In the modern era, the role of a Ryder Cup skipper has been elevated to such a venerated status, the position should come with its own marble plinth. Such exalted status brings its pressures, of course.
Win that little gold chalice and you’ll be worshipped like Zeus. Lose and you’ll attract withering condemnation.
After Europe’s walloping at Whistling Straits last year, everybody was expecting Lee Westwood to be given the captain’s armband for the 2023 tussle in Rome. But then Westwood withdrew himself from consideration and Europe’s chain of assumed succession, which seems to have captains in place for the next 100 years, was somewhat disrupted. Luke Donald has emerged as the favorite to take up the reins and certainly has plenty of backing among the current crop of players.
In an interview out in Dubai, former Ryder Cup man Andrew Coltart belatedly flung Paul Lawrie’s hat into the ring. It was a thoroughly merited call and one that, perhaps, should’ve been hollered more loudly down the years.
With a plethora of potential candidates stacking up in recent seasons, it seemed that Lawrie was too far down the pecking order to be considered. Why that should be the case, though, remains something of a mystery when you think about it.
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Here is a major champion, a multiple tour winner, a two-time Ryder Cup player and a staunch supporter of the European circuit who ticks all sorts of boxes. He was a vice-captain too in Darren Clarke’s 2016 set-up. While Thomas Bjorn and Padraig Harrington, who were also part of that backroom team at Hazeltine, went on to become captains in 2018 and 2021 respectively, Lawrie’s credentials have been overlooked.
Rather like Sandy Lyle before him, Lawrie’s hopes of performing a task he’d “love to do” have, realistically, passed him by. That Lyle did not earn the captaincy remains somewhat lamentable given that he was part of a famous five of European golfers who were all born within a year of each other and amassed 16 majors among them during a barnstorming spell of prosperity.
Nick Faldo, Seve Ballesteros, Bernhard Langer and Ian Woosnam all had stints as Ryder Cup skipper with varying degrees of success.
Faldo, for instance, employed his own ego as a vice-captain and was about as popular as the emergence of a new variant of the coronavirus. While his reign ended in dismal defeat, the other three all got to the savour the victorious popping of celebratory champagne corks.
Poor old Sandy, meanwhile, never did get his crack at the captaincy. “There is a slight unfairness about it,” he once said of a snub that cut him deeply. “I was due, definitely.”
Lawrie’s not the type to make a big song and dance about it but the 53-year-old would be justified in feeling as aggrieved as his celebrated countryman.
When it comes to the Ryder Cup, sometimes the captain’s cap doesn’t fit.
Nick Rodger is a contributor for the Scotland Herald and Glasgow Times, part of Newsquest, which is a subsidiary of Gannett/USA Today.
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