Slaying the Tiger

by Shane Ryan

  He went on to make $3.5 million that year, part of which he used to take care of his family as repayment for their sacrifices. He continued working with his sports psychologist to control his temper and frustration on the course, but toward the middle of 2014, he slipped into old habits—watching the Golf Channel too much, staring at leaderboards, and overwhelming himself with information. For an ADD personality like Horschel, too much data can be distracting, and he grew frustrated on the course in ways that reminded him of 2012. When he missed the cut at the Barclays, the first FedEx Cup event of the season, he went home and told his wife, Brittany, that he wished the year would simply end—2014 felt like a waste, and he needed a fresh start.

  Then he came to the Deutsche Bank, where his coach, Todd Anderson, made a few adjustments to his putting grip. The change was immediate—he won in Colorado, and with the field reduced to twenty-nine players for the final event of the season, he had the ten-million-dollar top prize in his sights. To reach the loftiest heights of his young career, though, he’d have to go through his old Walker Cup adversary—Rory McIlroy.

  —

  Of the players who made the year-end event, the game’s young stars were heavily represented, and the sport’s generational change was made manifest. Gone were Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson, and in their place came the standard bearers for the new wave—Jordan Spieth, Rickie Fowler, Rory McIlroy, Jason Day, Hideki Matsuyama, Russell Henley, Morgan Hoffmann, Patrick Reed, Billy Horschel, Brendon Todd, and Chris Kirk. They were joined by a group of slightly older players trying to take over the game as the legends faded, including Adam Scott, Justin Rose, Bubba Watson, Hunter Mahan, Sergio Garcia, and Martin Kaymer. In all, only six golfers in the field were older than thirty-five, and fourteen of them—nearly half—were still under thirty.

  The FedEx Cup is a creature of momentum, though, and in the end, the players who wound up in Sunday’s final group were those who had been on the best form for the past month—Rory McIlroy and Billy Horschel. The course on Sunday was playing a bit too difficult for anyone to make a big move, and it became increasingly clear that the big money would go to one of the two golfers in the final pair.

  Horschel showed up on the first tee wearing a pair of bright, pastel-plaid pants, and asked Tim Finchem, the Tour commissioner, if he liked them. Finchem nodded, but Horschel wouldn’t let him off the hook: “So you won’t make me change, then?”

  Rory showed up next, with J. P. Fitzgerald in tow looking weary and put-upon, but it was the golfer, not the caddie, who was worn out. While Horschel birdied twice on the front nine, Rory made a mess of the par-3 sixth, hitting his tee shot into the water and taking a costly double-bogey. He finished the front half with an errant tee shot, and walking to the 10th tee, he was now at -7, trailing Horschel by four shots.

  Rory had the same determined look I saw at Valhalla, but there was something else, too—something almost resigned. It was a subtle difference, but the truth was that losing the FedEx Cup was acceptable in a way that losing the major wasn’t. After falling to Chris Kirk at the Deutsche Bank, it felt like he had run out of steam. Kaymer had shown after Pinehurst that there’s only so much stress one player can withstand before the brain shuts down, and Rory had lost at least some of his sharpness.

  He still had a chance for a two-shot swing when Horschel got stuck in the right rough on 10 and made bogey. Instead, he missed the twenty-foot birdie putt and the three-footer coming back, suffering another bogey. When he failed to get up-and-down from the right rough on the 11th, falling to -5, reality had set in: His chance was over.

  By then, Horschel was walking with purpose, spurred on by cries of “Go Gators!” and his own constant anxiety. He hit an eight-foot par putt on 13, and on the par-5 15th, he got up and down from a greenside bunker for another birdie. Jim Furyk had reached -10 with a birdie on 15, and Horschel now led by just a shot. When he found trouble on the 16th, he began giving full speeches to himself—“Come on, Billy, make a better swing than that….You don’t want to hit left and left’s better than right!”—and McIlroy patted him on the back as they walked down the fairway. It was a gesture of both encouragement and concession, and a sign that the Walker Cup animosity was ancient history, replaced now by mutual respect.

