Westwood and Poulter on this week’s titanic tussle
Lee Westwood on the challenge facing captain Clarke, his ‘borderline OCD’ mate
LEE WESTWOOD is sitting on a balcony at Close House Golf Club, staring out over the rolling Northumbria hills and valleys and thinking back almost 20 years to the first time he ever played in the Ryder Cup. He was 24 then. The stellar career ahead of him was just a dream. He starts to smile as the memories from Valderrama in 1997 flood over him again.
Westwood is good company. He always has been. He has got the confidence to say what he thinks and he has a dry, irreverent sense of humour honed by plenty of practice. He seems at ease, too.
He is still in the throes of a divorce and has moved back from Florida to live in Newcastle so he can be close to his children.
‘I am happy being back in Britain, around British people,’ he says. ‘I did miss it when I was away. I didn’t know it at the time but having moved back, yeah I did miss it.’
He laughs at one episode from Valderrama. There were a few minutes left before he and Nick Faldo were due to go to the first tee for the Friday morning fourball against Brad Faxon and Fred Couples that would mark Westwood’s debut in the competition. The European captain, Severiano Ballesteros, long one of Westwood’s idols, strode up to him.
‘I was on the putting green,’ says Westwood. ‘I was standing around and there were a few caddies there. And then Seve came up to me. “Lee”, he said: “How are you?”. I said: “I’m all right, Seve. I’m really looking forward to it”. “It can be very intimidating on the first tee, the noise from the crowd. I have a suggestion for you”.
‘And then he held his hand out, so I held mine out and he dropped a massive ball of cotton wool into my hand. “When you are on the first tee”, Seve said, “take some cotton wool and put it in your ears”.
‘I said: “Seve, I have practised for two years to try to get into this team. It has consumed my life trying to qualify for the Ryder Cup. I want to stand on that first tee and feel the nerves and hear the crowd”.
‘Then, one of the caddies, who had been listening to the conversation, grabbed the cotton wool out of my hand and ripped it in half and it was so big it was like having two napkins and he wedged them in his ears and he was running round the putting green going: “Bloody hell, this is brilliant, I can’t hear a thing”. Well, we were cracking up with laughter.
‘Seve stared at the carry-on. He muttered: “Son of a bitch”, and strode off. And then off we went to the first tee.’
And that was how it began, Westwood’s great Ryder Cup adventure. He and Faldo lost that first game against Faxon and Couples but won their next two. Now, Westwood is about to play in his 10th Ryder Cup and if he wins two-and-a-half points at Hazeltine in Minnesota this week, he will overtake Faldo as the most successful player in the competition’s history.
Westwood, 43, does not try to pretend it would not mean a lot to him if he were to do it. ‘You look at all the Ryder Cup players who have played and that would be incredible to be top of that list,’ he says. Maybe it will mean more to him because he is still searching for his first major victory and it is his record in the Ryder Cup that may define him.
‘Of course records mean something,’ he says. ‘If you gave me the option of getting one-and-a-half points and Europe winning the Ryder Cup or getting two-and-a-half points and Europe losing the Ryder Cup then I would take the one-and-ahalf points, because first and foremost we are trying to win the Ryder Cup, but obviously I want to get past Nick’s record.’
His relationship with Faldo is not simple. Faldo was one of his idols growing up in Nottinghamshire and he was supportive when they played together at Valderrama. Westwood watched Europe’s greatest golfer at close quarters for the first time and admired what he saw.
Westwood says those memories were not compromised by what happened when Faldo was Europe’s Ryder Cup captain at Valhalla in 2008. America won comfortably and Faldo attracted widespread criticism for his captaincy style, including telling Westwood midway through a morning match that he was leaving him out of the afternoon session.
‘It hasn’t compromised my memories,’ says Westwood, ‘but I was slightly perplexed and mystified by his preparation for Valhalla. He is so meticulous in his preparation for everything. That Ryder Cup just seemed a bit random. There were mistakes being made everywhere. It was completely un-Faldo like.
