‘It was an incredibly emotional time for everyone’: 20 years on from the 2006 Ryder Cup

Twenty years ago, Ireland hosted the Ryder Cup for the first time on a week that was joyous and deeply poignant.The K Club achieved owner Michael Smurfit’s dream by hosting the world’s best golfers at the Palmer Course (now the North Course). Eight years in the making, and a year delayed from its initial 2005 schedule because of the 9/11 attacks, the 36th Ryder Cup began on September 22nd, 2006.Ian Woosnam was the man in charge of Europe – and the most important decisions of his captaincy came a few weeks beforehand.When Darren Clarke’s wife Heather died after a protracted battle with cancer that August, it was questioned whether he would be in the right frame of mind to play in Co Kildare a month later. He had not played competitive golf since a miserable round at The Open in July, when he shot 82.READ MOREReflecting on the Ryder Cup 20 years later, Woosnam says the selection of Clarke was not a difficult one as he had been playing excellent golf before Heather’s health deteriorated.“With it being in Ireland, I just wanted to give Darren that opportunity to play in the Ryder Cup. I asked him that I needed a couple of weeks to make that decision and he came back positive. I knew Heather would have wanted him to play,” the Welsh man says.The more difficult call was to pick Lee Westwood, a decision that was not well received by Thomas Bjorn, who missed out on the team. The Dane launched an astonishing tirade at Woosnam, calling it the “most pathetic” captaincy he had ever seen, saying he had lost all respect for him and their relationship was “completely dead”.Asked if he had forgiven and forgotten Bjorn, Woosnam chuckles and says: “I have got a memory like an elephant. I’ll leave it as that.Ian Woosnam watches the first day of play at the 2006 Ryder Cup at the K Club. Photograph: Alan Betson “I think there was a lot made about what Thomas said that I hadn’t decided until I walked in that press room in Germany. It wasn’t until they asked me right on the spot who my pick was and I still wasn’t convinced of the right one.“At that very moment, my gut feeling said Lee Westwood. Because him and Darren got on so well, they’d spent so much time together, and if Darren could lean on a shoulder, it would be Westwood. It was nothing about golf, it was about winning as a team and I felt that was the right partnership for Darren.”While modern Ryder Cups can get lost in the data of optimised pairings and analytics, the 2006 tournament took on an exceptionally human element that was perfectly suited to Woosnam’s style of captaincy.Johnny Watterson wrote in The Irish Times how Woosnam could come across as a “back of an envelope man”, scratching something down with a pencil in the bar and sticking it in his back pocket.Woosnam agrees his captaincy was more about motivation and man management, inspired by the captaincy of Tony Jacklin, whom he played under four times as a player, and about leading with excitement and aggression, just like he was as a player. The Masters champion in 1991 and one of the “big five” in European golf in the 1980s, Woosnam rose from a farm in Oswestry, Shropshire, near the Welsh border, and fought all the way to become world No 1. He chose vice-captains Des Smyth and Peter Baker to be sounding boards he could rely on, players he knew since he was 18, rather than elite statisticians like Eduardo Molinari.[ ‘Being the centenary makes it extra special’: Luke Donald wants Ryder Cup hat-trick at Adare Manor ]“I loved the way Jacklin went along with the management of the team. He made sure everybody felt they were a part of it. He came to you and asked your opinion, and that’s how I wanted to approach the captaincy.”Woosnam was also informed by his dislike of Seve Ballesteros’s captaincy in 1997 for failing to talk to him when he was left out of three of the four team matches, ironically winning his sole match with Bjorn in fourballs, before feeling undercooked and losing 8&7 to Fred Couples in singles. For his captaincy, he gives the example of his decision to sit Luke Donald and Henrik Stenson for the opening session, two of his top three players in the world rankings, but being sure to tell them they were playing in the afternoon.Unlike the common narrative of Europe’s unity being the difference-maker in Ryder Cup, the 2006 team was not in complete harmony in the build-up. José María Olazábal and Pádraig Harrington weren’t speaking after a row in the Seve Trophy over repairing spike marks. Colin Montgomerie had publicly criticised Olazábal for failing to turn up for the BMW Championship at Wentworth before the event, while Montgomerie was not the most popular figure himself after being accused of incorrectly replacing his ball after a rain delay at the Indonesian Open. Woosnam’s task was getting everyone on the same page.