  On the 16th green, Horschel left himself a thirty-one-footer for par. Staring from beneath his white Ping hat, Horschel’s eyes looked almost delirious with focus. He thought back to the long putt at the Zurich that gave him his first win, and standing over the ball, he saw the line perfectly. He didn’t even bother calling in Micah Fugitt for a read. He just gave it a run—too much of a run, maybe, and Fugitt worried that it might roll ten feet past—but it caught the right edge of the hole and dropped. Horschel unleashed a fist-pumping flurry worthy of Zurich, and the crowd erupted.

  He had saved his one-shot lead with two holes to play, and as it turned out, the veil of stress was about to fall. Furyk, as he does so often in the most critical moments, hit a loose approach from 178 yards on 17, and couldn’t make his twelve-footer for par. Horschel had a birdie attempt to shut the door, and he gave the crowd a bit of Kabuki theater by throwing his leg out and shouting, “Come on!” when he missed. Standing on the 18th tee box moments later, Horschel watched as Furyk made another bogey. He sunk to -8 and a tie with Rory McIlroy, who, even in his weakened state, had made his trademark late sprint with three birdies on the final four holes.

  Horschel simply needed to land his last tee shot on the green. When the ball fell safely, he breathed a sigh of relief—he had just become a very, very rich man.

  —

  Since childhood, Horschel had exprienced dreams that were more like premonitions—visions of future events that eventually came true. Once, at age ten, he dreamed of being hit in the head with a baseball bat, and when it happened in real life, the adults who rushed to his side heard him say, “I saw this coming.” Later, in college, he dreamed of the exact spot where he would later marry his wife in Plantation, Florida.

  On the walk to the 18th green, Horschel told his caddie, Micah, about a dream he’d had earlier that season, in December or January—one in which he won the FedEx Cup. This dream was fainter than the others. He knew he had held the trophy in the fog of his fantasy, but beyond that, everything was less distinct.

  When he woke up, he didn’t know what to make of it—was it real? Did it mean he’d win this year, or just sometime in the future?—and he confided only in his wife. As the difficult year went along, he told himself to forget the dream, because it clearly wasn’t going to happen.

  He thought of that dream again on Sunday morning, and despite his usual nerves, there was an underlying calm that helped him through the round. With his mother and father in the gallery, and Brittany at home bearing his first child—a daughter named Skylar Lillian who would arrive two days later—he reveled in the moment. When he made the winning par, he couldn’t help himself—the proud Florida alum gave an emphatic gator chomp to the crowd, who booed accordingly.

  The ten million dollars meant he could take care of the parents who had given him so much, and the trophy meant that his dreams were still real. He saw it all coming together, and when he showed up in the press area a few minutes later, you could tell he’d been crying.

  24

  WENTWORTH, ENGLAND, AND NEW YORK, NEW YORK

  The Captain’s Picks

  At the Deutsche Bank outside Boston—the second event of the FedEx Cup playoffs—the collective mind was on the Ryder Cup captain’s picks, scheduled for the following Tuesday. It would be the first strategic act for McGinley and Watson, and our first real hint at their leadership styles.

  For the Europeans, the automatic picks wouldn’t be set in stone until Sunday evening, but already speculation swirled. Paul McGinley would almost certainly pick Ian Poulter, for one. If Scotland’s Stephen Gallacher played well in Italy but failed to make the team, McGinley might be forced to pick him or risk losing the goodwill of the Scots. That left just one pick, and two
very successful Ryder Cup veterans to choose between—Lee Westwood and Luke Donald.

  The nine American spots had already been clinched after the PGA Championship. Watson had been traveling with the Tour all year, doing his best to give evasive answers about his captain’s picks, and he kept the act up in Louisville. When asked about Tiger, he left the possibility open, while dropping a few subtle of hints that it might not be the greatest idea.

  “If he’s playing well and he’s in good health, I’ll pick him,” Watson said. “Obviously he’s not in great health right now and he hasn’t played very well. So the question is, will I pick him? Well, I can’t tell until things happen in the next three or four weeks.”

  Can’t tell, indeed…except to say that he’s hurt and he stinks.

  Elsewhere, his options had narrowed. Dustin Johnson was out on suspension, and Jason Dufner had to quit during the opening round in Louisville due to the chronic pain from bulging discs at c4 and c5. Even his cocktail of medicine—anti-inflammatories and the steroid Medrol Dosepak—didn’t help. “It’s just pointless,” he told the AP, before leaving the course.

