by Dan Jenkins
“Sounds like a worthwhile plan,” she beamed, clinking her glass of wine against my Junior. “Deal.”
44
ALL YOU FOLKS OUT THERE WHO watched the Ryder Cup in person or on TV, you didn’t see or hear much of what I’m now going to report. I want to try to tell it as clearly as I can. Call it the inside story. Call it the flip side. Just don’t call it what Irv Klar wants to call the chapter if we ever get around to doing the book. Irv would call it “Little Red Ryder Hood,” may his typing fingers be squashed by hefty people in hiking boots.
Several things won’t soon be forgotten by some of us who were at the opening ceremony. The opening ceremony took place around the eighteenth green at
Muirfield Village, same as it had when Jack Nicklaus’s club hosted the matches the first time back in ’87.
The festivities began with the Ohio State band marching up the eighteenth fairway, having started back at the tee. The band played “Buckeye Battle Cry” and “Across the Field,” the school’s two rousing fight songs. Many in the hometown crowd teared up, as they normally do when they hear these tunes, but then some laughter broke out when the drum major in the tall fur hat tripped and fell.
The drum major scrambled up and continued to prance as if nothing happened, and the crowd applauded his effort.
“I hope that’s not a bad omen for the U.S.,” Cheryl said. At that moment, all twelve members of both teams along with their wives or fiancées and officials were waiting in the wings.
I said, “That’s what they get for stealing Paschal High’s fight song.”
A little humor there.
The two teams huddled together and made small talk while we waited to march out. Cheryl couldn’t resist playing around with Knut Thorssun, the only European team member without a wife or ladyfriend.
“Your wife isn’t with you?” Cheryl said.
“No, we have taken our separate paths,” Knut said. “I hope she is seeking medical advice. She is a sick woman in the mind.”
“I’m sorry you’re alone,” Cheryl said.
I said, “You can bust me if he’s alone.”
Knut smiled. “Oh, ho, Bobby Joe. You know me too well. Yes, it is true. A lady awaits me back at the hotel. She did not wish to participate in the ceremonies.”
I said, “She didn’t want to wear anything but a garter belt and bra, but they wouldn’t let her.”
Cheryl said, “Well, that was rather small-minded of them.”
Knut caught up with my remark. “Har, har!” he exploded. “Bobby Joe, you are always to be the funny one. But we must be serious about this competition, must we not?”
“Absolutely,” I said.
With the exception of me, the rookie, I believed the USA had as strong a team as any in the past. Our marquee was loaded with experience and “names”—Tiger Woods, Phil Mickelson, Davis Love, David Duval, Justin Leonard, Cheetah Farmer, Rickey Padgett, Hal Sutton, Jim Furyk, and the two wild cards, Fred Couples and Paul Azinger.
I was well acquainted with most of the members of the European squad, the ones who played our tour often or occasionally—Knut, of course, and Colin Montgomerie, Sergio Garcia, Jesper Parnevik, Jos´e Maria Olazabal, Paul Lawrie, Lee Westwood, Darren Clarke, François Despeaux, and Romeo Nadi.
Although I knew Karl Hein by name, I’d never met the European captain until that week. He’d been one of Germany’s early golf stars, and was called in to lead the team after Tony Jacklin and Seve Ballesteros both refused to come out of retirement.
Karl Hein was already operating under a cloud of criticism from the British press by the time he arrived in Columbus. The Brits were outraged at his two wild card selections that rounded out the European team. The captain had passed up such veterans as Nick Faldo and Ian Woosnam to go with two of his fellow countrymen, Gottfried Kunz and Otto Schwarzmann.
Defending his choices, the Europeans’ captain had been quoted saying, “We need up-and-comers, not disappearers.”
The Europeans—players, officials, and wives—marched into the public ceremony first, and if it seemed that they received more lasting applause and exuberant shouts than we did, I lay the blame directly on the doorstep of Jill Foster, Madam Captain.
