Team USA's Forgotten Formula for Winning the Ryder Cup
The magnitude of the moment had barely begun to register with Paul Azinger as he sat at the decorated dais, the crowd trickling out of the room, his wife at his left elbow and a bottled water in his hand.
His team had just won the 2008 Ryder Cup in demonstrative fashion, ending a run of European dominance that had become a point of embarrassment, if not occasional outrage, to the captains, players and, heck, most of America.
As his victorious team filed out of the press center, Azinger fidgeted with the plastic bottle and faced the inevitable question about signing on for another hitch as captain. The U.S. team’s future in the biennial matches with the Europeans, which had felt pessimistically half-empty for so long, suddenly seemed optimistically half full.
His wife, Toni, smiled. Hoping to bask in the afterglow for a spell, Azinger hemmed and hawed, then noted that he would have to be invited first.
The phone call never came. The PGA of America, which runs the Ryder Cup in the States and selects the American captain, explained it had more captains-to-be in the line of succession than there were upcoming Ryder Cups available to lead, a list that included players such as Tiger Woods, Phil Mickelson, Jim Furyk and Steve Stricker.
The organization ended up naming Corey Pavin and Davis Love III as captains in 2010 and 2012, respectively.
"Then they gave it to Tom Watson," Azinger cracked last week.
As the Yanks and Euros resume the one-sided battle this weekend at Hazeltine National Golf Club in suburban Minneapolis, the debacle of 2014 under Watson, a blowout loss in Scotland, isn’t far from the minds of many.
Yet again, the Americans are searching for emergency fixes and explanations after losing six of the past seven Ryder competitions. To some, the answer seems as clear as the liquid in Azinger’s old plastic bottle.
Under the charismatic former PGA Championship winner, who arrived in 2008 with a definitive and distinct plan of action, the Yanks won the Cup for the only time this century, yet the trio of losing captains who followed Azinger’s term only used bits and pieces of his game-changing blueprint, if that.
Eight years and three Ryder defeats later, Azinger still gives occasional speeches to corporate America about how and why his plan worked and why it’s suited for group environments. He even co-wrote a book about the week called Cracking the Code: The Winning Ryder Cup Strategy: Make it Work for You. But the PGA has effectively moved onward, if not downward, searching for answers.
"It was not a fluke," Azinger said of his game plan, which sorted players into squads by personality type. "I’m not saying it’s a guarantee. But I’m happy we won, and we did win for a reason."
The disaster of 2014 only underscored the lengths to which the PGA has gone in search of a win. Looking for an infusion of past success, the organization brought Hall of Famer Watson, who captained a winning effort in 1993, back aboard, and the Yanks were savaged, 16 ½ to 11 ½. It was ugly, ignominious and perhaps marked rock-bottom.
The PGA of America, under then-President Ted Bishop, announced the formation of a task force in the rout’s aftermath to study potential fixes, with Furyk, Mickelson and Woods serving as panel members. Incidentally, that trio ranks Nos. 1, 2 and 3 in all-time Ryder Cup losses among American players, respectively.
"We got beat by 35 shots over the course of three days," Bishop said last week of the 2014 blowout. "I don’t care who the captain would have been or what decisions were made from a strategic standpoint, you can’t overcome a deficit like that."
The U.S. frustration boiled over in stunning fashion moments after the matches ended, when Mickelson openly questioned Watson’s management and methodology before dozens of TV cameras and hundreds of writers from around the world. Awkwardly, Watson was seated only a few feet away.
"I'm just talking about what Paul Azinger did to help us play our best,” Mickelson said as several teammates shifted uncomfortably in their chairs. "You asked me what I thought we should do going forward to bring our best golf out, and I go back to when we played our best golf and try to replicate that formula."
Given the hand-wringing over the two years since Lefty aired his gripes, Azinger’s mold-busting template has never seemed more sound. And what makes it all the more interesting is that the primary component of his plan came together because he was too lazy to get off his couch. Indeed, the scheme was largely a happy accident.
A few months before his captaincy began, Azinger sat at home watching TV. A show about Gibson guitars had ended, but he couldn’t find the remote control. So he fluffed up the pillow and decided to watch whatever aired next, which happened to be a program detailing the U.S. Navy SEALs' unique training regimen. Laziness and lethargy were never more rewarded.
"Never moved a muscle," Azinger said, laughing. "Never felt guilty about sitting there, either."
Before long, though, he was seated bolt upright and tracking every word. The program explained how the SEALs built stronger units by being divided into smaller groups, wherein the men became more invested in the safety and success of the others in their pod. Instantly, he knew it could translate to his Ryder captaincy.
He divided the dozen Americans into three groups of four, based on their perceived profiles as aggressive, passive or cautionary types of players. Specifically, Azinger said he divided them based on whether they were green-, yellow- or red-light personalities. Players practiced and were paired in matches only with those from their four-man pod.
Azinger knew team bonding for a Ryder Cup squad was a long shot.
"You could probably get 12 guys to bond if it was a season," he said, "but this isn’t a season. There is no spring training.
