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What A Whipping! A high-flying International Presidents Cup team sent the U.S. to a new low
By John Garrity Issue date: December 21, 1998
The Australians have funny names for things. They call their tasty shellfish bugs. Body shops are panel beaters, and don't tell anybody Down Under that you root for your favorite team. You'll be brought up on sodomy charges. But one Aussie term needs no translation to American English: ass whipping. That's what folks in the antipodes were calling it last weekend when a team of pros from the Southern Hemisphere and Japan beat a U.S. 12 about as soundly as you can without leaving visible scars. "It was a romp from the start," said Australia's Steve Elkington, savoring the International team's first victory in three tries in the biennial Presidents Cup. "We poured it on and poured it on." Did they ever. The final score, after three days play at the historic Royal Melbourne Golf Club, was Internationals 20 1/2, U.S. 11 1/2. In 70 years of international team play, the previous worst margin of defeat for an American team was a 16 1/2-11 1/2 loss to Europe in the 1985 Ryder Cup. Incredibly, this U.S. squad -- described by International captain Peter Thomson as "the mightiest team ever assembled" -- won only eight of the 32 matches outright. Even more incredibly, one blocky, charming, irresistibly effusive Japanese golfer, Shigeki Maruyama, won more points (five out of a possible five) than America's David Duval, Mark O'Meara and Tiger Woods combined. Lee Janzen, the current U.S. Open champ, was among the first to admit smelling smoke in the cockpit. Standing with U.S. captain Jack Nicklaus at the 18th green on Saturday afternoon, Janzen looked at the mounting tally -- 13 1/2 to 5 1/2 at the time -- and darkly joked, "We'd kick their ass in baseball." Maybe. But that wouldn't be cricket. It wasn't quite sporting, of course, that the first two Presidents Cups were played in Virginia. This time the Internationals were the hosts, and they chose a tricky venue. Royal Melbourne's Composite Course is a grab bag of winsome holes from two 18s laid out in the early '30s by the English architect Alister Mackenzie. The track is notable for its wild, natural look and its steep, cliff-edged bunkers, but its terror is owed to the variable winds and the way the banks of the greens are shaved to let balls roll into trouble. In the U.S., only Augusta National -- another Mackenzie course -- plays so hard and fast. The weather last week was a composite as well, a medley of three seasons -- spring, autumn and purgatory. Last Friday's matches were played in the worst December heat Melbourne has seen this century, a toasty 108[degree] with hair-dryer winds. Saturday afternoon brought cooler southwesterly breezes and a whiff of Port Phillip Bay. Then on Sunday came cloudbursts and chill, giving the players and their wives a chance to show off their whole wardrobes. The Internationals proved they were a team for all seasons and all formats. They won eight of a possible 10 points in the foursome (alternate-shot) matches, 6 1/2 of 10 in the four-ball (better-ball) matches and the first two individual matches on Sunday -- which is all it took to claim the Cup. Many of the matches were settled on the 18th green, in front of a surprised and gratified grandstand crowd. Near noon on Friday, New Zealand's Frank Nobilo sank a 45-foot putt from the back of the green to beat a highly regarded team of Duval and O'Meara. On Saturday morning Melbourne native Craig Parry floored the Americans by chipping in from 50 feet to steal a one-up victory from Woods and Fred Couples. That afternoon South Africa's Ernie Els drew the last great roar of the day by dropping a 12-footer on 18 for a one-up four-ball victory over Woods and John Huston. "We haven't made enough putts, and they've made way too many," said a frustrated Justin Leonard. If one match summed up the American predicament, it was that Saturday afternoon better-ball tug-of-war, Woods and Huston versus Els and Fiji's Vijay Singh. The Internationals went four up as Singh, enjoying his best season, birdied three of the first four holes. But Woods, playing the kind of damn-the-torpedoes golf he disdained in '98, led a comeback that squared the match after 12 holes. Then Els got hot, birdieing 14 and 15 and sticking an approach close on 16 -- only to lose the hole when Woods hit one even closer and made the putt. When Tiger holed a 25-footer for birdie on the 17th, the match was square again and the stage was set for Els. The point being that the U.S., playing its best -- Woods and Huston were nine under par for the round, their opponents seven under -- simply inspired the Internationals to play even better. "I saw Els putt three times this afternoon, 20-footers," a dazed-looking Nicklaus said as he drifted among officials and cameramen at 18. "He made all of them." The words on everyone's lips were "How?" and "Why?" How could a U.S. team led by five of the world's top 10 players lose to a collection of nomads that included