Ed. note: This remembrance is the second in a series to highlight noteworthy Ryder Cup matches, during the week the biennial event was to be played at Whistling Straits in Kohler, Wisconsin.
There were a couple of things which John Paramor, the European Tour’s longest-serving referee, wanted to confirm when GGP asked him to revisit “The Battle of Brookline.” The first, that there was never “a deliberate action” on the part of the Americans to distract José María Olazábal from the 30-footer he had to keep the match alive. The second, that no rules had been broken.
You doubt whether too many minds need to be jogged with regard to the match in question, but the scene for the incident was the 17th green of The Country Club just outside Boston, Massachusetts, where America’s Justin Leonard had just holed a 45-footer for birdie. The roar it detonated may or may not have contributed to the US team’s conviction that the match itself was over but, either way, they ran onto the green to celebrate. The Europeans gesticulated wildly, and the officials did what they could to clear the decks, but there was still a gap of several minutes before Olazábal was able to tackle that 30-footer. He missed and the US supporters forgot what they mostly appeared to see as a minor hiccup and carried on with their celebrations.
Paramor’s opening comments out of the way, he went on to advance the following observation, an observation which, I suspect, may not have had too many airings before now.
“There was a chance for Justin to have conceded his opponent’s putt,” Paramor said, “but he didn’t. I suppose you would ask yourself if Jack Nicklaus had been involved, would he have done what he did in his match with Tony Jacklin?” Paramor was referring to the match of 1969 at Birkdale, another often unseemly affair in which Nicklaus gave Jacklin the 2-footer he needed for the contest to end in a sporting half.
For now, though, some thoughts on how so much went so wrong in what could have been nothing beyond the story of a grand comeback from a US side that had trailed to the tune of 6-10 on the Saturday night. And that had been staring at a third consecutive defeat.
For a start, it was often as if too many people had been crammed behind the ropes. That, in itself, would not necessarily have made for trouble, only it was coupled with a handful of players who encouraged the burgeoning mass hysteria by calling for more and more noise around the first tee.
Though Hal Sutton and David Duval were by no means obvious trouble-stirrers, the two of them were among the guilty parties. Duval went on to respond to his 5-and-4 victory against Jesper Parnevik by running round the green with his hand to his ear by way of calling for a crescendo in the already raucous cheers.
No more were the opposition entirely blameless. Jarmo Sandelin, for example, was in hostile mode when, as early as his second hole, he made it abundantly clear that he thought Phil Mickelson should be giving him his 2-foot putt. Mickelson was unmoved, producing a marker from his pocket as if to say that if Sandelin was short of a marker, he could provide one. The Swede, for whom nobody had any sympathy at that point, putted and missed.
Still more pertinently, perhaps, there was that Saturday night press conference in which Ben Crenshaw, the US captain, spoke in so strange and rambling a way that people wondered if he had fallen into some whacky state of self-hypnosis. He had closed with how he was “a believer in fate” and how he had “a good feeling” about the singles.
Some of his players, most of whom watching on TV, raised their eyebrows at what they were hearing. However, once they knew the draw, they were no different from their captain in scenting victory through that hallucinatory haze.
They forged ahead in the first six singles and won the lot to take a 12-10 lead. Two more wins later and all they needed was a half point from the match involving Leonard and Olazábal – a tall order when Spaniard had been 4 up after 10. But with Olazábal’s driving having gone awry, Leonard was back to level by the 16th before he holed his never-to-be-forgotten 45-footer.
Leonard’s putt was well worth celebrating, of course it was. Only that was all there was to celebrate at that stage.
In looking back at what happened post-chaos, some have said of Olazábal’s missed putt, “He’d never have holed it anyway.” Yet as often as not, that is a comment which sires the justifiable response, “How do you know?”
To their credit, the European players kept their thoughts largely to themselves that Sunday evening, with Sam Torrance, the 2002 captain, just about the only one to say precisely what he thought of the Americans’ behaviour as it happened. “Disgusting,” was the word he used.
The European captain of the moment, Mark James, was nothing if not diplomatic at the closing ceremony, though even he must have gulped when one among the US officials said in his speech how wonderful it was that the match should have been played in such a fine spirit.
But by the following day, James could contain himself no longer. He talked about the potentially dangerous crowd as one which would not have him hurrying back to play in America. His wife, Jane, claimed to have been spat at on several occasions, while she had failed to keep count of the number of times she had heard the yell “Go home!” at those bearing their European flags.
Sir Michael Bonallack, the secretary of the R&A, likened the atmosphere to “a bear pit.” He went on to describe things as a deal worse than at any other Ryder Cup he attended — and that included the notorious “War on the Shore” at Kiawah Island in 1991. He added that he was embarrassed for the game of golf, and that the last thing he wanted was for the match to disintegrate into “a mob demonstration.”
“Though my opponent (Payne Stewart) was trying hard to protect me from the crowd’s excesses, there was a limit to what he could do.” – Colin Montgomerie
Nothing, perhaps, had appalled him more during the afternoon than the way in which the crowd had been cheering and clapping the opposition’s missed putts. Furthermore, that behaviour had been repeated in the clubhouse where the members — who even then were paying in the region of £5,000 a year to play at The Country Club — were reacting to what they were seeing on TV in the same way as the crowd outside. Bonallack did not complain because he was in Brookline as a guest, though he was mighty relieved to discover that some at least among his clubhouse companions were sharing in his dismay at what had happened to Colin Montgomerie in his match with Payne Stewart.
In his book, Montgomerie described the goings-on as follows: “Though my opponent (Payne Stewart) was trying hard to protect me from the crowd’s excesses, there was a limit to what he could do. Almost certainly, he was no less shaken than I was by the events on the ninth tee when a spectator had to be ejected after his deliberate attempt to distract me.” So vile was the language aimed at Montgomerie that the Scot’s father, James, walked sadly back to the clubhouse. “His love affair with the Ryder Cup was shattered,” said his son.
Tom Lehman, who had been among those Americans to run on to the green, was among the first to apologise. “We could use a mulligan there,” Lehman said. “It would have been nice to let Justin celebrate (that putt) on his own. It was that incident that somehow spoiled … ” At that point he went off at a tangent to say that “spoiled” was not the right word, and left it at this: “The same thing, the same putt, and the same emotions without people running on the green would have been the better finish.”
Meanwhile, Pádraig Harrington, who won his singles on that dark afternoon, recently found a way to turn the match of ’99 into a positive. No doubt for the benefit of the players he will captain at next year’s match in the States, he said it had turned into a valuable lesson. “It showed how much the Americans had come to care about the Ryder Cup – and that no one should ever go back to thinking that the end result matters only to the Europeans.”