The Europeans wore three-piece navy blue suits, white shirts, and red ties, and their wives wore tasteful red, white, and blue ensembles. They looked like the Americans usually look.
We, on the other hand, were dressed like athletes from a Third World country marching into an Olympic stadium. We were wearing maroon suits, blue shirts, yellow ties, and maroon fedoras. Hats, yeah.
Some of us turned our hat brims up all the way around, and some of us turned them all the way down. Cheetah Farmer and Rickey Padgett wore the dark glasses they were being paid to endorse.
I sincerely thought you could see better-dressed people at a bank robbery, but I didn’t tell Madam Captain that.
Our ladies weren’t let off any easier. They were wearing yellow pants suits, red turtlenecks, and brown golf visors.
The band played all of the anthems. I was like most people, I think. Only three of them sounded familiar to me—England, France, and Germany. Spain’s was the longest. We could have played two rubbers of bridge before it was over, and we weren’t even sure it was over when it was over.
Cheryl whispered to me that in her official outfit, she was happy she hadn’t been run up the flagpole when they played the Spanish anthem.
I’d heard somewhere that in the Ryder Cup flag raising, which accompanies the anthems, the flags of at least two foreign countries invariably seem to get themselves hung upside down and fly that way the whole weekend. The Italian flag flew upside down at Muirfield Village and Sweden’s flag turned out to be Denmark’s, but you had to read Golf Digest later to find this out.
Cheryl and I scanned the crowd while the speeches droned on, seeing if we could spot any of our pals. I’d obtained credentials for Alleene, Buddy Stark and Cynthia, and Jerry Grimes. All of them were supposed to have arrived that morning. We didn’t see them anywhere, but there were more than fifteen thousand people on hand, including three thousand rowdies from Europe.
Cheryl planned to make contact with Alleene as soon as possible. Our pals were all staying in another hotel. I said I sure hoped I would be present when Knut saw Cynthia with Buddy for the first time.
A week earlier I’d asked Buddy on the phone, “What does Woodrow know, and when did he know it?”
Buddy said, “As far as we can tell, he doesn’t know about us yet, but the divorce is final, so who cares?”
Irv Klar and Smokey Barwood had both called to say I didn’t need to worry about credentials for them—they weren’t going to make it as they’d intended. Bad timing.
Irv said, “My sports editor is a black guy. He’s making me cover the UCLA–San Diego State football game Saturday. He says the Ryder Cup’s an event for Republicans. It’s not, is it?”
I said, “What have you heard from the resumes you sent out? Anything promising?”
“I got laughed at by SI and the New York Times,” he said. “I haven’t heard back from the others. I’m not giving up on your book, Bobby Joe. Your voice isn’t easy. I’m thinking hard about it. I know it’s somewhere in the ballpark of, let’s say, professional golfer from Texas has a head-on collision with the English language.”
I said, “Keep thinking hard, Irv. Thinking hard is good for the mind.”
My agent passed on the Ryder Cup at the last minute because of another client’s problems.
Smokey was busy trying to do damage control on all of Mucus Benson’s endorsement contracts because of the latest incident involving the all-pro linebacker, who only last March had been acquitted of the axe murder of LaToya Boyette, his girlfriend, the Olympic hurdler.
Mucus had now been arrested at a party in a Dallas apartment house and charged with murdering his new girlfriend, a fifteen-year-old high school student named Samantha. He beat her to death with a tire tool. He was also charged with raping
Samantha’s older sister, Teresa, a sixteen-year-old, by forcing her into a bathroom on her hands and knees. But there was more. Apparently he was in possession of a full Ziploc bag of cocaine and was said to have permanently crippled one of the arresting officers, a female, by hurling her down two flights of stairs. Eyewitnesses saw all of it.
“It’s going to be a tough one,” Smokey said, “but I’ve had calls from six criminal attorneys in six different states who think they can beat it—they say public opinion will be on Mucus’s side.”
