John Huggan

Chatting it up about golf
September 3, 2006

John Huggan is the European correspondent for both Golf Digest and Golf World. He is also the golf columnist for Scotland on Sunday. He lives in Dunbar, Scotland, where he hits many very bad half-wedge shots from around 75-yards or so.

Today Huggan chats it up about Ian Woosnam's two wild card picks.

- GolfObserver editors

Woosie's picks

In the end, it was all pretty predictable, safety-first stuff from Ian Woosnam.

After the final four stragglers - Thomas Bjorn, Paul Broadhurst, John Bickerton and Johan Edfors - still in with a chance of automatic qualification going into the final counting event, the BMW International Open, all came up short in different ways but with the same air of inevitability, the European skipper was free to round out his Ryder Cup side with the two guys he wanted to choose all along.

So it is that Darren Clarke and Lee Westwood will join David Howell, Luke Donald, Paul Casey, Colin Montgomerie, Paul McGinley, Padraig Harrington, Robert Karlsson, Henrik Stenson, Sergio Garcia and Jose Maria Olazabal in Europe's colours at the K Club later this month. It is a powerful looking side - albeit containing only one major champion - one that will be going for the old world's third win in succession and its fifth in the last six biennial encounters with an increasingly beleaguered United States.

In truth, Woosnam must have had a relatively easy time making up his mind about his two wild cards.

Photo: © Ross Kinnaird & Donald Miralle/Getty Images Ian Woosnam picked Darren Clarke and Lee Westwood as his wildcard picks.

Making a credible case for both Clarke and Westwood, Ryder Cup ever-presents and conquerors of Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson at Oakland Hills two years ago, is hardly the most difficult of tasks.

Still, amidst all this touching warmth and fuzziness the name of Carl Pettersson should not be forgotten. Had the US-based Swede been allowed to join the European Tour at the start of the qualifying period (Pettersson claims he wanted to but was denied by the tour, whose officials insisted he must wait until the beginning of the 2006 season) he would have comfortably made the side without recourse to a wild card. Because of the delay, his PGA Tour victory at the 2005 Chrysler Classic and second place at the State Farm Classic one week later earned the likeable Pettersson nothing in Ryder Cup terms. Then, of course, he won the prestigious Memorial Tournament earlier this year.

Photo: © Ross Kinnaird & Andy Lyons/Getty Images Carl Pettersson did win the prestige Memorial Tournament last May.

It was never to be, however. Even if Pettersson, whose steady game looks ideal for foursomes play, could point to multiple victories on the world's biggest and best circuit during the 12-month qualifying window (and one more than the European Ryder Cup side combined), there was never any real chance of Woosnam burning a pick on someone he couldn't even be bothered to call in the lead up to making his selection. The Welshman has never been one of life's more outward looking individuals and was always going to favour a fellow Brit over a continental European. "Xenophobic" would be too sinister a description for Woosnam's attitude towards those not brought up in the British Isles, but "insular" isn't too far off the mark.

All of which was part of the largely unspoken and rather distasteful subtext lurking behind the absence of Olazabal from the final qualifying event in Germany. Ever since 2000, when he joined the likes of Seve Ballesteros, Nick Faldo and Bernhard Langer in calling for a more detailed look at the European Tour's hitherto mysterious financial affairs, the Spaniard's relationship with his home circuit has been cool and increasingly distant. Certainly, the perks that routinely come the way of a player of Olazabal's standing dried up in the immediate aftermath of what was, at times, an acrimonious dispute. Just a coincidence I'm sure.

Photo: © Warren Little/Getty Images The question would of been if Jose Maria Olazabal was displaced off the top-ten, would he have gotten a wild card spot?

So it is that, as part of the European Tour's almost exclusively British establishment headed by executive director George O'Grady, Woosnam would have been unlikely to look favourably on Olazabal had the proud Basque been displaced by a fast-finisher at the BMW. One suspects that Clarke and Westwood would still have been the two picks.

Having said that, it was a bit rich hearing Montgomerie, of all people, express surprise at Olazabal's decision not to compete in the final qualifying event. Citing tiredness at the end of three successive appearances in the US and the need to recharge his batteries before what will inevitably be a gruelling week at the K Club, Ollie took himself off on a quail shooting expedition in Ohio. And this perfectly justifiable decision was, according to the suddenly saintly Scot, wholly unacceptable.

"He's got a long winter to be tired," snapped the eight-time European number one, who lost to Olazabal in the final of the 1984 British Amateur at Formby and perhaps has yet to either forgive or forget. "If I were in his shoes, I know where I'd be."

So does this correspondent. Based on long and close observation of Monty's almost 20-year professional career, it is an almost certain bet that he would be wherever he was being paid to be. Lest we forget, the curmudgeonly Caledonian has routinely injured his chances in major events by spending the previous week in far-flung but lucrative corners of the globe.

Photo: © Stuart Franklin/Getty Images Colin Montgomerie was a big critic at the BMW of Jose Maria Olazabal not showing up.

Money has always been high on Monty's priority list. Only the week before the BMW event that he deemed so very, very important, he skipped the Bridgestone Invitational, a World Golf Championship no less, to act as non-playing - but surely not unpaid - captain of a "European" team of C-list celebrities against a similarly pathetic bunch of American nonentities. The obligatory guy from "Dallas" was there. And the bloke with the beard from the "West Wing." Take it from someone who needed only ten minutes viewing to make up his mind. . . it wasn't pretty.

That sort of point missing and ego-feeding is nothing new for Monty. By way of further example, witness his preparation for the 1997 US Open at Congressional, a championship he would lose by one shot to Ernie Els. While almost every one of the world's best golfers was already in America one week before the year's second major, Monty was at Slaley Hall in North East England, competing in something called the Compaq European Grand Prix. Having won the meaningless and now long defunct event - and pocketed his appearance fee - he then drove for five hours or so, all the way to London, before rising early the next morning to fly to Washington.

Maybe I'm missing something here, but was it really a huge shock when an obviously fractious and fatigued Monty fell apart over the back nine of his second round 76 only four days later? Has he never heard of jetlag? And this is the man who felt obliged to criticise a fellow professional's schedule? Pulleeezz....

Anyway, such nonsense is in direct contrast to the behaviour routinely displayed by Olazabal over the course of his career. So honourable is the two-time Masters winner that the late Mark McCormack was once moved to comment that he was "a strange man, money means nothing to him." Given that fact, it was hardly surprising that Ollie should express some irritation at Monty's remarks, especially as, in the wake of the cheating allegations that arose from his infamous shennanigans around that bunker in Indonesia last year, the Scot's presence in the European team room two weeks hence will hardly be welcomed by certain other members of the side. "At least make me answerable to someone with some credibility," Ollie seemed to be saying.

All of which runs contrary to the notion - or myth - that European Ryder Cup sides are always universally happy groups filled with smiley faces. While it is certainly true that the level of chumminess routinely outstrips the camaraderie and touchy-feeliness that is so transparently contrived within the US camp, recent European teams have not always been the friendliest either. More than one player - Woosnam being one - has talked darkly of Ballesteros' eccentric captaincy in 1997. Frenchman Jean Van de Velde wasn't slow to register his displeasure at the treatment he and three other rookies received (all four were left out until Sunday's singles) from skipper Mark James in 1999. And two years ago, the selection of Swede Anders Forsbrand as captain Langer's deputy provoked one player to tell the German to "just keep that f-----g guy away from me."

Maybe that's why in every Ryder Cup side there are two "wild" cards.