Feature
Eye on the prize
Europe’s instinctive and uncomplicated captain Ian Woosnam is raising the bar, not propping it up, writes Johnny Watterson
15/09/06: Lights on. Woosie turns and smiles and gives that old raised-eye come-on. Hair buffed to a bright sheen, teeth tombstone white and the little 5 ft 4in former Major winner swivels towards the camera dressed head to toe in fire engine red Glenmuir golf attire.
It is a passable impression of the Donegal executioner of popular ballads, Daniel O’Donnell. Europe’s Ryder Cup captain cannot be condemned for making a buck but makeovers are the antithesis of Ian Woosnam. Adverts on Sky Sports can do what they wish but Woosnam’s strength of character is as it has always been. He is the farmer’s son, the Oswestry bale thrower and a pints man too, the 1991 US Masters winner, who has never been able to shake off the old tabloid epithet "Boozy Woozie".
When he and Nick Faldo were in the running for this year’s captaincy, the saying went that Woosnam scored more with pints in the bar, Faldo with points on the golf course. So goes the stripped-down reason why the Welshman leads Europe in the K Club and not the Englishman, whose self-possession many prefer to admire from a distance.
But the six-times Major winner, Faldo, will be given his lap of honour in the next edition of the competition in the US. The heavy betting is on his style being dramatically different from the Welshman.
For Woosnam, the caricature both credits him with the quality that Faldo clearly lacks - the common touch - and also does him a disservice. While the lounge lizard implications, backed up by the disapproving comments from Seve Ballesteros and the occasional lawman over the years, are frowned on by the maximum-achievers and puritans, it also marks Woosnam out as having the strength of character to ignore the normal golfing paradigms.
The strength of the former rural lad is that, despite the millionaire adornments of a house in Barbados and a private jet, he has never drifted from his Welsh border moorings. Woosnam’s venial flaws are unhidden and constantly open to inspection, which makes the heavily combed hair and sparkling eyes quite an arresting sight at a time when children are still watching.
"You can shove the Boozie Woozie stuff down the bog," said Woosnam just after his appointment in March of last year. "I never got to number one in the world or won the Masters by not being dedicated to the game. It’s in the past. Let’s look to the future. The tournament committee wouldn’t have picked me if they thought all of that was going to be a problem."
His irascibility has never dulled and Woosnam’s occasionally testy reaction to questions that are close to the bone is likely come under scrutiny in Straffan if things are not going well.
"Everybody has got an opinion. That’s part of the fun of the Ryder Cup," he says. "But I can take it. I have got broad shoulders."
Like most golfers starting out, he has had to show perseverance. His first cheque amounted to £134.09 for 53rd place in the 1979 Italian Open. Three years later, his first tour victory earned him £10,000 and when he won the European Order of Merit for the first time in 1987, he did so with earnings of £250,000.
Those current amateurs with lofty professional golf ambitions will also take comfort from him turning professional with a handicap of one. For the early years Woosnam had to listen to commentators opine that he was too erratic and that he wouldn’t make it.
"I definitely had more fun than the guys have now," he said in May. "You go into the gym for two hours before you go off, play your game of golf, do a bit of practice and then a couple more hours in the gym. I don’t think that was for me. I don’t think I would have been making it."
When his big breakthrough arrived in 1991, it was amid remarkable British dominance of the Masters event. His final round with American legend, Tom Watson, came after Sandy Lyle’s triumph in 1988 and back-to-back wins from Faldo in the succeeding years. Much to the chagrin of the occasionally bellicose American galleries, the sequence was of a Scotsman placing the Augusta winner’s Green Jacket on an Englishman and an Englishman passing it on to the compact little Welsh player, who in his day was famous for ripping it out the fairways.
Now Woosnam is longer than he used to be but he’s not long enough. For the Masters in warm weather he carries the ball 275 yards, but Augusta requires 285 yards to catch the down slopes. The game has overtaken the player. When Faldo jacketed Woosnam in the Butler Cabin after winning the Masters, Woosnam was thinking of only one thing. In an interview with the London Independent prior to this year’s event, he confessed. "I just wanted a few beers with the lads," he said. "But then I found out that I had to go for a dinner at the golf club with the members. I had to wear the jacket but they didn’t have one to fit me. For the ceremony I had to wear someone else’s.
"Anyway the wife and I went to the dinner and I remember Hord Hardin (chairman) asking me what bottle of wine I would like. I chose a 1975 Chateau Mouton Rothschild, which was fantastic and then, at about 11 o’clock, I went down to the Holiday Inn to see the lads. I eventually rolled out about one in the morning.
"I had climbed to the top of the mountain," Woosnam continued, "and wasn’t quite sure where to go next. The ambition went out of my life a little bit. I should have said let’s carry on and try to win more Majors, but I didn’t."
His instincts are not to regret too much and while he has proved his worth as a player, he and Tom Lehman have taken on briefs which they have to learn on the job, and quickly too. Tony Jacklin, who was in Dublin recently, captained four Ryder Cup teams and played in seven, although, in those days not so successfully as in recent years.
"I was consumed about wanting to win. That was the mission, to win the Ryder Cup," he said. "It meant a lot of study, a lot of looking for weakness, a lot of looking for strengths in your own team. You have to look for partnerships, guys that feed off each other. You talk to people. You want to be as sure as you can about everything. It never fazed me to stop a guy on my team and ask him is he happy, to tell him to come to talk to me about anything. Absolutely anything.
"I remember one year putting Howard Clarke and Mark James together. They were neighbours in Yorkshire, socialised together. I was thinking to myself whether I had done the right thing. So I asked them, and said that I didn’t want them to slack off either because they knew each other so well. You need to know those things. In the ’80s I had four Spaniards on my team and I chose to keep them together. That’s where the Seve-Olazabal partnership was born. Seve played with (Manuel) Pinero before he played with Olazabal. I remember putting Rivero in with Seve first, thinking that would work but it didn’t because (Jose) Rivero was totally intimidated by Seve.
"It’s up to Ian to identify where his strengths are and, if there are weaknesses, how to hide them without confiding in anybody. The last thing you do is go into a room and ask everybody what they think. It’s a different deal being captain. Because as a player all you worry about is yourself. As captain you’ve 12 guys to keep sweet."
When the captains were being decided, Luke Donald voiced a preference for Faldo, so too Lee Westwood and, more guardedly, Darren Clarke.
So too did Jacklin. Some have said Woosnam is too old, removed from locker-room familiarity only gained by playing tournaments, although Jacklin was 55-years-old for his last captaincy.
Excitable, realistic, natural and instinctive are the qualities most people attribute to him. But he has already set out his stall.
"It’s about the players," he says. "If they play great, then I’m a great captain in the eyes of the world. If they don’t, then I’m not." Uncomplicated too.