I said, “One of the calls wasn’t from a chick in Fort Worth representing a lawyer named Red Taggert, was it?”
Smokey said, “Yes, do you know him?”
45
WE HELD A PRIVATE TEAM DINNER meeting on Thursday night before the matches started the next morning. This was where Captain Foster reminded us that there would be foursomes, or alternate shots, Friday morning and four-balls in the afternoon, and the order would be reversed on Saturday, and there would be twelve singles matches Sunday.
Like we weren’t able to read the program.
The captain also reminded us that we should conduct ourselves in a sportsmanlike manner at all times because we represented the United States of America.
Rickey Padgett, striving for a joke, said, “It says USA on my bag—is that the same thing?”
Cheetah Farmer said, “We don’t need no pep talks, Larry. These guys aren’t in our class. What are they? Bunch of frogs . . . wops, spicks? They ought to be caddying for us.”
I said, “I know a way to sabotage their team.”
Everybody looked at me.
“Put a bar of soap in their rooms.” I grinned.
Everybody was still looking at me.
“That’s funny,” I said, “y’all are supposed to be laughing.”
“Why?” Larry Foster asked.
I said, “Have you ever found a bar of soap in Europe?”
“Oh,” he said.
The captain called me aside after the meeting broke up. He informed me that he was going with experience in the morning. I would be sitting out the morning foursomes. I said fine. But he really wanted to ask a favor.
“Will you take Cheetah for a partner?” he said.
“If you want me to,” I replied.
“Good,” he said, looking relieved. “Nobody will play with him. I’ve asked everybody else. They all say keep that cocky prick and his dickhead daddy away from me.”
“Or words to that effect,” I said.
“More or less.”
“I’ll take Cheetah,” I said. “He’s a hell of a talent, mouth and all.”
THE MUIRFIELD Village course was in gorgeous condition, better than I’d ever seen it, and I’d played in eight or nine Memorial Tournaments. I almost hated to take a divot out of the velvet fairways, and I wouldn’t have minded licking food off the bent greens.
Jack had designed and built the course in the early ’70s and it immediately took its place among the Top Ten in the country, but he’d never stopped jacking with it, proving himself as much of a perfectionist as an architect as he was as a player. The layout meets the “memorability” test with ease, and the fourteenth hole, the short but dangerous par four with water on the right, seems to make somebody’s All-Time Best 18 every year.
Nicklaus named the club after Muirfield in Scotland, where he won his first British Open in ’66. But there’s a story that a British golf writer once complained to Jack before the club opened that the name Muirfield Village was a big mistake.
Jack should name it something else, the British writer told him. Bear Creek, Golden Bear, something personal, more suitable. The word “muir,” he informed Jack, meant “village” in Scottish, thus Jack surely didn’t want to name his club Villagefield Village.
As the story goes, Jack’s response was “Well, this is Ohio, not Scotland, and the stationery’s already been printed.”
That story didn’t do much for Cheetah Farmer.
Cheetah was more interested in moving the conversation back to his favorite topic, himself. We were waiting around on the seventeenth tee of our four-ball match Friday afternoon. We were one up on our foes Otto Schwarzmann and Romeo Nadi.
All day long, between making birdies for us, Cheetah had talked about leaving IMG to go with WhapServ, a new firm whose agents were wooing him. The agents had been telling Cheetah they could do far better for him than the fifty million IMG made for him a year ago.
“It’s a dilemma,” I’d said to him more than once.
I couldn’t help wondering how many people in America weren’t sleeping well lately, having to worry about a twenty-two-year-old golfer who’d only made fifty million dollars last year.
I mentioned that to my pals who’d been in the gallery all day walking along together—Cheryl, Alleene, and Jerry Grimes. The shouts of “Go USA!” had mostly come from Alleene Simmons, golf fan.
Buddy and Cynthia were in town, but the lovebirds had yet to emerge from their hotel room.
When all four of us reached the seventeenth green in regulation, Captain Foster came driving up in his golf cart. He walked out on the green to tell Cheetah and I how desperately we needed this point.