"Four seems to be the perfect number: Four legs on a chair, four wheels on a car, when people play golf you yell 'fore' when somebody hits it off line, there are four forces in the universe, four quarters in a dollar, four people play bridge, you’ve got the four majors in golf..."
The selection of the last three wild-card players was another key component to the team’s success. With no obvious picks on the board, Azinger decided to defer to the players in the pods. He called Mickelson, Justin Leonard and Anthony Kim, who had made the team already via the points list, and gave them a list of six like-minded players. Mickelson called back an hour later and said they wanted Hunter Mahan, who had never before played in the event.
He gave podmates Stewart Cink, Ben Curtis and Stricker three names: Scott Verplank, Rocco Mediate and Chad Campbell. Azinger was hoping they'd give Verplank the nod, but the trio picked Campbell. Either way, mission accomplished.
"They completely sold-out for each other," Azinger said. "Those were the guys they wanted, so that’s who they got. They were bonded, dude. Every pod bonded like that."
For Campbell, who played on three Ryder teams, being handpicked by his brethren made a big difference between the ears. It's a lot easier to play good golf when you're getting along with your playing partner than when you're swearing at him under your breath between shots.
"It made you a touch more comfortable because the guys I was playing with wanted me to be there," Campbell said. "It wasn’t a big secret who I was going to be playing with that week, like it was other years sometimes."
Few realized what Azinger, who has played poker professionally in Las Vegas, had up his sleeve. Nobody outside the team room had a clue that the players had picked their final pod partners.
"We were also bonded by our secret, too, which was kind of cool," Azinger said.
Azinger eschewed fiery rah-rah speeches and Kumbaya morale-building moments with players and their wives, intentionally putting his own ego in neutral. As for his successors, particularly the decidedly old-school Watson, not so much.
"Not only did [Watson] not put his personality aside, he put it front and center, and said, 'This is how it’s going to be,' and the players bristled," Azinger said.
Indeed, over and over, U.S. captains have had the license to steer the Ryder ship as they saw fit, only to end up on similar shoals. Azinger also had great latitude, well before his celebrated pod system was instituted.
The organization had revised the points system and gave him four wild-card selections rather than the traditional two. He personally picked Stricker before allowing the team to choose the last three. He also demanded that the Valhalla Golf Club course be set up to his liking, another first. The night before the Friday matches, workers were trimming trees so that the American bombers had a better chance to prevail.
The Yanks cruised, winning 16 ½ to 11 ½, marking their lone victory since 1999.
Whether the lopsided win was a direct result of Azinger’s off-center game plan is impossible to know, but at minimum, fans can point fingers and suggest that his tactics played a role.
Campbell, for one, has never understood why the PGA, which has tapped losing 2012 captain Love again this year, didn’t give Azinger a second helping.
"Totally, they should have," Campbell said. "I was shocked that he didn’t get serious consideration the next year. It was surprising to me, because I talked to him a little bit, and I know he was interested."
After Mickelson’s uncommonly blunt comments following the 2014 blowout, Bishop’s task force made another round of changes to the points system, revamped the qualifying timeline and, lastly, instituted a formalized line of succession for U.S. assistant captains, a plan the Europeans have used to great effect for two decades.
"The European assistants are going to be captains," Azinger said. "None of their assistants are going to change anything because they have had so much success."
Whether the new U.S. tweaks change the short-term outcome or not, at least there will be some continuity in the captaincy ranks going forward. Tellingly, Azinger said he never spoke to Pavin, who served as the U.S. captain two years after Azinger’s team won at Valhalla.
His contact with Watson was limited, although Love has picked his brain several times. Love, whose team lost a closely contested Ryder Cup at Medinah Country Club four years ago, was expected to use some semblance of the pod system during practice at Hazeltine this week.
The Americans had lost five of six Ryder competitions entering 2008. As the latest American losing streak has reached three, it’s difficult to believe that Azinger’s phone never rang or that his Valhalla blueprint didn’t become the standard by which future teams were constructed—whether that was his intention at the time or not.
"We put together a system that was similar to what [the Europeans] did, except that my system was just a one-off," Azinger said. "It wasn’t built for future Ryder Cups; it was for one Ryder Cup."
It was a one-and-done proposition, to be sure. The Yanks haven’t won since, though that didn’t stop Love from saying earlier this month that his roster of 12 players might represent the greatest U.S. team ever amassed. It drew predictable smirks. Said European star Rory McIlroy: "They've definitely assembled the best task force ever."
While Azinger declined the PGA’s invitation to join the task-force panel, he said he met with organization officials four times to discuss fixing what seems broken. He was particularly vocal about having U.S. assistants serve as apprentices before being elevated to the captaincy.
While the game plan this week in Minnesota reflects only a few nuances from his groundbreaking battle plan of eight years ago, Azinger thinks the Yanks might finally have found a proper path.
"I honestly think that this is the year the U.S. just demolishes Europe," he said. "While I say that the margin in these matches is razor-thin, the U.S. is ready, and Europe is not strong. I think these guys are organized, and they finally have a system in place."
All quotes and information gathered firsthand except where noted.
.jpg?w=480 "NFL Meetings Football")
