee- jerk will take our American cousins. As much fun as that might be to watch, it’s probably time for them to end the melodrama and just win the darned thing.