The Green by Troon McAllister

Author:Troon McAllister [McAllister, Troon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-56761-1
Publisher: Crown/Archetype
Published: 1999-11-06T16:00:00+00:00

Eddie helped me out with the pairings, too, but we did that out of earshot of the rest of the guys.

One of the things you had to consider in managing the team was the interaction of the various personalities. They’re like thoroughbreds, these professional athletes who live or die by margins so slim as to be nearly imperceptible, where the difference between being number one or number ninety on the money list might be an average of fewer than two shots per round. You need to worry about who gets paired up with whom in practice rounds, how you phrase things if you need to be critical, stuff like that.

And when you make up the pairings for the doubles rounds on Friday and Saturday, it isn’t just a question of skill. It has as much to do with how well two unique individuals are going to play together. Is one guy willing to hold back and tee off safely so his partner can risk whaling the driver? Depends on who “the other guy” is. And not everybody gets to play every round or even every day, so you have to worry about who gets offended easily and who puts the good of the team above his own ego. All of which is a whole lot less predictable than I’m making it sound.

The captains have no say in who plays against whom, which turns out to be a pretty random process. For the first two days, where teams of two play each other, I will give the officials a sheet showing the four pairs of American players I’m putting up in the morning and the four in the afternoon, along with which of the eight preset tee times each of them will be taking. Jacques St. Villard will do the same for the Europeans. Only then do the officials post the matches. There is no way for one captain to predict whom the other captain will be teaming together or what tee times they’ll be assigned to. It couldn’t be more fair, or more exasperating. Ryder captains long ago gave up even trying to guess, and just did the best they could in trying to match personalities and optimize order of play. And just when you think you have it nailed, or at least as nailed as humanly possible, something unforeseen was probably going to come up and put all your analysis right in the Dumpster.

Each of the pairs matches was worth one point to the winning side, for sixteen points in all over the first two days. In the case of ties, which were typically plentiful, each side got a half point. Adding in the twelve individual matches on Sunday, there were twenty-eight points available in the whole tournament, so whichever side got fourteen and a half points was the winner. And if the whole thing was a dead heat, fourteen points each, the side that had been in possession of the Cup from the last Ryder got to keep it.

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