Inside the US Ryder Cup Team – 2010

Michael Bamberger at Golf.Com has a very interesting article on how the US Ryder Cup team gelled over the competition.  The inside scoop comes from Ted Bishop, secretary of the PGA.

“This team had no cliques,” Bishop said. “The young guys and the veterans were together. Phil and Tiger were doubles partners in Ping-Pong, having a great time, taking on all challengers. According to some of the younger players, Phil was saying that he feels his career is winding down and he wanted them to know how much the Ryder Cup meant, pass it down to them, and that going forward he wanted to help them understand how to grow the game.”

Ok. So we might expect that sort of thing from Phil. But Tiger also was working overtime to be a team player:

“Tiger was amazing,” Bishop said. “He knew that Jeff Overton had never met him, and Overton had been telling people that the thing he was most excited about was the chance to finally meet Tiger. Jeff’s sitting in a chair, talking to some people. Tiger gets in a chair right next to him, taps Jeff on the shoulder. Jeff turns around, sees who it is and yells, ‘It’s Tiger Woods!’”

On the overnight charter to Wales, Woods did soduko puzzles. Fowler, Dustin Johnson and Bubba Watson were jumping around like kids on a field trip. “Tiger rips out a couple of pages from his book, and like a parent calming down children, hands them the puzzles and says, ‘Here, why don’t you try to do these?’ And they did them and came back and said, ‘O.K., we can handle something harder now.’ Tiger was laughing.”

That doesn’t sound to me like the Tiger as typically portrayed by the media.

Read the rest of the article. It’s quite interesting.

 

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