GEORGE KIMBALL/America At Large Jesper Parnevik was in a clubroom at the Belfry when Sam Torrance unveiled the line-ups for Sunday's Ryder Cup singles. I was six thousand miles away, in a hotel room in San Diego, at the same moment, but our reactions were almost identical.
"Wow," I whistled to myself. "This thing could be over before Tiger hits the back nine."
Once the mano-a-mano match-ups had been trotted out, Johnny Miller bravely handicapped the following day's races for the benefit of American television viewers. Miller conceded the Europeans the first four matches of the day but not much else. The way I saw it, the Americans would be very lucky to win two of the first eight.
As it turned out, we were both wrong up to a point, and it was left to Paul McGinley (designated a "sacrificial lamb" in one American newspaper) to hole the cup-clinching putt, but there can be little doubt the outcome was foreshadowed the moment the two captains submitted their order of play for Sunday.
Curtis Strange, noted Sports Illustrated wag Rick Reilly, "drew up the dumbest starting line-up since the 1962 Mets". Strange "blew it", Boston Herald columnist Karen Guregian was moved to note. "European captain Sam Torrance completely outfoxed his American counterpart," she wrote.
"By the time Davis Love III, Mickelson and Tiger Woods finally stepped up to the first tee, there was enough blue writing on the leader board to fill a pornographic library," noted Fran Blinebury in the Houston Post.
If Strange was everybody's favourite whipping boy in the wake of the embarrassing defeat, Phil Mickelson and Tiger Woods weren't far behind.
"Maybe it is simply Phil Mickelson's fate to always be the man tied to the mast in the stormiest of seas, the one who finds himself eternally ground up beneath the wheels of fate," wrote Blinebury. "The lefthander doesn't just drop the big ones. He lets them hit the floor with a loud clatter, a crash that reverberates like a tray of silverware in the one empty room in his résumé (sic).
"Mickelson is No 2 in the world golf rankings, but easily No 1 on anybody's list of major disappointments Paul McGinley might have clinched the Ryder Cup for the Euros, but Mickelson let it get away from the United States. When Strange said he was sending out his horses for the end of the race, who would have thought Mickelson would come out looking like Mr Ed on a light gallop to the glue factory?"
Even in conceding a halve in his by then meaningless match with Parnevik, Woods actually improved his overall Ryder Cup record to 5-8-1 - "not good enough for the world's best player," noted Boston Herald golf writer Joe Gordon.
Woods will continue to be raked over the coals for his ill-considered remarks in Ireland a week before the Ryder Cup. Everyone I've spoken to who was present when Woods said there were "a million reasons" why winning at Mount Juliet was more important than winning the Ryder Cup recognised His Tigership was speaking in jest, but still, he might better have apperceived that the words would come back to haunt him, particularly from those who didn't hear how he said it.
"Woods," wrote Sports Illustrated's Gary Van Sickle, who was at Mount Juliet, "reached for the weakest club in his bag - humor." Some not inconsiderable grumbling took place in the press box at San Diego's Qualcomm Stadium on Sunday afternoon, and one heard the words "choking dogs" at least a few times, but even Americans who unrepentantly gloated in the aftermath of Brookline three years ago managed to find admiration for both the gritty performance of the Europeans and for Torrance's shrewd job of out-manoeuvring Strange.
"The best team won the 34th Ryder Cup," Mark Cannizzaro wrote in Tuesday's New York Post, "because they played as a team."
The passions a Ryder Cup can engender are precisely what we've always found most endearing about the event, witness the exuberantly celebratory antics of Sergio Garcia, who may have been the only man in Birmingham happier than McGinley to see that last putt drop. Garcia had positioned himself to be the Ryder Cup goat had things not gone the Europeans' way, and with the weight of the world suddenly lifted from his shoulders, he could not restrain himself from racing down the 17th fairway and into the midst of a match still in progress.
If Sam Torrance made one single mistake last weekend it was not warning his players about becoming unhinged in such an eventuality. Granted, when Garcia interrupted Davis Love's game against Pierre Fulke the Ryder Cup had already been decided so the circumstances were considerably different from those which saw the Americans tramping en masse onto the 17th green at Brookline with Jose Maria Olazabal yet to putt.
So far as we could tell, Love was the only one disturbed by Garcia's antics, and when the American got "hot under the collar," as Joe Gordon described it, Fulke even offered to concede the match. (Justin Leonard might have forever cemented his reputation for sportsmanship with a similar gesture in 1999.)
"Sergio is Sergio. That's all I'm going to say about it," said Love afterward, leaving his caddie John Burke to make the observation that Garcia "doesn't lose with class, and he doesn't win with class." Love and Fulke eventually settled on a draw, which seemed fair enough under the circumstances, but the problem is this: those who three years after the fact still refuse to accept the American players did anything wrong on The Country Club's 17th green three years ago have now been handed ammunition to fuel their argument. Groused American Hal Sutton as he watched the European players celebrate their win, "when we do it, we're poor sports."
Fourteen months earlier, before the events of September 11 delayed the 34th Ryder Cup for a year, Strange and Torrance played a match at Carnegie Abbey in Rhode Island. If the fact that Strange won appeared to perpetuate a reverse jinx, the Europeans might have cause for apprehension: the fourth match in Sunday's singles may well have been played between the men who will captain the 2004 sides, Bernhard Langer and Sutton. Langer won 5 and 4. This time.
