Gentle Ben may prove no soft touch for Europe

Ben Crenshaw has gone to each of his players with the terse instruction: "If you have a problem, keep a lid on it with the press." The extent to which his rebels toe the line at Brookline next week, however, will depend on how much steel lies behind the popular image of Gentle Ben in his role of US Ryder Cup captain.

Those who know the 47-year-old Texan, will argue that you don't necessarily get what you see. As one American observer put it: "Crenshaw is like most champions - a killer whose father happened to teach him to be polite." That side of the man was easily recognisable during his splendid US Masters triumphs of 1984 and 1995.

Then there was the chilling menace with which he infused the words "it burns the hell out of me to listen to some of their viewpoints", as he turned on the Ryder Cup rebels at Medinah last month.

On the other side, there is the player who has lost all eight play-offs in which he has been involved on the US Tour, including the 1979 USPGA Championship against David Graham. And the US Open records tell us of a third-place finish at Medinah in 1975, when a dumped ball in the water on the 71st, cost him a play-off with John Mahaffey and the eventual winner, Lou Graham.

Meanwhile, there is Crenshaw's notorious temper which, though not necessarily reflecting steel, sits rather uncomfortably with the Gentle Ben image. Ironically, most of his outbursts on the golf course have had to do with the greatest strength of his game - putting.

His father, Charlie, who died last year, gave him a present of his celebrated blade putter, later to become known as "Little Ben", for his 15th birthday. By Crenshaw's own admission "it first got broken when I was 16. It ran up a tree or something". Since then, the shaft has been replaced on numerous occasions by a player who is thought to have been even more demanding on equipment than the youthful Bobby Jones.

One of those occasions was in the Ryder Cup at Muirfield Village in 1987. After three-putting the sixth to go two down against Eamonn Darcy - the problem lay not with his putter but with a badly wayward approach shot - Crenshaw smashed "Little Ben" in temper, en route to the seventh tee.

All of those incidents combine in a decidedly complex image. It is one which has left the highly knowledgeable NBC television anchorman, Johnny Miller, unconvinced about Crenshaw's credentials for captaincy. Sceptics were not reassured when he chose as his assistants the eccentric Bruce Lietzke and former British Open champion Bill Rogers, both of whom were colleagues of his in the supreme, 1981 Ryder Cup team at Walton Heath.

"If recent history tells us anything, it's that the best Ryder Cup teams are led by tough, businesslike, hands-on captains, who have a way of bringing out the best in their players," said Miller. "Seve Ballesteros, Tony Jacklin, Tom Watson and Dave Stockton were all that way."

Miller went on: "Ben, on the other hand, is one of the warmest, most trusting people I've ever known. I'm hoping he doesn't adopt a hands-off, just-go-play policy. If he does, the Americans could suffer their third straight loss to the Europeans."

Everything that Crenshaw has done so far, however, seems to be pointing towards the role model Watson projected when leading the side to victory at The Belfry in 1993. Firstly, there was the way he dealt with Fred Couples who was seen by many as an obvious choice as a wild-card, despite a decidedly indifferent season.

Crenshaw didn't buy the notion that the player had no interest in extending a sequence of appearances going back to his defeat by Christy O'Connor Jnr at The Belfry in 1989. "Fred Couples always wanted to be on this team," he insisted. "And the players love him." Then the US skipper added: "It was tremendously difficult (to leave him out), but I could only do what I thought was right for the team."

He also tackled David Duval over what he considered to be the dreadful slight of dismissing the Ryder Cup as an exhibition. "I talked to David about this exhibition stuff and I told him `You haven't even played in one yet. Wait till you get there,"' said Crenshaw. "And I warned him he should hire someone to massage his feet, because I was going to ride him hard in Boston."

