Europeans Look Tough To Beat

By Chad Hollingsworth
Love of Sports Correspondent

Remember the movie Armageddon?

It starred Bruce Willis and Ben Affleck, along with a pretty solid supporting cast? Had the good fortunes of following up the unbelievably boring Deep Impact in the summer of 1998?

If so, you have to remember how EVERYTHING went wrong for the oil drillers/astronauts in that movie before the somewhat happy ending. Just when something gets fixed or goes right, something else immediately went wrong. The oil guys get the drill to work and in the next scene, the drill breaks. A.J. Frost (Affleck) draws the short straw to die in space in order to save Earth, then Harry Stamper (Willis) pushes him back at the last second and sacrifices himself.

The same thing could be said about the U.S. Ryder Cup team.

Just when things starts to be going well, something bad would happen. Tiger Woods was on course to have the best year of his career (and that’s really saying something), and then he revealed he won the U.S. Open walking around on a torn ACL. He’s Superman with a golf club, but even Superman can’t finish a PGA Tour season on one leg.

Bottom line: no Tiger for Ryder Cup captain Paul Azinger.

Speaking of Azinger, he even managed to get the matches switched around and figured out how to tweak the system to allow him to get four captains picks instead of the usual two. This is great news, right?

Well, at least until Azinger drew raised eyebrows with his picks, of course. Chad Campbell over the likes of Rocco Mediate, D.J. Trahan or Woody Austin? Those three were all ranked higher than Campbell in the Ryder Cup standings.

So now the U.S. team is heading into the Ryder Cup seemingly overmatched against the Europeans. Will there be a Hollywood ending? Let’s take a look at the teams starting with the host country.

The U.S.

Much has been made about how hardly any of the U.S. players have been playing their best golf lately. As a matter of fact, that’s what made Azinger’s picks even more challenging. Phil Mickelson, despite steady play all season, hasn’t won since May. Stewart Cink had a great spring, but hasn’t played well since winning the Travelers Championship in June. At one point this summer, Kenny Perry was a lock to win any tournament. Right now, he hasn’t had a Top 25 finish since July.

At least Anthony Kim, Jim Furyk and Ben Curtis have been playing well during the FedEx Cup tournaments. A case could be made for Hunter Mahan and Steve Stricker as well during August and September. Pretty good isn’t good enough to beat the Europeans, though, at least on paper.

With six rookies on the team, it’s boom or bust for Azinger. None of the veterans on the team have outstanding Ryder Cup records (for example, Furyk’s 6-12-2 in his career). Perhaps the rookies can breathe some new life into a team that badly needs a good performance.

Also working in Azinger’s favor is that half of the team are southern guys and will greatly endear themselves to the gallery at Valhalla Golf Club in Kentucky. The U.S. will need all the help they can get in their efforts to disarm the Europeans, and a home field advantage never hurt anyone. Unless you’re the Florida Marlins and get 200 fans at a game, that is.

Basically, the United States doesn’t seem to have any momentum going into this weekend. Azinger’s going to need to keep an eye on the practice rounds, find a good balance of chemistry and talent and attempt to put together the most productive teams he can.

The Europeans

It’s a pretty good scenario when you make your captains picks and people question why you picked Ian Poulter over Darren Clarke. Nick Faldo had to go through this horrible dilemma, and Poulter nearly qualified for the Ryder Cup, anyway. So goes life for the European team.

Not only has Europe won the past three Cups, they’ve dominated the past two. The good news for the team is that the transition between the older generation to the younger generation has been seamless. Gone are European Ryder Cup vets like Clarke, Colin Montgomerie and Jose Maria Olazabal. Now players like Padraig Harrington, Miguel Angel Jiminez and Lee Westwood are the elder statesmen on the team.

Add this to the fact that many of Europe’s young guys could already be considered Ryder Cup veterans. Sergio Garcia has a 14-2-2 record in the matches. Paul Casey is playing great golf and owns a 3-1-2 record in two Ryder Cup events. Even Europe’s “rookies” are experienced players like Justin Rose and Graeme McDowell.

Not only have a good portion of these guys played in Ryder Cups or World Cup events, Faldo can form partnerships just by looking at his players’ native countries. He’ll likely partner Garcia and Jimenez together (both from Spain) and will have that same option with Harrington/McDowell (Ireland) and Henrik Stenson/Robert Karlsson (Sweden). Five players on the team are from Great Britain as well. Hence, Faldo doesn’t have to tinker with his teams too much if he doesn’t want to.

The bottom line is, most of the guys on the European team had good years on the PGA and/or European Tours. Faldo already has positive chemistry with this team, and he could even claim his team has more collective talent than their U.S. counterparts.

The Outlook

The Cup’s basically Europe’s to lose. To go back to the Armageddon metaphor, Europe is an asteroid and the U.S. is the oil drillers experiencing every setback imaginable trying to stop it.

Can the U.S. emerge victorious this weekend? Yes, they can. However, Azinger’s going to have to hope his top dogs (Mickelson, Cink, Perry) can bring their best golf with them. He’ll also have to figure out which players will make the best pairings while implementing six rookies into the fold.

Finally, the Kentucky gallery will undoubtedly be ready to root the team on, and the U.S. players will have to feed off that energy to make this movie have a happy ending.

It’s no Armageddon, but waiting another two years to try to win the Ryder Cup might seem like the end of the world for the U.S. if it doesn’t happen now.

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