Feature
Star earns his stripes
George Kimball talks to the ‘War on the Shore’ veteran Corey Pavin, whose Ryder Cup record made him an ideal recruit as assistant captain to Tom Lehman
15/09/06: In his Ryder Cup debut, Tom Lehman was partnered by Corey Pavin in the 1995 matches at Oak Hill. Their foursomes duel against the formidable pairing of Nick Faldo and Colin Montgomerie was the first match of the competition, and came to the 17th all square.
By then Lehman, was, by his own admission, "so nervous I could barely swing the club", and Pavin was fearful that his team-mate was about to hyperventilate. "I told him I was nervous and having a hard time controlling my emotions," recalled Lehman. "And Corey said ‘Look, just get committed and swing’."
Pavin thereupon drove into the rough off the final tee. From that lie, and a distance of 205 yards, Lehman committed himself to a five-iron and hit it onto the centre of the green. The Americans two-putted for a one-up win. Lehman describes Pavin’s mantra as "the best advice I’ve ever gotten in golf".
"Just get committed and swing," reflected the 2006 Ryder Cup captain, "that advice was invaluable to me for my whole career."
European golf fans may find it difficult to reconcile the image of Corey Pavin as a steadying influence with the pugnacious, flag-waving, fist-pumping dervish who emerged from the 1991 "War on the Shore" as the veritable poster boy for the rampant jingoism that has come to characterise the Ryder Cup in recent years.
But, said Lehman in naming him his chief sidekick for the 2006 edition of the matches, "Corey’s record as a competitor is respected throughout golf. He’s one of the best pressure putters I’ve seen, and his tenacity while a member of the US Ryder Cup team was inspirational."
When Lehman deputised Pavin and Loren Roberts as his assistant captains for the 2006 matches he knew he was adding a pair of veterans with a wealth of Ryder Cup experience, but a funny thing happened on the way to the K Club. On the last weekend in July, Roberts won a play-off to capture the Senior British Open title at Turnberry, while Pavin posted a-wire-to-wire victory at the US Bank Championship in Milwaukee.
Pavin’s triumph, his first tour win in a decade, was particularly unlikely. A 46-year-old whose distance off the tee ranked him dead last in that PGA tour statistic blasted out of the box with eight birdies in the first nine holes he played at Brown Deer Park. His nine-hole score of 26 set a tour record, and he never looked back.
His win in Wisconsin vaulted him from 111th to 26th place on the US Ryder Cup points table, and suddenly people were discussing the possibility of Lehman adding one, and possibly both, of his assistants to the team as captain’s picks.
"Tom and I never discussed it," said Pavin. "To even have had that opportunity I’d have had to play very well at the International or the PGA, and probably both. It would have been a strange position, anyway, because part of my job as an assistant captain was supposed to be discussing potential picks with Tom."
In some quarters Pavin’s presence at the K Club might be viewed as a red flag. At Kiawah back in 1991, the diminutive American bulldog memorably sallied off to battle clad in a camouflage "Desert Storm" cap, and when he wasn’t playing golf assumed a secondary role, whipping the crowds into a frenzy as the principal American cheerleader.
Pavin is quick to note that Kiawah wasn’t the first place Ryder Cup crowds were loud, demonstrative, and partisan. The same thing had occurred two years earlier at the Belfry. And he wasn’t the only one wearing a Desert Storm cap at Kiawah. US Captain Dave Stockton wore one, too. "I think people misinterpreted that," Pavin reflected last month. "The message was never supposed to be that the Ryder Cup was a war. We were just trying to show support for our troops."
Pavin believes that the reasons he was chosen for his advisory role at the K Club are threefold. "First of all, (Lehman) and I are friends," he said. "That certainly doesn’t hurt.
"Tom knows that I have Ryder Cup experience, and that I understand the style of play in this competition and that I know what it takes to win," added Pavin, whose overall Cup record is 8-5 ( 7-3 over his final two appearances and 4-1 in his last).
"Another reason," said Pavin, "is that I might potentially be a Ryder Cup captain myself in the future, and this will be a valuable experience from that standpoint."
