US sorry, but not too sorry

Jeff Maggert may have set the stage for all of this earlier in the week when he proclaimed the US Ryder Cup team "the 12 best golfers in the world." Whether they upheld that claim with Sunday's comeback performance may be open to some debate, but there is no disputing that the US golfers showed themselves to be the world's 12 biggest assholes.

The infantile celebration which accompanied Justin Leonard's improbable 45-footer that all but iced the Cup was a thoughtlessly appalling breach of sportsmanship. While Jose Maria Olazabal stood forlornly by, awaiting his turn to attempt a putt that could have halved the hole and kept Europe's hopes alive, members of the American team were stomping all over the green, exchanging high-fives, bear-hugs, and war-whoops.

"I would like to think," Mark James later reflected on the episode, "that wouldn't happen with my players."

Off to one side, Olazabal's young protege Sergio Garcia and Spanish countryman Miguel Angel Jimenez protested in vain to the match referee, but between the celebrating players and the rowdy crowd, many of whom were by now behaving like ice hockey fans who'd gotten lost on their way to the FleetCenter, there was to be no abating.

Although US Captain Ben Crenshaw later apologised, the damage had been done - and that Tom Lehman was one of the principal culprits is particularly inexcusable, since on the same green not minutes earlier he had done precisely the same thing.

When Mark O'Meara holed an eight-footer to ensure at least a halved hole in his gripping match with Padraig Harrington, Lehman had charged onto the green to hug O'Meara, trampling all over Harrington's line in the process.

O'Meara then graciously conceded Harrington's two-foot par putt. The Irish golfer felt it might have been conceded anyway, and that O'Meara had only made him mark the ball in the first place for, as they say, negotiating purposes.

"I was going to hole it anyway," said Harrington. "I wasn't putting very well, but I certainly wasn't going to miss from 18 inches. Mark was just being a gentleman."

Be that as it may, Lehman surely should have learned his lesson there.

Instead, moments later, there he was leading another stampede out onto the green.

"You know, what happened on 17 was unfortunate, but in the excitement of the moment, Justin making a 50 (actually, it was more like 45) foot putt to probably clinch the Ryder Cup, we all got excited," said Lehman. "There was never any ill intent on anyone's part in any way whatsoever. Obviously, in retrospect, we probably wish we all would have jumped up and down in place instead of running down the side of the green.

"But I'm not going to apologise for being excited," said the defiant Lehman. "It was a great day for the American team."

In other words, he was sorry, but not too sorry.

Nor does Leonard's subsequent recollection of the incident - "As far as I know, I was never on the green when we were all going nuts" - wash. They were all over the green, and if Leonard didn't know that, he is an even bigger idiot than Tom Lehman.

That Crenshaw might have done the gentlemanly thing and ordered Leonard to concede Olazabal's putt seems to have occurred to no one.

From where she was seated beside the right greenside bunker, in fact, Julie Crenshaw, the American Captain's wife, leaned over and whispered to Jarmo Sandelin "I'm sorry they got on the green."

"That's too much," replied a glowering Sandelin.

Well, it was too much, but it was very much in keeping with what went on all week. Both Crenshaw and James thought they had put a lid on all of this stuff going into the matches. Moments after he stepped off the Concorde on Monday, in fact, James had described 1991's Kiawah Island "War at the Shore" as a low-water mark in Ryder Cup annals, and said that he and Crenshaw had taken steps to ensure that proper decorum would obtain during the 1999 staging of golf's premier international event.

Just what those steps might have been is anybody's guess, but the American players evidently didn't pay much attention.

In the first match on the first day, Phil Mickelson missed a putt from the apron, leaving Paul Lawrie-Colin Montgomerie two for the match from a distance of less than five feet. After consultation with partner David Duval, Mickelson made the British Open champion putt the first one before conceding.

A day later, as Montgomerie stood over a 10-foot birdie putt on the sixth, a voice from the audience bellowed out a familiar refrain - "Mrs Doubtfire!!"- causing Monty to back away from the putt as most of the audience then heckled the heckler.

Montgomerie and Lawrie correctly accused the American duo of Hal Sutton and Maggert of "geeing up" the crowd with their impromptu celebrations on the green on Saturday, and the audience was riding Montgomerie hard enough on Sunday that opponent Payne Stewart took Monty aside five holes into the match and said "if it happens again, let me handle it."

All told, it was, as Olazabal described it, "a pretty ugly picture", and ascribing it to the emotion of the moment or blaming Valderrama simply isn't good enough.

Instead of basking in the limelight of what they never stopped describing as "the greatest comeback in Ryder Cup history," the American players ought to be ashamed of themselves. That they are not makes it all the more disturbing.