Watson cranks up Gleneagles intensity
He sat alone in the same seat from where he’d just batted away questions he didn’t want to answer, barely recovered from the jet lag that left him looking every second of his 65 years the previous day.
“I was bushed yesterday, but I’m fine now,” he said. But he didn’t appear to be enjoying what the Ryder Cup has become since he captained the last US side to win on European soil, in 1993.
“The only thing different here is the media responsibilities I’ve had, the extra time that I’ve had to spend with the media,” Watson said.
He didn’t say it like a man who was enjoying that aspect of the job but as his opposite number Paul McGinley has pointed out, Watson is a hard man. And he clearly can’t wait to get it on, as they say in boxing circles.
The Ryder Cup is at its best when the hype is cranked up to fever pitch and the needle is out. Little wonder then that Watson feigned not to understand the question when asked if bringing two US veterans — amputees from the Wounded Warriors — into his team room on Tuesday as a gesture aimed at “dialling down the intensity of this Ryder Cup”.
“I don’t know,” Watson said vaguely. “I can’t answer that question. I don’t know how to respond to that.”
Just a few hours later it became patently clear that Watson very much wants to dial up the intensity as Phil Mickelson, his face plastered with a big smile, stuck the needle deep into Rory McIlroy.
“Well, not only are we able to play together, we also don’t litigate against each other and that’s a real plus, I feel, heading into this week,” the left-hander said of Graeme McDowell’s nominal involvement in the legal action between Rory McIlroy and Graeme McDowell when asked about the perception that US teams are simply not as close as their European counterparts.
Mickelson is Watson’s right-hand man, his leader in the team room and it is unlikely he would goad Europe’s top player without a nod from the top. “He talks smack,” Watson had said of Mickelson’s role. “He talks the way you’re supposed to be talking in the locker room.”
When Watson said in the early build-up that the US was targeting Ian Poulter and McIlroy, he was only telling half the truth.
McIlroy is clearly the man he wants to shoot down and he admitted as much to this writer in a casual chat as he finished his sandwich. “He’s the guy, he’s the one we want to take down. You look at ’83 when (Fuzzy) Zoeller played Seve first up (in the Sunday singles). He came back to claim a half with Seve. That made a huge difference to our team. It changed the dynamic. It was a big momentum swing and we fed off that.”
On the face of it, Watson is being played off the park by Paul McGinley, who spoke for twice as long and twice as happily about Alex Ferguson’s Tuesday night pep talk with the European players, caddies and vice-captains.
Nothing happens by pure chance in the Ryder Cup captaincy stakes and while Watson would appear to he thinking on the hoof, McGinley has been hatching his plan for months.
His vice-captain, Des Smyth, was impressed by the amount of effort that Alex Ferguson put into his chat.
“He said, ‘Hi Des, how are things.’ I didn’t even know he knew my name because we only met once very briefly many years ago. But he knew everybody by their first name. He told loads of football stories, stories about Cristiano Ronaldo and how he liked to stay after training to do extra work with the ball. And one day it was a really mucky horrible day and Ferguson told Cristiano he didn’t have to go out. But he went anyway, on the astroturf.”
McGinley later revealed he was in contact with Ferguson for 19 months and the wily old Scot did not give an off-the-cuff chat but a bespoke and highly prepared presentation specific to what McGinley wants to achieve.
“There was specific things he did as a manager that were pertinent to what I am trying to achieve. I’ve been marking his card and he was really up to date with what’s going on with these players. He got a great buzz and he’s coming back again. This wasn’t Al Pacino in (Any Given Sunday). This was guys sitting down relaxed having a bit of food in their laps, a glass of wine. It was a to-ing and froing.”
The dark art of captaincy has many facets. Whether by design or instinct, Watson and McGinley never stop.
