Zinger Just Getting Warmed Up

He doesn’t do e-mail, the Ryder Cup captain. Just as well because Paul Azinger’s old school blunt is better heard than read. He’s black coffee and a bullhorn in a Blackberry, latte world.
 
“Is there any way in hell anyone’s giving a 4-footer on the first day of the Ryder Cup?” he asked me rhetorically in a most entertaining phone conversation, recalling Vijay Singh’s conceded putt at the Presidents Cup that allowed that match to end in a feel-good halve.
 
Further illuminating the differences between the two competitions, Azinger then recounted 20 years of Ryder Cup “animosity” that peaked but didn’t end at 1991’s “War on the Shore.” There, Azinger planted the seeds that would yield his captaincy. He did so with a shovel across the kneecaps of an icon. See, sometimes the skinny kid in the neighborhood turns out to be the toughest.
 
Seve Ballesteros possessed Westminster pedigree. Zinger was a lovable mutt. When Seve predictably tried to intimidate and bully his way across Kiawah, Zinger bit him in the leg.
 
In the end, Bernhard Langer misfired and the Ryder Cup turned into the Yankees against the Red Sox, conservatives against liberals, Rosie against The Donald. And save for one maniacal Sunday at Brookline outside Boston eight years ago, it’s been inexplicably, depressingly one-sided.
 
“I’ll talk to guys who’ve been in both (Ryder and Presidents Cup) to find out what they feel the difference is,” he explained. Azinger says this knowing full well we’re right back where we were in the euphoric aftermath of the Presidents Cup of 2005.
 
The Americans had found their anchor pairing in Tiger and Furyk, DiMarco was Corey Pavin, the team had bonded and Europe was in deep trouble. Of course, they got killed at The K Club. So the difference isn’t so much between the Presidents Cup and the Ryder Cup, but between the Europeans and the Americans.
 
I told Zinger about Oakland Hills in 2004. I’d been assigned the European team arrival at the Detroit airport on Monday of Ryder Cup week. I pledged that I was removing emotion from the equation, that chemistry was overrated and that recent European success was merely a result of better putting. Then they ambled off the plane in their stylish tan car coats, Sergio and Darren with their hands in a bag of Doritos, the whole lot of ‘em loud and laughing and glassy eyed and looking like fraternity brothers who’d just come from a kegger. “We lost,” I remember thinking.
 
Zinger jumped in, eager to back up the point. “See for them it’s an escape from the daily grind. For us, it epitomizes the daily grind.”
 
I suggested that maybe they need comic relief. Look what Woody did for the boys at Royal Montreal. “Was Woody a partner or a mascot?” Zinger cracked.