WITH customary fat cigar between his lips, a smiling Darren Clarke strode towards the immaculate 1st tee for a practice round at Oakland Hills yesterday, acknowledging those around him and looking as if he did not have a care in the world. With Butch Harmon, his coach, by his side, he cut a relaxed figure, one who had seen it all before and one on whom Paul Casey and David Howell, his rookie playing partners, could lean for help and advice.
Yet it was a demeanour that would have been hiding a mind beginning to come to terms with all the hoopla that surrounds this most intense of competitions. “You do everything to be there and to make the team. You look forward to it, then you get there and it’s no fun at all,” the Northern Irishman said earlier this year. “It’s the ultimate test.”
It is a test, however, that he has risen to in the past and he should do so again. In three Ryder Cup matches, he has twice been on the winning side and got the Europeans off to the perfect start at The Belfry two years ago when he and Thomas Bjorn beat Tiger Woods and Paul Azinger in an opening four-ball match that was littered with birdies, three of which Clarke picked up in the first three holes.
The match was nip and tuck until Bjorn’s 25-foot putt at the 18th sealed victory by one hole, but the scores almost defied belief: the Europeans had a combined 62 to their opponents’ 63. “I had grown up watching the Ryder Cup on television and wondering how those fellas could do what they were doing under that kind of pressure, and there I was, 15 years later, doing the same.” Clarke said. “That was one of my best matches ever and it got the underdogs off to the right kind of start.”
Needless to say, Woods has not forgotten the game either. In Akron recently, he told Clarke that he was astonished to have shot 65 only to finish on the losing side. Clarke, partnering Lee Westwood, also got the better of Woods and David Duval in a four-ball match at Brookline in 1999 — and famously beat the then world No 1 in the final of the Accenture World Match Play Championship in 2000, the year Woods won three major championships in succession.
Advertisement
One of the team’s elder statesmen at 36, Clarke said he is happy to be paired with anybody but is looking towards Colin Montgomerie to lead the team. “He raised his game and played unbelievable golf at The Belfry. I think a lot of us are looking to him to do the same again,” he said.
Clarke knows the crowds will be noisy and partisan but says that it goes with the territory. “Sometimes it inspires guys to play better. Sometimes he (Monty) reacts a little bit too much, but that’s just the way he is. He plays with his heart and will do that again this week.”