Feature
Ready to prey
Johnny Watterson profiles Tom Lehman, a raw-boned straight talker with a church elder’s honesty who expects his players to match the zealous commitment he brings to the cause
15/09/06: Davis Love III, a veteran of six Ryder Cups, will watch events unfold at the K Club from the USA. Captain’s choice. Although a man of God, charity is not one of the Christian concepts with which Tom Lehman means to arm himself going into a Ryder Cup duel. In the "them" and "us" atmosphere that defines confrontational golf, Love would have been an easy pick for a squad with four rookies. Lehman had other ideas.
The American team captain is not easily defined and from the outside presents an amalgam of ruddy-faced, pioneering strength as well as occasional demonstrations of venality. Lehman is the raw-boned straight talker with an obliging, church elder’s honesty, a man who has shown time and time again that he expects the players to match the zealous commitment he brings to the team cause.
But when he allegedly led the American celebratory charge across the 17th green at Brookline in 1999 following Justin Leonard’s audacious putt that loomed into view from the horizon of the green before outrageously plopping into the cup, Lehman was accused of impetuosity and even the sincerity of his Born-Again-Christian beliefs was called into question by the then European vice-captain Sam Torrance.
It was, Torrance acerbically noted, "disgusting, not what you’d expect from a man of God". The Scot’s belief was that the spontaneous jigging before Jose-Maria Olazabal’s putt to halve the match broke the Spaniard’s concentration. In the dizzy high moral ground that golf continually tries to occupy, the American freestyle celebration simply wasn’t, well, cricket.
Lehman denied leading the charge but argues that his imperfections sit comfortably with his convictions.
"I play golf the same way as I lead my life," he told the Sunday Times in April. "I’m somewhat impulsive. I’m a very calm person until I get pushed so far. Then I can let it go and slam my bag or whatever it might be. I’m not above and beyond getting really upset, but it takes me a while to get there."
But the accusation left him seething and when the Ryder Cup came to the Belfry two years later the topic was still burning. Expecting to be a captain’s pick, having finished 11th in the American rankings, Lehman was overlooked by skipper Curtis Strange for rookie Scott Verplank and Paul Azinger. Accusations of political wrangling because of the bitterness generated in Brookline landed on Strange’s desk. All were flatly denied.
Despite Lehman’s strong 3-0 playing record in the event and his run of never having had a bogey in the singles, Strange claimed then that the player’s form and mental strength were in question after his fourth child was tragically still-born just weeks previously.
On his son Thomas’s sixth birthday, Lehman had driven his five months pregnant wife, Melissa, to hospital, where Samuel Edward was delivered. He sat weeping on a rocking chair holding the baby in his large hands for 10 hours as if he were alive.
"Those words were really uncalled for. I couldn’t think of anything sweeter than to go over there, let my clubs do the talking, win the thing and celebrate on the 18th green right in front of their fans," he said at the time in a pique of frustration.
A man who the former professional Johnny Miller once described as the one golfer he would choose to stand alongside him in the trenches, Lehman has finally been given his chance to dance in victory beside the lake that marks the K Club’s 18th green, if the match goes that far.
Matching his words with innovation, he is also the first captain in the competition’s history to bring his squad to the venue weeks before the event begins in order to promote the American cause.
Doubtlessly, when 12 players and their caddies were shoehorned into a jet in Cleveland, Ohio last month and flown to Dublin for a few days at the K Club, the gesture was in part a public relations exercise for what Americans will, with good reason, perceive to be a hostile European gallery but it was also, demonstrably, a strong captain’s decision.
The reality is that the Americans are seen to be a group of players unused to travelling beyond the borders of their own country. Given the US PGA circuit is the most lucrative in the world, American golfers play less often abroad than their European counterparts and so spend less time in airports, private jets and hotel restaurants in each other’s company.
"The perception of our guys is that they all roll in their own little universes," Lehman said in April. "I want to help them understand that their own little universes are more closely linked than they think.
"A lot of guys have egos, a pride in what they do and they don’t want to open out. They don’t want to show what they really feel. That’s probably the main thing I have going for me as captain. My personality, my openness and honesty can encourage guys to be the same way."
Lehman, who began to read the bible as a teenager, was always consumed by sport. His father Jim earned a place on the roster with the National Football League’s Baltimore Colts in 1958 and, had Tom failed to make it as a golfer, his fallback option was to be a basketball coach.
His opinion, drawn from the great UCLA coach John Wooden, is that you don’t need to be best friends to make a great team, but you must possess a unity of purpose, where everyone plays a clearly defined role. Lehman has also sought out the opinions of several other high-profile American team coaches in an effort to understand the sort of group dynamics and collegiate nuances that don’t come easily to a sport where the players are profoundly self-absorbed. The early trip to the K Club was Lehman’s first step in putting into action that line of thinking.
The bible and life’s experience also give him a purpose that is more strongly expressed than in most people and, when an unhinged local malcontent named Troy Willis Smith pulled up alongside Lehman’s courtesy Cadillac Escalade and took a shot at him as he drove to the airport from Augusta National following this year’s Masters, it reinforced his beliefs.
"The bible says ‘if your neighbour asks you to carry a bag for one mile, you should carry it for two.’ The idea is to go above and beyond," he says.
In a way that explains his tenacity and may even inspire those who are finding the professional tour a hostile and unforgiving environment. In his first spell on the US circuit between 1983 and 1985, he made just 28 cuts and earned less than $50,000.
In the late 1980s, he carved out a frugal life on the tier two mini-tournaments in the US as well as travelling abroad to far-flung venues in Asia and South Africa. The experience made him battle-hardened and in 1991 a glimmer of light appeared when he won the Nike Tour Player of the Year, which set him up to return to top flight golf in 1992. There the new money and old attitude launched him into the top of the game and four years later in Royal Lytham the 1996 British Open followed wins at the 1994 Memorial Tournament and 1995 Colonial National Invitational.
To date Lehman, who was for a week ranked the number one golfer in the world, has won a modest five PGA events and earned $18,764,165 in prize money. He is currently lying 49th in this year’s PGA money list with $1,635,208.
"If you had told me when I started out that I would win the Open, I would have said you were crazy, but we all progress at a different rate and I was a late bloomer," he says.
Beast of Brookline or man of passion? People will decide when Lehman pulls up a stool for the first time in Ireland and makes his case. His old-world sense of courtesy and humility will be admired here, his convictions too and when people look into his plausibly sincere, broad face and listen to his earthy homilies Lehman will be persuasive. But behind that the 47-year-old from Minnesota will be losing sleep over how to sink Europe and regain America’s tarnished reputation of having won only one Ryder Cup since 1999. Americans care too much, is his view.
Their weakness is their reluctance to show it. And Davis Love III, who was "a difficult, difficult phone call for me to make, out of respect for him, out of my admiration for him". Love III will have been long forgotten.