Medinah, Ill. -- You never know which teacher lessons will stick with you. A teacher, for some reason, once told us that when you’re carrying liquid -- a bowl of soup, a cup filled too high with water, a coffee mug -- you shouldn’t look at the liquid while you walk.
Why? Because, she said, if you look at the water you will see it slosh and splash shake. And seeing that will make you shake. And the water will wade a little more, making you shake a little more, making the liquid move a little more, making you shake even more, on and on, until you spill.
Here’s the part that sticks with me: She said that you will always underestimate the power of tiny ripples. You will always believe that you are steadier than you think you are. (...)
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The coolest way to observe a Ryder Cup is through sound. Once the matches are rolling, you will hear sounds everywhere. Huge roars. Light cheers. Applause. Groans. U-S-A chants. Ole-ole-ole sing-song. It’s hard to tell where they come from -- they rattle up in the trees and come down all around you -- but after a while you learn to make out what they mean.
The sounds in the early part of Sunday’s golf suggested that everything was going OK for the U.S.A. It was a cool on Sunday afternoon. The merchandise tent was overflowing -- they must make millions. The Europeans were trying to charge, but the U.S. was holding its own. Webb Simpson had a two-up lead on Ian Poulter early. The Johnson boys -- Dustin and Zach -- seemed to be controlling their matches. Jim Furyk seemed to be outplaying Sergio Garcia. There was no reason to believe that anything unusual was going to happen.
It’s hard to pinpoint exactly when things started to turn. Maybe it was when Poulter squared up his match against Simpson with back-to-back birdies. Poulter was the heartbeat for this European team. He’s brash, he’s a bit goofy, he’s a Twitter fanatic, he loves attention, and he has never quite broken through.
But he is a fierce Ryder Cup player. His record at the Ryder Cup is otherworldly -- 10-3 coming into Sunday’s singles -- and on Saturday evening, after the sun set, he made a putt in the dark that gave Europe a half point and inspired his teammates. “That was when we thought [a comeback] was possible,” Olazabal would say.
The crowd tried to give Poulter the hardest time -- he loves engaging the U.S. crowd. But the harder time they gave him, the better he played. When he evened the match with Simpson, maybe there was something a little bit bigger rippling.
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Seve Ballesteros’s memory was ever-present all week at the Ryder Cup. Ballesteros, probably more than anyone, created the Ryder Cup as we now know it, with all the intensity and fervor and pressure. He died last year. People talked about him constantly around Medinah. There were images of him wherever you turned, especially around the European team. And, of course, his favorite playing partner, Olazabal, was coaching the Europeans … and nearly crying every time Seve’s name came up.
Ballesteros was a force of nature. He saw the Ryder Cup as a cause … a chance to prove to everyone that players in Europe were just as good as American players, a chance to show just how fierce they could be. He did not just lead the European teams to victory, he told his teammates (and players, when he was a coach) that they were tougher than the U.S. players, that they had more heart, that they would win, that they had ALREADY won, but they just didn’t know it yet.
His positive force pushed players beyond their expectations. Could any of this have played a role on Sunday, even with Seve gone? I guess it depends what you believe. The European players did talk about feeling his presence. “I have no doubt in my mind that he was with me today all day,” Sergio Garcia would say. The way it ended for Garcia and American Jim Furyk, it’s not hard to imagine the ghost of Seve Ballesteros being nearby.
by Joe Posanski, Sports on Earth | Read more:
Photo: Getty Images