Mentoring younger players also comes with the territory, and Lehman and his vice-captains figure to face a more formidable than usual task in that department, since the composition of the American team includes four first-time Ryder Cuppers. It isn’t just that Vaughn Taylor, JJ Henry, Zach Johnson and Brett Wetterich are unfamiliar to Europeans: they’re not exactly household names in America, either.
But, noted Pavin, every Ryder Cupper was once a rookie. When it was suggested (as it was on one US golf website last month) that "someone is going to have to change the diapers" of the newcomers, Pavin replied: "I don’t look at it that way at all.
"You want the best players, and the guys who have qualified for the team have shown that they are among the best players, whether they have Ryder Cup experience or not. They’re all guys who know how to win, and I think they have a pretty good idea of what’s in store for them."
And if they don’t? "I’m sure Tom and Loren and I will speak to them beforehand, but they know what this is all about," said Pavin. "By the time they’ve played three practice rounds in front of 20,000 people, they’re going to have a pretty good idea."
Pavin anticipates a highly partisan audience of the variety that has come to characterise Ryder Cup crowds.
"There’s definitely a different atmosphere from what you see at a regular tournament," he said. "I only played one Ryder Cup overseas, at the Belfry in 1993, and after what had happened at Kiawah (captains) Tom Watson and Bernard Gallacher got together and deliberately tried to tone some of it down.
"But (at the K Club) I expect there’ll be a lot of cheering for the Europeans, and polite applause when we do something good," predicted Pavin. "Don’t get me wrong, there will be some support for the US, but we all know it’s not like your everyday tournament.
"Some people will even be cheering when we miss putts, but fans have the right to cheer for whomever they wish.
"Sure, Ryder Cup crowds are crazy and wild, but if they acted that way at a soccer match nobody would say anything," he pointed out.
If that much is predictable, is it even possible to restore the Ryder Cup to its one-time position as a "friendly competition between gentlemen golfers," or have we now reached the stage where that would be like trying to put the toothpaste back in the tube?
"I think it still is a gentlemanly competition," said Pavin. "A lot of that other stuff has been blown out of proportion by the fans and by the press, but almost all of my Ryder Cup experiences have been overwhelmingly positive, whether we’ve won or lost.
"In fact, one of my most treasured memories came in a Ryder Cup. Loren Roberts and I were playing Bernhard Langer and Nick Faldo in a fourball at Oak Hill, and on the last hole I chipped in to win the match one-up. The crowd, of course, went crazy, but Bernhard smiled at me and I nodded at him. We didn’t say a word, but I knew he was saying ‘Hey, great shot,’ and I acknowledged that. Those moments are few and far between in golf, and I’m glad that it happened in a Ryder Cup."
In what has emerged as an era of European dominance, amateur psychologists have ascribed this edge to a difference in mindsets: whether the Americans have the more talented golfers or not tends to be irrelevant if Team Europe, which it usually does, plays as a team.
"Well, their guys do appear to get along fantastically," conceded Pavin. "They want to win, they’re all on the same page, but I don’t think there’s any big mystery to it. The biggest difference is that they’ve been making the putts when it counts and we haven’t.
"Everyone assumes that we have the better players and they have the better team, but what gets overlooked is that the Europeans have some great players," said Pavin. "It hasn’t been a fluke that they’ve won the cup five of the last six times. We’re the underdogs, there’s no two ways about it – and this year, they have home-field advantage as well."
It has been reasonably argued (by Jack Nicklaus, among others) that the European advantage might be even more pronounced were the 2006 matches being played at, say, Portmarnock, rather than on the American-style, Arnold Palmer-designed course at Straffan.
Remarkably, as of mid-August, Pavin had yet to lay eyes on the K Club. Although he allowed that he, Lehman, and Roberts "might go over for a little visit", prior to the commencement of hostilities, going into the PGA Championship at Medinah, the US assistant captain had never seen the course.
"I know how the course sets up, and I’ve talked to Tom about it," said Pavin. "But right now everything I know about the K Club is what I’ve seen on the website."