Notebook

Watts Barred from U.S. Team
Ryder Wrong

As a naturalized U.S. citizen, Tour player I Brian Watts can vote, must pay taxes and is required to appear for jury duty in his hometown of Edmond, Okla. He is also eligible to represent his country in the Olympics, in soccer's World Cup and in golf's Presidents Cup. Watts cannot, however, play in the Ryder Cup. Because of an outdated rule that the PGA of America chooses not to revise, Watts was recently declared ineligible for the Sept. 24-26 match at the Country Club in Brookline, Mass.

The regulation that bars him from the match was written in 1927 as part of the original Ryder Cup deed. It states that "only American-born players represent the U.S. team." The 33-year-old Watts was born in Montreal.

At least one other Tour player, Andrew Magee, was born outside the U.S. yet has been ruled eligible for the Ryder Cup. The PGA says Magee can play because though he was born in Paris, his parents were simply U.S. citizens living abroad. Watts's mother is German and his father is English. The fact that the Wattses moved from Canada to the U.S. in 1966, when Brian was six months old, and that they were sworn in as U.S. citizens as a family in 1982, carried no weight with the PGA.

The odds on Watts's even qualifying for the Ryder Cup team would be long (he'd be 49th on the points list), but he thinks it's wrong that the PGA has denied him the chance. "I don't agree with their decision, but it fires me up to play better," he says. "I want to force the PGA to have to change the rule." The 24th-ranked player in the world, Watts finished 11th last week in the Colonial and tied for third the week before in the Byron Nelson Classic.

The question of Watts's eligibility came up after last July's British Open, in which Watts finished second to Mark O'Meara. Watts had played in Japan for the previous six years, but his $309,260 paycheck at Royal Birkdale earned him a PGA Tour exemption in 1999, which prompted the PGA and the Tour to request background information to determine his eligibility for the Ryder and Presidents Cups.

Less than a week after he was first contacted, Watts was told that the Tour's policy board had made him eligible for the Presidents Cup. The PGA's inquiry, though, dragged on for nine months. "A PGA official asked me all sorts of questions about Brian, and I thought it was insensitive and rude," says Magee. "It was as if they wanted some dirt on him."

PGA president Will Mann says that the PGA had no choice but to rule against Watts. "We had great deliberations about Brian," Mann says. "But the issue of eligibility goes to the core of the Ryder Cup, and the decision we've made is to uphold the best interest of the Ryder Cup."

Watts has been amazingly diplomatic throughout the ordeal. "I know I wasn't born here," he says, "but I've been here all my life. I'd do anything for the U.S."

If only the PGA would let him.