HE went on: "I've encouraged our players not to be shy. I've asked them what it would mean to each one of them, personally, to put an end to the second longest Ryder Cup drought in US history. If they've got issues to raise, they're welcome to do so. But they must know that the Europeans have to be feasting on all this talk over here about finances, as if they aren't united enough. That's why I wanted the air cleared at Medinah."

When the matter came to a head last month, many observers felt that the PGA of America did no more than buy an uneasy peace. That it would take only a spark to get the malcontents - Mark O'Meara, Tiger Woods, Duval and Phil Mickelson - all fired up again.

If Crenshaw feared such a development, it wasn't evident in his conciliatory tone. "We forget that Tiger and David have so much more going on than we did," he said. "And they handle it unbelievably well." "If I know Tiger, and I believe I know him pretty good, he will put all the talk about money and things behind him and concentrate on being the best player he can be. Of course I will be looking to him, the same way that Mark James is looking at Sergio (Garcia).

"In fact I'm confident they'll all be fine. I've just asked them that if they have a problem, they should save it for the right time and place." Crenshaw added: "I have talked to the players about certain attitudes to money and regardless of what has happened, I impressed on them our need to be a team. Because we know it is one of Europe's strengths. We have a tremendously talented bunch of individuals who are intent and focused. They know that only their best efforts will be good enough.

"As for pairings, I believe, for instance, that you don't necessarily want a short hitter with a long hitter, even though it has worked sometimes in the past. If I have a problem right now, it is having a team with not too many weaknesses. So how to put these guys together has been my hardest task in the build up to the Ryder Cup."

Most captains are motivated by a basic desire to succeed, if only to prove their leadership qualities. Crenshaw's motivation is very different to the norm. He is moved not by money, nor by a desperate need to beat those European upstarts. For him, golf is about history, tradition and celebrated courses. In that context, the Ryder Cup represents everything he holds dear.

"I have enjoyed putting the pieces of the puzzle together and I want my players to enjoy the week while achieving the objective of winning back the trophy," he said. "Television viewers all over the globe know they are going to tune into a close match, a very competitive match. That is why I have emphasised to my players the importance of the short game. That's how matches are won."

As if endorsing the decision by his European counterpart Mark James in not picking Nick Faldo, he said: "You have to get the ball into the cup. In the last few meetings, the Europeans did a beautiful job of getting the ball up and down in tough situations and holing out. They also had sustained play throughout their line-up. That's what wins holes.

"We've lost the last two cups, so I will be asking my team what sort of players they think they are. Some of them have suffered the last loss at Valderrama, so they understand what it's all about." Crenshaw went on to talk about his love for The Country Club. "I think it's a wonderful, old-fashioned test," he said. "It's rustic, it's natural and it tests every conceivable shot. I think it's going to be a classic matchplay course because there's short parfours, like the fourth (338 yards) and sixth (312 yards) and a very tough middle stretch provided by the 10th (439), 11th (453) and 12th (450), which are very tough par-fours.

"At the 14th (527-yard par five) you will probably see the long hitters getting there in two. And the course has an exciting finish. We all know historically what happened on the 17th (a 381-yard par four which influenced the destination of three US Opens). "Then there are the very, very small greens. It will be problematic hitting the ball onto those small greens if you have say, just medium rough. So accurate driving will be rewarded if a player is to be in the best position for his approach." It is said that from as far back as their college days at the University of Texas, Crenshaw and Tom Kite were engaged in a blood feud as golfing rivals. Those sort of feelings tend to endure, especially when it comes to measuring success in one's chosen sport.

Crenshaw would have watched from a distance, probably without much sympathy, as Kite led his troops to defeat at Valderrama in 1997, to leave the Ryder Cup in European hands for another two years. History, tradition and sentiment aside, nothing would please him more than to outdo his fellow Texan just one more time.

Gentle Ben faces an unenviable task at Brookline next weekend, but the feeling among his compatriots is that he will become callously cold-blooded in pursuit of his objective. Which could mean the destruction of yet another beloved golfing image.