A White House Trip, Trash Talk and Jenga: Tales From 1993, the Last U.S. Ryder Cup Road Win

Gary Van Sickle is old enough to have covered the last Ryder Cup won by the U.S. in Europe. Here's what he remembers from 1993 at The Belfry.

Call it "The Mystery of the Ryder Cup."

It is not just that Team USA hasn’t won a Ryder Cup on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean since 1993, it’s that Team USA (the defending champ) has lost nine of the last 13 Cups and 11 of the last 17.

This isn’t a case for Scooby-Doo and the gang. Former caddie John Wood, now an on-course reporter for NBC golf, may have solved it without the help of “those darn meddling kids.” Wood fingered the secret of why the Europeans usually out-putt the Americans.

"In the Ryder Cups I’ve been a part of, I believe the Europeans historically have outworked the Americans on the greens during the practice rounds, and they have a routine down between the players and caddies," Wood told SI's John Hawkins. "I watch them working hole locations together, as a group, talking them over with their potential partners. Those practice rounds may seem glacially slow, but it seems to pay off once the balls are in the air. They read putts together in a more natural style. There is a rhythm and consistency to it, and they’re able to come up with a consensus, even with the extra set of eyes. American pairings may do the same, but they don’t end up with a consensus. I don’t think they’re as clear of mind sometimes."

There are other reasons, too. It’s easier to be more aggressive with putts when you’ve got a partner to handle the next one if you miss. And, also very big, go back and look objectively at the team lineups from the late ‘90s through the early 2010s. Europe often had a better team, factoring in that Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson, America’s best players for two decades, didn’t necessarily bring their A games.

Captain Tom Watson, victorious in 1993 / Getty Images

So the former English potato field known as The Belfry was the magical place in 1993 where the U.S. won on foreign soil for the last time. All the current members of Team USA were either not born yet or were toddlers. Even crafty veteran captain Zach Johnson was only 14 then. The Ranking staff, which covered that epic ’93 event, recalls items of interest from the last U.S. victory overseas …

Gaffes, Part I

The U.S. Ryder Cup team was scheduled to meet President Bill Clinton at the White House before flying to England. Clinton was a Democrat and a number of team members weren’t fans of his. Lee Janzen, John Cook and Paul Azinger were quoted as saying they were not in favor of the meeting, or words to that effect. Team captain Tom Watson said the team would meet with Clinton and give the President’s office the respect it deserved. The U.S. had a team dinner Sunday night before a Monday morning meeting at the Oval Office. Azinger showed up at the pre-dinner cocktail party wearing a Bill Clinton mask, Janzen wore a Hillary mask. “It broke the ice,” Azinger told a Golf World writer (me) later. Clinton, an avid golfer, won the players over with his enthusiasm. At least about golf, probably not about taxes.

Fashionable Trash Talk

The British media likes to stir things up before every Ryder Cup with any possible anti-American content they can find. They loved this quote from European team member Mark James before the matches: “The only thing that scares me about the Americans now is the clothes they wear.”

Nick Faldo was ranked No. 1 in the world. Watson was asked by the British media if he thought Faldo was the best player in the world. “One of the best,” Watson replied. Just one of the best, he was asked. “One of the best,” said Watson, who wasn’t going to admit that a player was better than any of his.

Another wave of tabloid outrage ensued. European captain Bernard Gallacher said, “He is indisputably the best player in the world. It doesn’t matter what Tom Watson says. It’s a fact.”

What’s on the Menu? Gaffes, Part II

The Wednesday night black-tie dinner was the backdrop for this controversy. A long-standing Ryder Cup tradition was for teams to exchange autographs at the post-match victory dinner. Watson told his team not to sign autographs at the Wednesday dinner, where 800-plus guests attended, to avoid an autograph feeding frenzy. Then long-time Ryder Cup player Sam Torrance approached Watson and asked him to sign his menu. Watson declined. Gallacher said Torrance then walked back to his seat “feeling more embarrassed than he has ever been in his whole life.” Watson said he told Torrance and other European players his team would sign their menus later at the U.S. team room. “I told Sam that if I started signing for him now, you know what will happen,” Watson said. “I thought if we started signing autographs we’d never stop. I guess a few people got upset.”

Oh Say Can You See?

Fog shrouded the course on the first day of the 1993 Ryder Cup, causing a delay / Getty Images

This Ryder Cup didn’t start on time due to a fog delay. Paul Azinger and Payne Stewart were set to face Bernhard Langer and Colin Montgomerie.

“The fog delay really hurt Payne and I,” Azinger said later. “We waited on the practice range and in the Titleist truck. When the fog finally began to lift, they said, O.K., you’ve got 30 minutes. We’d been only been hitting balls for 10 minutes before that. We should have stayed at the clubhouse and practiced putting during the delay but we didn’t. It ended up we both ran to the first tee. We waited in the wrong place. It was inexcusable. Payne and I got off to a horrible start and got smoked, 7 and 5.”

The Benching of Seve

It seems hard to believe now but Seve Ballesteros benched himself for the Saturday afternoon fourball matches. Maybe it was because his back was tender. Maybe it was because the Europeans had a commanding 7.5-4.5 lead. Or maybe it was because despite winning two matches, he was snap-hooking drives with regularity and playing poorly and he didn’t want to hurt the team. Who knows if Seve’s absence played a part in the stirring U.S. comeback that afternoon when it won three of four matches to cut Europe’s lead to one point?