The morning foursomes had split 2-2, Tiger and Duval had won the first four-ball in the afternoon, but the European pairs of Knut-Jesper and Garcia-Olazabal were winning their matches handily. Our match, therefore, was critical. It would clinch us a 4-4 tie for the first day.
We were all looking at birdie putts ranging from twenty-five to eighteen feet. The Europeans were both inside of us. I left my putt six inches short, right in the throat. I slapped the Armour and said, “Way to go, Doris.” I tapped in for the par four.
Cheetah’s daddy, the arrogant caddy, said, “Time to go into our two-minute offense, kid.”
“No prob-lemmo,” Cheetah said.
Cheetah addressed his ball, but glanced at me before he putted.
“Watch this,” he said. “This is gonna look like a BB rollin’ into a washtub . . . send these dudes home in a hearse.”
The putt didn’t even come close. Cheetah yelled, “Fuck me!” He kicked his ball off the green. His daddy picked it up.
Our foes both missed their birdie tries. Better still for us, they left themselves very difficult putts for pars. Breaking putts of five or six feet.
I went over to stand by Otto Schwarzmann, the German, while Romeo Nadi, the Italian, studied his putt from all angles. He would putt first. One of them had to make the putt or the match was over.
Speaking softly, I said, “Otto, what did your granddaddy do in the war? You hear any stories growing up?”
“No, this subject was never discussed,” he said. “Why do you ask at a moment like this?”
“It’s only a game,” I shrugged. “I’ve heard half a dozen people say golf is the real winner here this week.”
“Games are serious,” he said.
I said, “I know what my granddaddy did in the war, Otto. He flew B-17 raids over Germany. Hey, you know what? I’ll bet my granddaddy bombed the shit out of your granddaddy. What do you think?”
Otto was glaring at me in an insane way as Romeo Nadi barely missed his putt. The ball rolled around the cup and stopped on the lip. Margarita with a slice of lime.
Otto had no chance, then. Not with the whole match riding on his putt. Not while thinking about his granddad buried in all that rubble. He blew the putt by a foot to the right.
I sauntered over to the ropes where my friends were whooping and applauding. Behind me, still on the green, Otto Schwarzmann and Romeo Nadi were pointing in all directions and barking furiously at each other in German and Italian.
46
SATURDAY OF THE RYDER CUP was the first time I’d been benched since high school—when I missed three straight J’s and Coach Baldy Toler threw a chair at me.
What Captain Larry Foster did was, he decided to go with his more experienced players, his brand names. This put Cheetah Farmer and me on the sidelines al
ong with Jim Furyk and Rickey Padgett. I joined the cheering section out on the course, as did Rickey and Jim. Cheetah, that staunch patriot, chose to hit practice balls and talk to his IMG agent all day.
We’ll never know whether Larry made the right decision. We do know that our
big names at least fought their way to another 4–4 tie in the four-balls and foursomes. Which meant that after two days of fierce competition the score was USA 8, Europe 8.
It would all come down to Sunday’s twelve singles matches. We needed to win seven of those to nab the cup. Or they did.
By late Saturday afternoon every player was aware of who his singles opponent would be. It works like this: the two captains, as the rules call for, secretly list their players 1 through 12 in whatever order they prefer. They are then revealed and announced. USA No. 1 plays Europe No. 1, USA No. 2 plays Europe No. 2, and so forth on down to USA No. 12 duking it out with Europe No. 12. Luck of the draw on who you play.
It’s a captain’s guessing game and it’s always been debated as to the best way to arrange your lineup. Put strength at the top and strength at the bottom, or throw all your strength in the middle.
Larry Foster went with strength at the top and strength at the bottom. That’s why Tiger led off and Mickelson brought up the rear. A hoss to get us out of the starting blocks with a win, hopefully, and Phil back there in case things tightened up and we needed a hoss who could handle the pressure of a decisive match.