a Paraguayan (Carlos Franco), two Kiwis (Nobilo and Greg Turner), ranked 60th and 69th in the world, respectively, and one of Jumbo Ozaki's kid brothers (Joe Ozaki)? Why did Duval putt as if his sunglasses were foggy? Why did Huston not score even half a point? The simple answer is that unusual wind conditions and a leadership vacuum allowed tired, unmotivated players suffering from jet lag to give a halfhearted effort too close to Christmas on an unfamiliar course in front of a partisan crowd. That's the simple answer. Or at least that's the consensus answer. Phil Mickelson, who had only two halves in four matches, said, "If we were to make up reasons, it would take away from their wonderful play this week." Some will blame the captain. Nicklaus was the first U.S. skipper to lose the Ryder Cup on American soil (at his own Muirfield Village Golf Club in Dublin, Ohio, in 1987), and now he is the first to lose the Presidents Cup on anybody's soil. At times last week he seemed detached and distracted. He called his players "my children" and said his role in the matches was essentially to provide an encouraging word and simply to be there, like the dutiful dad who leaves work to watch his boys play peewee football. Strategically Nicklaus was a conscientious objector. He paired players who had not previously teamed together because he thought it would be "neat" for them to make new friends. He let some players pick their own partners. "Just because you're selected as the captain," he said, "everybody thinks you're a strategic genius." The real shocker, when you consider that only eight months ago he contended at the Masters, is that Nicklaus looked old and tired. An arthritic hip has sapped him of his physical vitality, and emotionally he seems drained by recent business setbacks, including a management scandal at his public company, Golden Bear International. "He looked smaller at the end of the day," said an Adelaide woman, sympathy in her voice. To be fair, that day was Friday. At the end of that scorcher, all the Americans -- save perhaps Couples and Woods, who beat Els and Singh, 5 and 4, in the morning foursomes -- looked smaller and more vulnerable. Furthermore, Jack's players voiced their unequivocal support. Said Leonard, "Mr. Nicklaus has done an incredible job." If not bad captaining, what? The calendar? This Presidents Cup was played during the American holiday season, which is traditionally a time for rest, family gatherings and gazillion-dollar, made-for-TV exhibitions. It's not a time to take on the Southern Hemisphere, where the golf season is at its peak. There is also a suspicion that the American players don't really want the event to soar. They already have a love-dread relationship with that biennial gut check, the Ryder Cup. A gloves-off Presidents Cup would make their ordeal annual, like taxes and flu shots. The players reject that theory as well. "It's not a lack of heart or desire," said O'Meara. Jim Furyk, who scored only a point, said, "I've been asked whether we were too loose or too tight." He shrugged. "We just got beat." Nicklaus, who doesn't expect to be captain when the matches return to Virginia in 2000, allowed that his team's unfamiliarity with Royal Melbourne may have hurt, just as the U.S. team's ignorance of Valderrama in Spain probably cost them last year's Ryder Cup. "Our guys had never seen the course under the north wind conditions," he said. But just as quickly he dismissed the wind as a factor. "It was the putts and chips they holed. They produced shots when they needed to produce them." Not surprisingly, the other side thought the outcome was more a matter of Australian audacity, New Zealand zeal, Paraguayan pride, Fijian fortitude, Zimbabwian zest, South African sagacity and Japanese ... sushi. "The thing with Kiwis," said Nobilo, after he and Turner had won on Friday, "we will nip at somebody's heels all day for 18 holes, and eventually we will take the leg off." A wild image, but certainly the U.S. players didn't have a leg to stand on when they teed off on Sunday afternoon in the singles needing 10 1/2 out of a possible 12 points to retain the Cup. Thomson led off with the feisty Parry and then chose veteran Nick Price to follow. Parry dusted a struggling Leonard 5 and 3, and Price snuffed out Duval in 17, making the remaining 10 matches a December anomaly -- a televised exhibition with nothing on the line but individual pride. (For the record, the current world No. 1 -- Woods -- defeated the Australian icon and former world No. 1, Greg Norman, one up.) It was left for Scott Hoch, one of only six Americans to score at least two points, to put the International team's win in perspective. "We knew it was going to be a matter of time," he said on Saturday evening, surveying the wreckage that was the U.S. squad. "But with the team we had, we didn't think it would be this year." Stonkered. Up the spout. Gone to Gundy. It didn't matter what the celebrating Aussies called it. The U.S. got an old-fashioned butt whipping.
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