“When I put them all together in our team meeting, I said to them, you know one thing in this room, there’s no superstars. We’re all individuals, I’ll treat you exactly the same as anybody else,” Woosnam says.“Olazábal got up and gave the emotional speech he does, when he talks he can bring you to tears. He said let bygones be bygones, we were here to do one job and that was to win.”Woosnam captained with good humour, particularly on Thursday to get his team out playing despite a waterlogged course for the practice session, as Kildare dealt with the effects of Hurricane Gordon.Winds reached up to 60km/h making the course unsafe, with practice suspended. A tree came down on the 18th with the course covered in mud. It was a nightmare for fans who had spent considerable money to attend the event, while a Monday finish was explored as a contingency plan, as well as preferred lies.Europe’s decision to go out and play later won over the Irish crowds, especially in comparison to their US counterparts, who were jeered after deciding to hit from the middle of the fairway in practice, away from where spectators could see.“They cheer on our side. They spent all this money to come to the Ryder Cup and they were not going to see any golf, so we got the guys out,” Woosnam says.Come Friday morning, the world was waiting for Clarke’s arrival on the first tee. Woosnam decided to put him out with Westwood against Phil Mickelson and Chris DiMarco last for fourballs, “which got the crowd wound up”.Darren Clarke and Lee Westwood line up a shot on day one of the 2006 Ryder Cup. Photograph: Morgan Treacy/INPHO “It was perfect. I’ve never seen anything like it,” Woosnam says.For Clarke it was a walk into the unknown as he was greeted with a tsunami of noise for his opening tee shot. “How on earth he made contact with the ball I have no idea,” said a teary Westwood at the time. Clarke piped his driver down the middle and made birdie. He said Heather was watching down on him as they won their match on the final hole.Bjorn had said in his rant against Woosnam: “I have nothing against Lee Westwood. But if you can find one category in which he has beaten me then I would like to see it.” Westwood and Clarke won both their matches as a pairing, with Westwood winning four points that week. Woosnam knew how to manage Clarke too, only playing him once per day. “It was so emotionally draining for him”.Clarke’s embrace of Tiger Woods with a big bear hug was one of the defining images of the week. Woods went into the tournament in blistering form, winning five strokeplay events in a row, including two Majors. But he and his team’s week were summed up by him hitting his opening tee shot in water and his caddie Steve Williams dropping his 9 iron into a lake on Sunday, although he did top score for the USA team with three points.“I don’t know why Tiger didn’t play as well as he could, Maybe he didn’t like the decisions that were being made,” Woosnam says. “You never know, or I just don’t know. It certainly didn’t seem to gel anyway.Darren Clarke receives a hug from Tiger Woods on the practice green. Photograph: Alan Betson “As for Tom Lehman [the US captain], sometimes you get too many players who think they’re the captain in the team.”The Americans were competitive, but the rivalry was not quite as ferocious as other Ryder Cups given the sympathy for Clarke. There were hugs all around on that first tee, DiMarco and Mickelson included.“Everybody felt the same way: they really wanted to win, but they were all feeling the emotion,” Woosnam says. “They knew Heather, it was a sad time. It could have happened to any one of us where a partner passed away, so we would all have been the same whatever side it was on.”The Irish fans were also in loud voice for the pairing of Paul McGinley and Harrington, but they struggled to click, with Harrington only winning half a point all week. Woosnam attributed that to “trying too hard” on home turf. The week was bittersweet for Clarke’s good friend McGinley, who withdrew mid-event from the PGA Championship the previous month to attend Heather’s funeral and struggled for form in the build-up.Reflecting on the week, McGinley says: “I don’t look back at it with ‘Oh my