  Dufner dropped to 10th on the points list, with Phil Mickelson and Zach Johnson leapfrogging him, and it didn’t take a genius to understand that Watson would have to leave him at home.

  Tiger’s story took a bit longer to play out. He missed the cut at Valhalla, as almost everyone predicted, but even though he didn’t make the FedEx Cup playoffs and wouldn’t have a chance to play a competitive round before the Ryder Cup, he still maintained that he wanted to be part of the team.

  Watson said little, as though he were giving Tiger the chance to remove himself from consideration, rather than having to deliver the bad news himself. Finally, two days later, Tiger did exactly that. In a statement, he announced regretfully that his health wouldn’t permit him to make the trip. We’ll never know if Watson ever gave him an ultimatum—“You’re not making the team, so decide for yourself how that information gets out”—but practically, the effect was the same. For whatever it’s worth, Watson later revealed that he was the one to call Tiger when he supposedly “withdrew,” and not the other way around.

  The Dufner and Tiger sagas were just the latest evidence that Watson would be fighting at a disadvantage against Paul McGinley and the Europeans. He couldn’t afford to screw up the captain’s picks, and he’d be watching the action at the Deutsche Bank closely. Conventional wisdom said that Keegan Bradley had a great chance, after playing so well with Phil Mickelson in 2012. Nobody played the political game as well as Bradley—he and Watson had grown friendly—and he was practically a lock. Beyond that, the other two picks were up in the air—Hunter Mahan had an inside track after he won with a Sunday back nine surge at the Barclays, but anyone from Brendon Todd to Chris Kirk to Webb Simpson to Harris English to Ryan Palmer still seemed to have a shot.

  It was Chris Kirk who would eventually triumph in Massachusetts, and in surprising fashion—by beating Rory McIlroy, the world’s best player, after 36 grueling holes in the same pairing. On the eve of the picks, his win seemed like the most compelling argument imaginable.

  But Kirk was stubborn, and he refused to admit that the Ryder Cup mattered to him at all. During his post-round interview, he’d only say, “I’m planning on seeing Georgia play Tennessee that weekend.” He made vague comments about how it would be a “bonus” if he made the team, but none of it sounded very convincing. I pressed the issue when I saw him by the flash area, but he wouldn’t budge.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe it’d be a better story if I was like Keegan, and was freaking out about it and really, really excited and going nuts. But I’m just not.”

  Kirk and Watson had played a practice round together at the British Open, and when Kirk struggled on the front nine—he still had jet lag from his flight—Watson got on his back a little, and they ended up winning. Whether Kirk appreciated the pep talks is doubtful—he’s a self-motivator, and not the kind of person who searches for mentors. Even agreeing to play with Watson as a sort of audition probably rubbed him the wrong way, and the two hadn’t spoken since.

  Making matters worse, Watson had an ego, and he wanted players who would be excited to play for him. He saw himself as a general—tough but inspiring, harsh but well-loved. He appreciated players who would flatter the John Wayne aspect of his self-image. Unfortunately, Kirk was a natural-born mercenary who adamantly refused to move even an inch toward Watson, much less beg. The ring was extended, but Kirk wouldn’t kiss it.

  * * *

  “I think, as a human being, I have empathy and an understanding of people and hopefully I can bring that to the captaincy. When the debate about who should get the captaincy was going on, people were saying: ‘We need a big name, a Major winner, who has achieved a lot in the game.’ And I wanted to scream. I mean, show me the correlation between being a great player and a great captain. And not just in golf, but in any sport? There is none.”

  —PAUL MCGINLEY, in the Irish Independent, two weeks before the Ryder Cup

  On Tuesday, September 2, in a twelve p.m. ceremony at the Wentworth Club in Surrey, England, Paul McGinley sat behind a simple podium and spoke for exactly one minute before he announced his three captain’s picks in quick succession: Stephen Gallacher, Ian Poulter, Lee Westwood.

