Fresh Look

Take a quick look at the U.S. Ryder Cup roster. Impressive, right? � The team captain, Tom Lehman, is a sensible man and a feisty competitor who has more Kumbaya spirit than the whole PGA Tour Policy Board put together--the ideal person to lead the team at a time when the U.S. can count its overseas friends on about three fingers. The team's anchor, Tiger Woods, is maybe the most dominant golfer of all time. Riding shotgun with Woods (in all likelihood) in the better-ball and alternate-shot matches will be Jim Furyk, the third-ranked golfer in the world, who couldn't spell quit if you spotted him the first four letters. The team's second-best player, Phil Mickelson, has more shots in him than Mel Gibson on a Saturday night, plus three majors. Then there's the team's designated bulldog-cheerleader, Chris DiMarco, about the only big-name player you've never seen cry on TV. Throw in two more experienced Ryder Cuppers, flinty Chad Campbell and steady David Toms, and the other half-dozen fellas who round out the team and you have ... the underdogs!

Sergio Garc�a and Ian Woosnam, the wee Euro captain, will fight you on this, but there's no denying it: The Europeans are the favorites this time. Europe has won four of the last five Ryder Cups, and this year the match, to be held Sept. 22--24, will be in Ireland at the K Club and "the Irish are very rowdy," says Luke Donald, himself a reserved Englishman. Ladbrokes, the British bookmaker, has Europe as a 1.72 to 1 pick and the U.S. as 2.37 to 1. All manner of players and officials and writers will tell you that the Americans have earned the right to travel to Dublin as the Davids. "For the first time the Europeans will feel as if they're supposed to win," says Doug Ferguson, the AP writer. Geoff Ogilvy of Australia, a neutral and keen observer, says that this European team is deeper than the U.S.'s, at least on paper.

Yes, the Europeans are experts at portraying themselves as downtrodden discards, culled from Fagin's gang of pickpockets. And yes, it's hard to think of any team with Woods and Mickelson on it as unfavored. As W.C. Fields used to say, It baffles science. But if there was any lingering doubt about who ranked where, last week's PGA Championship at Medinah sealed the American team's second-class status. At least a dozen Americans had a chance to play a solid tournament and earn their way onto the team. On Sunday night, postvictory, Woods was examining a list of the top 10 American finishers. Part of the fun of the PGA in a Ryder Cup year is that it has more than one winner. There's the winner of the Wanamaker Trophy, and then there are the guys who play their way onto the Ryder Cup team. "Anything change in the rankings this week?" Woods asked, the list in his hands. He was looking for something and seeing nothing.

"Everything stayed the same," he was told. Woods didn't speak, and his face revealed nothing. There's no upside in saying, "Wow! Nobody stepped up." Why state the obvious?

One of Lehman's goals is to make the Ryder Cup more fun, inside the ropes, for the players. If they're having more fun, he believes, they will be more relaxed and will play better golf. That's his theory. The two captains before Lehman, Hal Sutton in 2004 and Curtis Strange in '02, came at it more like football coaches. Lehman's coaching hero is John Wooden, the UCLA legend. ("His whole thing was, You have to have fun. If you don't have fun, you're not going to love it, and if you don't love it, you're not going to work hard enough to be successful.") If last week's play and the last two Ryder Cups are any indication, it's obvious that Lehman will have a lot of reprogramming to do. Medinah, and many of the Tour events leading up to the PGA, showed a massive buildup of scar tissue among many of the best American pros.

Last Wednesday, before a shot was struck in anger, the week looked promising for the Americans. Lehman entertained (though barely) the possibility that he would make the team on points. Two esteemed Ryder Cuppers, Fred Couples and Davis Love III, were in position to play their way onto the team; so were young talents Lucas Glover and Arron Oberholser. Lehman could see that numbers 7, 8, 9 and 10--Vaughn Taylor, J.J. Henry, Zach Johnson and Brett Wetterich, none of them with Ryder or Presidents Cup experience--could all get bumped off the team if they were to play poorly and others played well.

Then the cards were turned in. Couples missed the cut, and Love's play was erratic. Taylor, Henry, Johnson and Wetterich? Varying degrees of not much. Lehman missed the cut, and he and wife Melissa spent Sunday wandering among Medinah's giant trees, observing Stewart Cink, Jerry Kelly, Tim Herron and, most particularly, Love. Not a single player did anything special. There's a cool vibe that comes off of Lehman. He says of the Ryder Cup, "It's only a golf match." But you can't wave the shaft of your long putter and suddenly make Love relax when he's been pressing all year for one reason or another. Mostly he's been trying too hard to make the Ryder Cup team. He had been on every one since 1993, and his goal was to keep the streak going until the day he was selected captain. But this year he's had only one top 10 finish, missed the cut at the U.S. and British Opens and has admitted, with admirable candor, to frailties of the mind. At Medinah he was eight under through 45 holes and in position to make the team and even win the championship. Then on Saturday he made a bogey at the relatively easy par-5 10th and never came back from it, finishing 34th. Regarding the Ryder Cup, Love kept saying, "I'm trying to block it out." But he couldn't. Maybe Coach Wooden could help him.

On Monday morning, nine o'clock Chicago time--as President Bush was holding a press conference on the state of war and peace in the Middle East-- Lehman was in the press tent at Medinah announcing his two captain's picks, Cink and Scott Verplank, both experienced Ryder Cuppers. Lehman was working on about two hours' sleep. He had spent Sunday night speaking, on the phone or in person, to a dozen or so other players who were in the vicinity of the top 10. In picking Cink, ranked 12th on the points list, he skipped over No. 11 John Rollins, who had missed the cut at Medinah. In selecting Verplank, No. 20 on the list, he passed over Kelly and Herron, plus Love and Couples and himself.

Love received updates from Lehman his assistant, Corey Pavin, about how the long Sunday night was going, both before and after Love and his wife, Robin, went to see Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby. "I knew they were struggling about what choices to make," said Love. "I said all along that I needed to make the team on points. I told Robin that maybe I should make it easier on them by taking my name out of it. He needs players who are 100 percent physically and [are] playing well, and I'm not either. Robin said I should let the process run its course. I wouldn't have picked me. Melissa Lehman's out there, watching me from behind a tree, and I'm missing putts knowing that she's watching. If I can't make those putts, I don't deserve to be on the team."

Cink and Verplank will help cement the U.S. position as the underdog, with help from young Taylor (30), Henry (31), Johnson (30) and Wetterich (33). The match will turn on what those six do. For 20 years the European path to victory was not determined by how Nick Faldo and Seve Ballesteros and Colin Montgomerie performed; you expected those guys to hang with any player in the world. Europe won because its best golfers played with heightened emotion. But Europe also won because its second-tier players--Steven Richardson, Philip Walton and Paul McGinley, in different years--outplayed the U.S.'s second-tier players time after time. Traditionally, Ryder Cup overachievement by the second-tier players has been the province of the Europeans.