Thomas Bjorn described Ian Woosnam as the ”worst captain ever” after he was not personally informed that he had not been picked for this weekend’s Ryder Cup.
Bjorn was heavily fined and forced to apologise by the European Tour, but Woosnam nevertheless confronted the 12 golfers he will lead and asked them if they supported the Dane’s comments. It never has been Woosnam’s style to try to walk away from anything, whether it is a sporting challenge or a serious personal confrontation.
Small for his age — and, at 48 and 1,63m, he still is — he was often bullied at school in Oswestry. He learnt the hard way to stand up for himself and the means to do this were forged on his dad’s dairy farm. Life was not cartoon-hard on the farm, but everyone was expected to contribute.
Not long after Woosnam had learnt how to toddle he was learning how to milk cows, how to stack bales of hay and then how to drive a tractor. Power steering was not available back then, and it was this tractor that he admits created the enormous forearm and upper-body strength that made up for his lack of height when it eventually came to whacking the sweet bejesus out of a golf ball.
It also meant that when Woosie hit someone they tended to stay hit. Sooner rather than later the bullies were writing letters applying to join Ian’s gang. His dad, Harold, duly noted his son’s pugilistic predilection and, while hoping that he had sired the next Welsh light-middleweight sensation, he settled for a holiday-camp hero instead.
This occurred because the family breaks tended to be taken at Butlins at Pwllheli, where, in the 1970s, children’s boxing matches were organised. Harold entered Ian each year and regularly the tyro battered his way to victory and so secured a free family holiday for the next season. Then it was back to the cowshed. By this time his own sporting preference was for golf, the game he found when age forced his dad to turn from amateur football to the joys of Llanymynech Golf Club, a borders course that has 15 holes in Wales, three in England.
He will tell you now that the farming community is a wonderful one, but he will tell you also that buying a ticket out of that cowshed was his inspiration as a professional golfer. First, though, he had to earn his player’s card for the European Tour. This was not easy. Three times he won it and three times he then lost it. His preference for a hectic lifestyle did not help.
Through the second half of the 1970s, he scrambled a living in Europe, but it wasn’t much of one. He travelled the continent in a creaking camper van and grew tired of eating baked beans. And then the big ride began. In 1982 he won his first significant title. In 2001 he won his last. In all he has won 44 pro events around the world. The camper van has been traded in for his own plane and the cowshed has been trumped by a home in Jersey. The wee man has done very, very good indeed.
Now here he is the captain of Europe, another ambition realised but one that comes at a price. For Woosnam this is the media glare. He is, as anyone who has witnessed his televised press conferences, not exactly comfortable when confronted by a microphone and an unexpected question. Woosnam’s natural habitat is the taproom not the lounge, his preferred implement a spade and not a stiletto.
”You’re right enough, but I’ll be OK,” he says. ”All I can be at the end of the day is me.”
He says the captaincy is genuinely the biggest honour ever for him, bigger even than his Masters victory in 1991. ”It stands higher than anything else. Yeah, even Augusta. Why? Because I’m responsible for 12 other guys and, if you like, the European Tour. Christ, I’m responsible for a continent.
”It’s all about pride and passion and, in my case, doing well for Wales. It’s just terrific. And there’s nothing fake about it either.
”What would be great would be if we and the Americans can all get together on Sunday night no matter what the result.
”Over the years it’s not been bad, but it could have been better. Guys like [Mark] Calcavecchia and [Jeff] Maggert and [David] Duval always came over for a drink. You couldn’t keep Payne Stewart, bless him, or his harmonica away and Fred Couples and Davis Love also joined in. I’ll try and sort something this time.”
At the very least the Americans can always pop into the European locker-room for a pint.
Two years ago in Detroit it was red wine, cigars and serious coffee in the team headquarters. This time, it being Ireland and the captain being Woosie, it is a barrel of Guinness. Who needs a master communicator when you’ve got a deep thinker like this? Genius, I’d say … — Â