  The first two names were expected. Westwood—one of the great European Ryder Cup players of all time but in the waning stages of his career at age forty-one—was the surprise. In late 2012, when McGinley was the presumptive favorite for the captain’s position, his chief opponent was Darren Clarke, another Northern Irishman and a good friend. McGinley had even pulled out of the 2006 PGA Championship when Clarke’s wife died, in order to attend the funeral. McGinley was viewed as the natural choice for captain in 2014, and Clarke wrote him a letter saying he wasn’t interested in the job.

  That vow didn’t last long. Clarke changed his mind after the 2012 Ryder Cup, and became a candidate for a short period before withdrawing and declaring his support for Colin Montgomerie, stating that he didn’t believe McGinley had the appropriate stature to stand opposite Tom Watson. McGinley had never won a major and had only played in three Ryder Cups, Clarke’s argument went, and it would put Europe at a disadvantage. This move, more than his original candidacy, torpedoed the friendship between McGinley and Clarke, and it also did significant damage to McGinley’s chances.

  Montgomerie’s cause gained momentum, and seemed on the verge of spilling over into success. At that critical moment, Rory McIlory came out publicly in favor of McGinley. His emphatic support prompted a series of endorsements from Luke Donald, Justin Rose, and Ian Poulter.

  “I didn’t think the right thing to do was react to that,” Rory said of the near mutiny against McGinley. “The Ryder Cup is won on the golf course, not on stages where speeches are made.”

  Rory, with his hard intelligence, knew that picking a new captain would show fear, and if he wasn’t already motivated enough to support his countryman, this confirmed it—why run scared from the Americans?

  McGinley won the job, but before the final vote, Lee Westwood went public with his own support—for Darren Clarke.

  When the time came to make captain’s picks, and the third and final choice came down to Luke Donald and Lee Westwood, it seemed like a no-brainer—McGinley would reward loyalty by picking Donald.

  He didn’t. Westwood was pleasantly stunned, and Donald was upset, but McGinley had a plan. And that plan didn’t hinge on holding grudges, or letting his judgment be clouded by ego and pride. The reason behind the move wouldn’t be revealed until the Cup began, but for now, it was an interesting indication of what we could expect from a McGinley captaincy.

  —

  That same night, the Golf Channel ran a half-hour Ryder Cup special to announce Tom Watson’s picks. The legendary American sat on a large stage framed by American flag imagery, his face caked with television makeup, and stumbled his way through thirty agonizing minutes. Unlike
the straightforward European picks, this looked like low-rent reality television, with the three announcements spaced out across the program’s half hour in order to build suspense. Julius Mason did a fine job hosting, but Watson couldn’t seem to focus as he introduced and justified his three picks: Keegan Bradley, Hunter Mahan, and Webb Simpson.

  The first two picks needed no real explanation, but with Webb Simpson, things got a bit tricky. Not only had Simpson failed to win in the 2014 calendar year; his form wasn’t even particularly strong, and he had missed the cut in three of four majors. By choosing him, Watson was also leaving Chris Kirk at home—the man who had just outdueled Europe’s best player.

  “I kind of had a revelation this morning,” Watson explained onstage. “I just took a look at last time the Ryder Cup was played…and I was cleaning up all these stats and folders and things like that this morning, and the last one out there was the results from the 2012 Ryder Cup. And I looked down there and I see Webb Simpson. 5&4. Webb Simpson. 5&4. And I said, that’s gotta be the guy. Webb Simpson is my next pick.”

  It was a nice story, even if it was derived from a very shortsighted look at Simpson’s 2012 performance. He had indeed teamed with Bubba Watson for two runaway wins at Medinah, but he had also lost a pairs match with Bubba to Poulter and Rose, and then lost his singles match to Poulter on Sunday, for a 2-2 overall record.

  The semantics didn’t matter, because the truth was that Watson hadn’t made his decision based on some folder he found on a desk. That was a convenient explanation, but it wasn’t the real engine behind his decision. The “revelation” he spoke of had come that morning, but it had come, we later learned, from a series of text messages with Webb Simpson himself.

  As Simpson would tell the media at Gleneagles, he had been tossing and turning in a Denver hotel in the predawn hours on Tuesday. He was there to play in the BMW Championship, and the captain’s picks would be announced that night. He got the sense that his chances were slim, he said, and decided to send Watson a text. The content was simple: He acknowledged that Watson was facing a tough decision, but said he really wanted to play on the team and represent America.