Warm, fuzzy talk
Presidents Cup not a pressure cooker -- yet
Posted: Tuesday December 08, 1998 06:14 PM
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Tiger Woods (left, with Fred Couples): "It is not a war, it is not a battle. It is a friendly match between two different sides and we all know each other" AP |
MELBOURNE, Australia (AP) - The "War on the Shore" it isn't.
The way the players and captains are talking about the Presidents Cup, it might as well be called "Peace at Port Phillip Bay."
U.S. captain Jack Nicklaus set the tone for this year's matches six weeks ago during the Tour Championship, when he talked more about goodwill for the game than a winner-take-all mentality that leaves grown men crying about a missed 6-foot putt.
"Both teams want to win," Nicklaus said Tuesday. "But the important part of this thing to me is that the game of golf wins."
The same warm, fuzzy sentiments spilled from the mouth of Peter Thomson, the five-time British Open champion and captain of the International team.
"It's not a war. This is a game, this is sport," Thomson said. "There will be no blood on this floor, I'm sure. Like Jack, I want to see this succeed, and I want it to be a close contest and I want everybody to be satisfied -- those who competed and those who watched."
Of course, it helps that all but two players on the International team -- Japan's Joe Ozaki and Shigeki Maruyama -- will play on the PGA Tour next year.
"We play with these guys probably more than we do the Europeans," Scott Hoch said.
And it helps that the United States has won the Presidents Cup both times since it began in 1994 to give foreign-born players from outside Europe a chance to compete under one flag, similar to the Ryder Cup.
Both teams kept their distance on the first full day of practice early Tuesday morning at Royal Melbourne Golf Club -- the International team in their khaki slacks and cream-yellow shirts, the United States decked out in red shirts and red caps, with matching uniforms for the caddies.
But Justin Leonard noticed a change in the warm summer breeze that blew in from Port Phillip Bay.
"It was just a chance to kind of see the course and relax and hit a few shots," Leonard said.
That wasn't necessarily the case a year ago in Valderrama, or in 1995 at Oak Hill, or any of the previous Ryder Cup matches that have taken on a life of their own ever since Europe became the dominant team by winning five of the past seven events.
Both teams will meet for a barbecue on Saturday night. In some of the previous Ryder Cup matches, the teams felt like they were the ones being cooked.
"You start getting nervous a little bit later than you do for a Ryder Cup,' Davis Love III said.
Love was among those yukking it up during the practice round. He played with Leonard against Scott Hoch and Lee Janzen, the last-minute substitute for Hal Sutton.
"Miss it!" Love said from the back of the green as Janzen tried to ram home a par putt on the 16th hole.
Nice and easy, fun and games.
"I think today, you're right," Love said of the casual atmosphere. "On Saturday afternoon, probably not. It's not quite the pressure of the Ryder Cup. But still, we don't want to lose."
If there is one player who has an edge to him about what these matches are all about, it is Tiger Woods, at 22 the youngest player in the Presidents Cup. The only man to win the U.S. Amateur three years in a row, expectations were heaped on his shoulders last year in his first Ryder Cup, and he took much of the blame in another U.S. loss.
"I believe that this Presidents Cup is played more in a spirit of the way it should be played," said Woods, making his first appearance. "It is not a war, it is not a battle. It is a friendly match between two different sides and we all know each other."
The "War on the Shore" was the 1991 Ryder Cup at Kiawah Island, South Carolina.
Europe, which had lost every Ryder Cup since 1959 and all but one since 1935, finally turned the tide by winning back the cup in 1985, winning on American soil for the first time in 1997 and then making it three in a row at The Belfry in 1989.
The Americans -- players, reporters and fans -- brought a bunker mentality to the sand dunes of Kiawah, and it hasn't left.
Nicklaus doesn't think it belongs, nor does he expect to see it surface at Royal Melbourne.
"I think it's important that these guys, who beat each other up week after week after week, get together once in a while and put their arms around each other and say let's have a fun week and play for the game of golf," Nicklaus said. "Play for the bragging rights, that our team is better than your team. But let's not have a war. We've had enough of those."
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