‘Bernhard Langer is known for being meticulous and knowing how far the yardage is from the back of the sprinkler, never mind the middle of the sprinkler, and his captain’s preparation in 2004 was very much the same. Faldo’s captaincy didn’t go with his character.
‘When you analyse it a bit more, he has been so individual and so singleminded all his career about his own game, maybe he couldn’t adapt to somebody trying to pull together 12 players and being a team man. It didn’t sit naturally with him.
‘With what happened with me, that’s the same thing. You have got to try to put yourself in another player’s head and picture what they are going through and imagine whatever you say to them, the reaction (they will have). You have got to judge different people and say the right things at the right times.’
Westwood attracted plenty of attention last week when he suggested the presence of Tiger Woods as a US vice-captain at Hazeltine might place added pressure on the American players. Things spiralled, as they tend to do in the build-up to the Ryder Cup, and he soon became involved in modest spats with former US captain Paul Azinger and some of the members at Hazeltine, who had trolled him on Twitter.
But Westwood remains forthright about some of the issues the picks of US captain Davis Love III may yet cause. ‘He has already skipped past Bubba Watson,’ says Westwood. ‘There are obviously fractious things in there, so you never know how it’s going to affect other players.
‘He has skipped past Bubba, who was ninth in the points list, and gone for 10, 11, 12. So that says to me 10, 11 and 12 are under more pressure because in the back of their minds he has gone past Bubba because he thinks they can do a better job.
‘If he goes for Bubba now with his final pick, Bubba’s going to walk
into the team room and think: “Why did I not get picked four weeks ago, why have I not been allowed the four weeks to prepare for this?” If he picks a rookie, then there’s added pressure on that.’
There is added pressure on Westwood, too. He admits that. Despite being runner-up at the US Masters this year, he fell just short in his attempt to qualify automatically and had to rely on European skipper Darren Clarke, a close friend, for a captain’s pick. Few queried the decision but Westwood knows that a wildcard always feels the heat.
‘Darren knows what I can bring to the team and to a rookie because he has partnered me himself,’ says Westwood. ‘Half his team is rookies so he has got to balance that up. I didn’t feel any more pressure knowing that Darren is the captain. And Darren is professional enough that if he didn’t think I deserved a place, he wouldn’t pick me.
‘I told him that. I said: “Don’t be afraid not to pick me”. As a pick, there is a lot of pressure with that because you feel like you have to justify that pick. Having had two picks before — from Woosie [Ian Woosnam] in 2006 and Paul McGinley in 2014 — I am used to that mindset.
‘Darren will have his own ideas about partnerships. He’s discussed it with me, who I’d like to play with, and there have been a couple of random ones that I wouldn’t have come up with straight away.
‘Darren’s very meticulous, borderline OCD. Everyone looks at him as this jolly, bubbly character with a cigar and a glass of wine but you don’t win as many tournaments as Darren has won by not being professional and ticking every box. He has been like that with his captaincy. It has taken over his life. He will want everything to be perfect.’
For now, Westwood’s greatness is defined by his Ryder Cup accomplishments and his spell at the top of the world rankings as golf’s No1 player. He knows he is in the autumn of his career now but he is still ambitious. He is content with his lot, too.
‘If you’re asking if I’d exchange any of my Ryder Cup points for a major win,’ he says, ‘I never really do swaps and compares and stuff like that. You get what you deserve. I have been pretty successful. I have been the best player in the world. If you show the bottle at the right time and do the right things at the right time, you get rewarded for it.
‘I’d love to win a major but you have got to do the right things at the right times. I have had a couple of opportunities where I feel like I should have won a major. Turnberry in 2009, really. I didn’t do the right thing over the last three or four holes. But I am pretty happy with my place in golfing history.
‘What drives me now? I like getting into contention and feeling that buzz of wanting a chance to win. I just play because I love golf.’