ALL THE PRESIDENTS MEN
NO SHOWDOWN THIS TIME Absence of Els, new rules mean no repeat of ’ 03
Two years later, the truth spills out at the end of a half-hour interview session with members of the United States golf team.
Two years after captains Jack Nicklaus and Gary Player opened their not-so-secret envelopes and drew out the names of Tiger Woods and Ernie Els to play a sudden-death singles match that included a race against the South African sunset — with the 2003 Presidents Cup matches riding on the outcome — we learn why Tiger Woods was so darned happy to have it all end in a tie.
“ The reason I didn’t want to have to go into that playoff is that I had already beaten Ernie earlier,” Woods said yesterday. Had whipped the International Team’s unquestioned leader 4and-3, as a matter of fact, in their Sunday singles match.
“So I’ve already beaten the top player on their team, in his home country, won us a point, and now, if I go out and lose one hole, no one’s ever going to remember that I beat Ernie Els and got a point — I just lost the entire Presidents Cup.
“So it was a little nerve-wracking out there. Thanks, Davis,” said Woods, directing an evil grin at Davis Love III.
“Finally, somebody said it,” grinned Love, whose fluffed chipshot on the 18th hole of the final singles match, which he ought to have won but instead halved with Aussie Robert Allenby, created the 17- 17 draw and triggered the Presidents Cup’s unique tiebreaking mechanism.
Thirty-four matches involving 24 players over four days had failed to settle it, and now Woods and Els had to go back out, as the sun was rapidly sinking under the horizon, and go one-on-one.
Great theatre, impossible pressure, brilliant play.
Some say the Presidents Cup came of age that day, or rather that night, when Nicklaus and Player humanely agreed to call it a draw after Woods and Els somehow sank putt after excruciating putt in the dark — willing the ball into the hole when they could barely see it.
Others are not so sure, and never will be convinced, that a declared tie can be construed as a landmark event.
Anyway, you’d have a hard time arguing the PGA Tour’s answer to the Ryder Cup has truly attained a different stature since the 2003 edition at the Fancourt Links. Judging by the sparse crowds Tuesday at the Robert Trent Jones Golf Club in Lake Manassas, Va. — and the lack of buzz locally — it appears that not even Washington, D. C., where the biennial competition is being held for the fourth time in its 12year history, is dying to see the unfinished business finished.
But the news, good or bad, about the sixth Presidents Cup is that there will be no mano-amano decider this time. There wouldn’t have been one last time, if Player and Nicklaus had actually read the captains’ agreement in advance, and talked it over.
“We probably would have said we don’t really think that’s how a team event should end up,” Nicklaus said yesterday. “But that’s what the rules were, so Gary had Ernie in the envelope and I had Tiger in the envelope and they played three holes ... and when Tiger had about, I don’t know, a 15-foot putt and Ernie had an eight-footer and both of them made them, it was the biggest relief because now it was dark.”
“ Jack’s team was up and looked like they were going to win, and then they lose a hole that it looked like they were going to win, and Davis Love duffs the chip on 18 ... I mean, how was this possible?”
Well, it’s not possible any more. A tie this time will be just a tie.
And Els, who tore his knee ligaments when he fell off an inner tube being towed by a boat while holidaying with his family in August, won’t be here, in any case. So all the possible elements of a 2003 replay are out the window. And with the Presidents Cup being so absolutely religious about camaraderie and sportsmanship and all those good things, one wonders how it is ever going to attain the Ryder Cup-like stature it craves.
Nicklaus is surely correct when he says “the potential of the Presidents Cup is to be greater than the Ryder Cup, simply because the scope is larger. I think there are more good players on the International Team, as it relates to world rankings, than on the European Ryder Cup side.”
Player is arguably correct when he says “you will never have another event [like 2003], in my opinion — and I’ve thought a lot about Jack saying that it was the most significant event that he has participated in, in his life, and that it was something ‘ way beyond golf.’ ”
Getting it to the next level, though, to the sort of can’t-wait anticipation the Ryder Cup creates, is no small job.
“ As an event, it’s just not as evolved as the Ryder Cup,” said Aussie Stuart Appleby. “Its evolution and growth process is still going along. I think the Ryder Cup has levelled out. We’ve got a lot of growing to do, but 50 years from now we’ll be very much the same in a historical sense as the Ryder Cup has been to the Europeans and Americans.”
At least, it appears, the U. S. players are now on side; the International Team has been from the start.
“In ’ 98 when I captained at Royal Melbourne, the guys told me afterwards, ‘ You know, we were there but we didn’t really want to be there,’ ” said Nicklaus. “I think all the guys wanted to be there in 2003, and it’s been even more so this year — guys coming to me all year long and saying, ‘ Boy, I want to make the team.’ ”
Of course, it’s a home game for the Yanks, who aren’t keen on inconvenience.
But with a seemingly unanimous desire not to see the competition “degenerate” into the war-like atmosphere that surrounds the Ryder Cup, something else is going to have to happen to make the Presidents Cup matter in the U.S.
“I think when we started losing and getting our faces rubbed in it for two years, it started getting a lot more intense,” said Love, who’s been a staple of American golf teams most of his career.
It might be as simple as that. Another U. S. rout on home turf — they have a 58-38 margin in previous matches played at RTJ — won’t even raise an eyebrow. A good, cleansing loss, however, might get everyone’s attention.
Fifty years, Stu, is a long time to wait.
CanWest News Service