America at Large: Hours before Woosie rolled over and reached for the aspirin bottle on Monday morning, Tiger Woods was already in London and engaged in one of his least-favourite pursuits: speaking to reporters on the telephone.
Under normal circumstances Woods would be one of the hardest guys in the world to find on the morning after another Ryder Cup ass-kicking, but the conversation had long been pre-arranged, and Tiger had a vested interest in beating the drums for his personal favourite on the December golfing calendar: an invitation-only event at Sherwood Country Club in Thousand Oaks, California, whose proceeds will benefit the Tiger Woods Foundation.
Although the tournament's date places it squarely in the middle of the silly season, the numbers bandied about this week are certain to make people sit up and take notice. The overall purse will be $5.75 million, with $1.35 million of that going to the winner. The last-place finisher in the field will earn $170,000, which ought to be good for a few Christmas presents.
After rounding up as many of the top-dozen rated golfers in the world as he could muster, the field was filled with four special exemptions. One of them went to Darren Clarke, to whom Tiger personally extended the invitation. (That the others went to John Daly, Fred Couples, and Davis Love III may have been Tiger's way of telling Tom Lehman what he thought of his captain's picks for The K Club.) Clarke's addition means there will be 11 members of the respective Ryder Cup sides represented at Tiger's Target tournament.
Team-mates Padraig Harrington, Colin Montgomerie, Paul Casey, David Howell, Luke Donald, Henrik Stenson, and Jose Maria Olazabal will join Clarke in California, while the losing team at The K Club will be represented by Woods, Chris DiMarco, and David Toms.
Tiger was still licking his wounds.
"It still hurts, no matter what, even more when you get dusted by nine points," he said Monday. "It didn't feel good at Oakland Hills and it certainly doesn't feel good now."
Having had a night to sleep on it, he had pondered possible explanations for the Americans' implosion in Kildare.
Some aspects of the Slaughter in Straffan defy explanation. Woods, for example, was asked why the likes of Montgomerie, Clarke, and Sergio Garcia can raise their games for the Ryder Cup but can't win a major tournament, while major winners like Phil Mickelson and Jim Furyk get to the Ryder Cup and fall flat on their faces. Tiger's one-word response spoke volumes. "Interesting," he said.
Woods did offer up one possible explanation for the recent European dominance, which is that the organisers on both sides of the Atlantic haven't done the Americans any favours with their choice of venues.
Europe were always going to have the crowd last weekend, but the Palmer Course, as American a course as one is apt to find in Europe, should have suited the visiting squad as well - at least until the rain started falling and the winds began to howl.
But, Tiger pointed out, the US team's familiarity with the venue was limited to August's reconnaissance mission, while most of Team Europe plays it at least once a year. The same, he noted, is true of recent host sites in Europe such as the Belfry and Valderrama.
On the other hand, American Ryder Cup host courses have tended to be as unfamiliar to the US players as they are to their opponents.
"The ones we've chosen are fantastic venues and difficult golf courses, but they're courses we don't play," at least not regularly, noted Woods.
The tour pros hadn't seen the Country Club in Brookline between the 1988 US Open and the 1999 Ryder Cup. Oakland Hills went even longer between visits - the 1985 US Open and the 2004 Ryder Cup.
Six years have elapsed since Tiger won the 2000 PGA at Valhalla, the site of the next Ryder Cup, and by the time the matches roll around it will have been eight.
"And on top of that, I heard Jack (Nicklaus) is going in there and redoing all the greens," said Woods, noting any nuances retained in his meticulously-taken notes from 2000 will have been rendered useless. "You'll have to relearn all the greens," said Tiger.
Before he hung up the phone to head over to The Grove, Tiger had another interesting observation, one that hardly bodes well for the competitive nature of the Ryder Cup in the immediate future: of the team the Americans brought to Ireland last week, only Zach Johnson and Vaughn Taylor - and they each by a matter of months - are younger than Tiger himself.
"They have Luke (Donald) and Sergio (Garcia) and Paul Casey, who are all in their 20s, and those three have won tournaments all over the world," pointed Woods. "When our youngest player is 30 years old, that's not a positive thing."