The Bullpen Stars

The heroes of this U.S. win were John Cook and Chip Beck. They didn’t play in any of the first three sessions, then went off first in Saturday afternoon’s fourball match against Europe’s top team, Nick Faldo and Colin Montgomerie. Sacrificial lambs? Nope, Cook and Beck played brilliantly and won 2 up, a win that fired up the rest of the team. “Chip Beck was the last guy to speak Saturday night (at our team meeting),” Azinger said. “Chip said, ‘Boys, the will to win can overcome a mechanical breakdown like I was having out there today.’ The room roared with laughter. If you’d been there for that, you’d have bet as much money as you had on our team. He was dead right. That inspired all of us.”

The One-Hit Wonder

The star of the European team, surprisingly, was 25-year-old Peter Baker. Baker went 3-1 for the week and putted lights-out, carrying Ian Woosnam in two wins, including a 6-and-5 rout of Fred Couples and Azinger, the only fourball match Europe won Saturday afternoon. Baker also beat Corey Pavin in singles after spending the previous evening with his daughter, who’d been hospitalized with a viral infection. One magazine writer (not me) concluded his piece on Baker with this: “Though it was a long time coming, Baker’s first success in the crucible of international competition isn’t likely to be his last.” Actually, it was. Baker never won again on the European Tour and never made another Ryder Cup team. In 2007, 14 years later, he won the first of three Challenge Tour victories. He has won for times on the European senior circuit.

The Jenga Factor

The U.S. team room featured good-natured competition in the form of games. Before ping-pong became a thing, Azinger brought Pass the Pigs, Jenga and Balderdash. In Jenga, players must remove a small piece of wood from a tower without causing it to collapse. “Raymond Floyd was funny,” Azinger said. “Every time he pulled a block out and put it on top, his eyes would get as big as saucers and he’d run out of the room and run right back in, saying, ‘That’s it! I don’t want another turn.’ I didn’t know a 51-year-old could move that fast.”

This One’s for Lanny

Jim Gallagher Jr. defeated Seve Ballesteros in Sunday singles / Getty Images

An infected toe became so painful for Sam Torrance that he was forced to withdraw from Sunday’s singles play. That meant the dreaded envelope would be in play. Before the matches, each captain submits the name of one player in an envelope who would sit out in case of a withdrawal. Ryder Cup warhorse Lanny Wadkins prevented that from happening by going to Watson and volunteering to sit out even though he was scheduled to play Seve Ballesteros, an opponent he couldn’t wait to play. Wadkins’s sacrifice was another bit of inspiration for his team.

Jim Gallagher Jr. moved up in the lineup and faced Ballesteros in place in Wadkins. He won the match. When he got home to Mississippi, his young daughter, Mary Langdon, was wearing a T-shirt that read, “My daddy beat Seve.”

The Ace of Clubs

Not only did Nick Faldo make a memorable and rare Ryder Cup hole-in-one, he called his shot. Earlier in the week at the Belfry, Faldo told Montgomerie, “This week, making birdies isn’t good enough. I’m going to hole one.” Sunday, Faldo was last off in a tense match with Azinger that looked as if it might be the deciding match. “After losing two of the previous three holes,” Faldo recalled, “I brushed a few leaves out of the way and said it was a good time to hole one and boom! I knocked it in.” That came at the 14th hole, which Floyd had nearly aced earlier.

The Ryder Cup was already decided by the time Faldo and Azinger reached the final green, all square. Faldo missed a birdie putt, then didn’t concede Azinger’s eight-foot par putt to halve the match. “I honestly thought he’d give me that putt, it was insignificant,” Azinger said. “But he didn’t. I’m glad now because I made it.”

The Putt … Before Justin Leonard

Stephen Munday/Allsport/Getty Images

What Davis Love did was nowhere near as dramatic as Leonard’s famed 1999 putt at the Country Club but, given that the Americans hadn’t won overseas in 10 years, it was a big moment. It also happened in a match-play reversal. Italy’s Costantino Rocca was 1 up through 16 holes, then three-putted the 17th to lose the hole and square the match. At the tough 18th, Love hit a perfect drive, Rocca found the rough, missed the green and missed a 20-footer for par. Love, meanwhile, left his 50-foot birdie try six feet short. After Rocca’s miss, Love rolled in his par putt to win the match and effectively clinch the cup for the U.S. The lasting image of the ’93 Cup was of Love, both arms extended in the air in triumph and joy.

But about the ball Love used for the winning putt—it disappeared.

“I made the last putt, the crowd came out and rushed me at the Belfry and I never got my ball out of the hole,” Love recently told The Golf Show 2.0 podcast. He said he never knew what happened to that ball.

So when Love was Ryder Cup captain in 2016 at Hazeltine and Ryan Moore made the winning putt, he was ready. “I was waiting for Ryan to putt and he putted it up there and left it a little short,” Love said. “The matches are over, we win and everybody runs out there. I went around the crowd and picked Ryan’s ball up and put it in my pocket. The punchline is, when we got back to our hotel, I say, ‘Ryan, I lost my golf ball in ’93 so I rescued yours.’ And I gave it to him. He came back to see me later that night and said, ‘You know what? You lost your ball, I want you to have mine.’ Wow, that’s what (being part of a team) is all about.”