God, that was amazingly great’ feeling because it was tinged with such sadness. They lived next door to me and I was very close with Darren and Heather. I don’t look back at it with the fondness I should have done.”With Europe leading 10-6 heading into singles, and with early wins from Montgomerie, Paul Casey and Donald making victory inevitable, it became a case of who would clinch the cup.In the end it was Stenson who didn’t follow the script, winning the cup five minutes before Clarke. But the Northern Irishman felt like the spiritual clincher when he won his match against Zach Johnson, making it a perfect three points out of three for the 2006 Ryder Cup. Johnson later said after playing surrounded by deafening roars: “I didn’t feel like I was just playing Darren. I thought I was playing the whole of Ireland.”Europe won the Ryder Cup 18.5 to 9.5, winning every session. An outpouring of emotion followed, and the photograph of Woosnam raising teary-eyed Clarke’s arm aloft.“It was an incredibly emotional time for everyone, anybody who has played golf in the world, to see that emotion. Eventually I went up to him and just said, ‘You know, that is destiny, Darren’. It was a very special moment,” Woosnam says. There was hardly a dry eye in the house, at the K Club or at home.When asked what was going through his mind by the BBC after victory, the typically plain-speaking Woosnam said: “A pint of Guinness.” It duly followed, with Clarke’s pint downed in no more than five seconds. Woosnam’s soon after. Woosnam’s Guinness drinking at least went better than his failed swallowing of champagne, which exited dribbling at leisurely pace through his nose.Bertie Ahern, then taoiseach, presented the trophy to Woosnam in his pinstripe suit and the party started once more in the halcyon days of the Celtic Tiger. Up to 45,000 people had fitted in the final day as Miriam Lord reported “they stood on golf buggies, on top of wheelie bins, climbed trees, packed like sardines on to muddy hillocks”. Butch Harmon called the Irish fans the greatest he had ever seen. Philip Reid wrote that the week had been “sacred, immune from ridicule and scandal” and that it could not be topped.Ian Woosnam receives the Ryder Cup from Bertie Ahern after guiding Europe to victory over the US. Photograph: Alan Betson That is the task of Adare Manor next year and Woosnam expects more of the same. He urges Irish fans to show the Americans how they are supposed to act after the European players were subjected to abusive crowd behaviour at Bethpage, New York, last year. He says that if he had heard what Rory McIlroy faced in Bethpage then he would “still be locked up in prison”.Woosnam says events in the US need self-policing to deal with abusive spectators.“You only have to look at what they do to a person they don’t like, look at Wyndham Clark [at this year’s US Open]; they’re very, very rude people in New York as golf fans,” Woosnam says.“You know I couldn’t possibly go there [to the US for the Ryder Cup]. It wouldn’t have been good for me. I think I would still be locked up in prison had I gone [last year].“What they said to Rory – it’s horrible. He did well, I would have been in the stands with my 5 iron. I’m not joking, I would have been. I don’t care who they are, I’m just straight in there. If I got banned from golf, that’s my problem. I’m not having that crap.“It’s just ridiculous. What’s the matter with golf now? It’s such a shame. It’s a gentleman’s game and it’s just a game of golf at the end of the day. For God’s sake, what if I came along and said that about your wife, pal and whatever, you know. Throwing things as well. That’s a joke.”The Welsh man says bad behaviour needs to be reported promptly.“Everybody pretty much has a mobile phone, anybody misbehaving in a stand, a crowd or wherever, you just take a video and send it to a number and they get taken out.“The police can’t do everything, but you can get the public to police themselves and throw them out straight away. Tell them you’re never coming to a golf tournament again.“I hope the European fans show the American fans how they are supposed to act. How the game should be played, and how it should be supported.”Now 68 years old, but still enjoying playing golf, Woosnam says he will be in Co Limerick next year on the balcony watching on, but he won’t be mixing champagne and Guinness this time.“I will certainly be there and get on that balcony and drink another pint, hopefully not coming out of my nose again. I’ll be there with my 5 iron. Maybe I’ll bring a hurley stick.”