Ryder Cup: Like 1985 Torrance Putt, Task Force Marks U.S. Turnaround

After a huge victory at the Ryder Cup, Team USA should have plenty of momentum in the years to come.

Love it or hate it, the Ryder Cup Task Force delivered a victory for the U.S. We can only guess what their secret recipe was or how the Europeans may have assisted the American squad with internal errors. Plenty of people have opinions. However, for the U.S., winless since 2008 and with only three wins in the last 20 years, the Task Force success was a step in the right direction.

Europe had bigger problems between 1957 and 1985 than the U.S. had by 2014. They didn’t win for 28 years. Then, a change in leadership came when European Tour Executive Director Ken Schofield approached Tony Jacklin and asked him to take the helm of the European Ryder Cup team for 1983. Halfway through the year, it was late to appoint a captain, and Jacklin was no fan of the way the European Tour had run the event in the past.

Jacklin insisted on several things for his team in terms of equipment, transportation, clothing and player selection. Also, he would not lead the team, he said, unless Seve Ballesteros was on it. It was non-negotiable. The team, taken right off the European Tour money list for that year, and including Ballesteros, Nick Faldo, Sandy Lyle, Bernhard Langer and Ian Woosnam, lost by just one point.

At the next playing of the matches in 1985 at The Belfry, with Jacklin still at the helm, the Europeans won by five points over the U.S., with Sam Torrance making the winning putt.

“It was a great moment for me, but it was a moment for the team. It meant that we won for the first time in a while,” Sam Torrance said at this year’s Ryder Cup matches. “We’ve become very, very strong over the last 20 years. We lost this week, but we will be back. And yes, I did think it would get this big. It felt this big 30 years ago, let me tell you.”

Jacklin would go on to captain the team in 1987, when the Europeans won for the first time in the U.S. at Muirfield Village. Eamonn Darcy made the putt to get the 14th point, which secured the Cup for Europe, and then Seve Ballesteros made the final point to push the total to 15 Europe, 13 U.S. With a system in place, Jacklin then passed the torch to Bernard Gallacher, and after that, other former players took the helm, always with the support of past captains. It led to European domination for the last 30 years of play.

Of course, that brings us back to the Task Force. Whatever they decided behind closed doors worked this time. The American victory at Hazeltine had to feel nearly as important to the U.S. team as Torrance’s putt in 1985 felt to the Europeans.

Yet, as Phil Mickelson warned, the 2016 victory is not a reason to get complacent or change course.

“For us to go to Europe [in 2018] and try to win the Cup is a whole different feat,” he explained after the victory. “That’s going to require a whole different level of play, of solidarity, of fortitude, and we are going to have to build on this in two years if we want to try to retain the Cup. So it’s important to start this foundation. Yes, it’s great that we had success this week, but it’s not about one year or one Ryder Cup. It’s about a multitude, for decades to come.”

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Perhaps the real secret of the Task Force is as simple as what Mickelson said in 2014 after Team USA’s Ryder Cup loss.

“There were two things that allow us to play our best I think that Paul Azinger did, and one was he got everybody invested in the process,” Mickelson commented at the time. “And the other thing that Paul did really well was he had a great game plan for us, you know, how we were going to go about doing this. How we were going to go about playing together; golf ball, format, what we were going to do, if so-and-so is playing well, if so-and-so is not playing well, we had a real game plan. Those two things helped us bring out our best golf.”

So far, the results of the Task Force have been good, even if the optics of it weren’t. Two examples were choosing Rickie Fowler, who has not had a good year of play, as a captain’s pick, and the selection of the losing captain from 2012, Davis Love III, to repeat in 2016.

Both turned out to be good decisions in retrospect, but from the outside looking in, it appeared that the fix was in from the start. There’s no way to argue with the results, however, so the Task Force may have had an idea in advance of what would work.

What the Task Force did get right was including past champions in the decision-making process and including the players in the selection of the captain’s picks. The players may also have had some say in who they wanted as partners.

For decades, the European team has utilized the experience of past captains to try to improve the decisions they make. They have also worked to build teams that perform. This year, for instance, Sam Torrance, a former captain and the man who made the winning putt in the 1985, was a vice-captain. In addition, a new Spanish pairing of Sergio Garcia and Rafa Cabrera-Bello made its debut.

Just as the Torrance putt was a visible exclamation point to the European turnaround in Ryder Cup play, the Task Force’s victory at Hazeltine may mark a turnaround in the results for the U.S. team. No one wants the Ryder Cup to return to the days when a U.S. victory was a forgone conclusion, but on this side of the pond, we would like to see the wins and losses more evenly distributed than they have been in the last three decades. The Task Force was either good or lucky this time, and honestly, it doesn’t matter in the end.

Next: Ryder Cup Report Card: Team USA

What do you think: did the 2016 Ryder Cup mark a turning point for Team USA? Let us know in the comments, and keep it here at Pro Golf Now for more analysis.

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