Thursday, Sep. 04, 2008

Azinger looking for ways to inspire team at Ryder Cup

What would Tiger Woods do?

That's one of the last questions U.S. Ryder Cup captain Paul Azinger of Bradenton wants his players thinking about when they take on the fearsome European team at Valhalla Golf Club in two weeks.

With the exception of Phil Mickelson - and maybe Anthony Kim, when he's wearing that gaudy belt buckle - these are guys you wouldn't recognize in a supermarket checkout line.

Maybe that's the point of Azinger picking "workmanlike" players Steve Stricker, Hunter Mahan, J.B. Holmes and Chad Campbell to round out the squad. When it comes to the Ryder Cup matches, American golf needs a shot in the arm.

It hasn't come from Woods and Mickelson, who have one Ryder Cup victory apiece to show for their combined 11 appearances.

For proof that U.S. men's golf is ailing, look no further than the FedEx Cup, the PGA Tour's contrived pension plan for its members' great-great grandchildren.

Entering this week's BMW Championship at Bellerive Country Club in St. Louis, the top three players are non-Americans: Vijay Singh of Fiji, Sergio Garcia of Spain and Mike Weir of Canada. U.S. Ryder Cup players Justin Leonard, Jim Furyk, Kim, Mickelson, Kenny Perry and Ben Curtis are all in the top 10.

By winning the first two FedEx Cup events, Singh is all but assured the $10-million first prize. Garcia, Weir and Leonard remain mathematically alive, but even if Singh finishes last this week and in the series-ending Tour Championship in Atlanta at the end of the month, Garcia would need a victory this week and a third in Atlanta or a fifth and a first to catch him.

Make no mistake: Singh is playing unbelievable golf. His closing 63 in the Deutsche Bank Championship on Monday was Woodsian stuff, with three birdie putts covering a combined 130 feet over the last six holes.

But U.S. fans have a right to ask when an American golfer other than Woods is going to rise to that level. Azinger is wondering too, wondering how to bring out the passion in his charges when they arrive in Louisville, Ky., as underdogs to the Padraig Harrington- and Sergio Garcia-led Europeans.

"I like who the top eight players turned out to be, and I think many of you know that my desire was to find the four players who were playing the best and who were the most confident after the PGA Championship, and we had three tournaments to identify that," Azinger said during his Tuesday press conference in New York City.

"Unfortunately, we had three foreign winners in those events. So nobody really jumped off the page."

So Azinger did the next-best thing, selecting guys who have played well this summer and might have enough inexperience not to be intimidated the first time Garcia refuses to concede a 3-foot putt. Only one of the four, Campbell, has previous Ryder Cup experience.

That, too, may be a good thing. Campbell and the other U.S. veterans - Mickelson, Leonard, Furyk, Perry and Stewart Cink - have a combined 19-37-17 Ryder Cup record. Europe's Cup veterans are a combined 40-27-12. That's not surprising, given the lopsided nature of the past two competitions.

It's gotten so bad, Spaniard Seve Ballesteros said he hopes the United States wins this time because the Ryder Cup is getting to be a bore. Irksome as that may be, it's true - only a close Sunday finish is going to draw rank-and-file sports fans away from the NFL.

A testy give-and-take during the press conference between Azinger and a British writer drew laughs, but there's no doubting the captain's intensity as the event nears. His own Ryder Cup playing history includes tightly contested victories in 1991 at Kiawah Island - "The War by the Shore" - and 1993 at The Belfry in England.

"We will be an underdog," Azinger said Tuesday, and you could almost sense him gritting his teeth and throwing down the gauntlet. "We are missing Tiger Woods. . . . arguably the greatest player ever. That's a big blow to us."

But it also means the U.S. players have no one to count on but themselves. That's a place Azinger doesn't seem to mind occupying.