First offenders get no sure shank redemption

100 writers, the celebrities, the helicopters, the marshals, the coaches, your wife, your girlfriend, everybody else’s wife, everybody else’s girlfriend, the agents, the rules officials and the caddies all waiting for you to shank one straight into the Häagen-Dazs cart.

And just as you start to take it back, one final thought goes through your mind — “Should I have worn an adult undergarment?” It’s one thing to screw up at one of hundreds of Buick Opens on the US PGA Tour. You disappoint yourself, your caddie and maybe your Great Aunt Mildred in from Toledo. It’s another thing entirely to screw up when your partner, your team and your entire country are depending on you.

And so it was yesterday morning, on that first tee, the best players in the world began a Heimlich Manoeuvre Festival. Of the eight American tee-shots off the 435-yard par-four 1st hole, only two found the fairway. Davis Love III hit a shot so far left it nearly finished in Canada. He was five yards from going over a fence into a car park. It was so bad that Love’s caddie, John “Cubby” Burke, just kept looking at his yardage book and scratching his head. “Is there a yardage mark from the Volvo?”

The Brit, Luke Donald, stepped up ten minutes later looking like a man who had just heard a judge say: “I sentence you to 100 years in prison.” There was a desperate blankness in his eyes, like a shark hanging upside down or the look your kids get when you say: “Hey, who wants to see my prep-school yearbook?” Donald swung at it as if he were trying to flail his way through jungle underbrush. It wound up right of the fairway, right of the fairway bunker, right of the trees right of the bunker and just next to a TV tower on the 9th hole.

Everybody who came to that tee looked tighter than Joan Rivers’s face. Not a single player in the much- ballyhooed first match of the American gods, Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson, versus the Euro titans, Colin Montgomerie and Padraig Harrington, even came close to hitting the fairway.

Can’t anybody here play this game? Poor Mickelson. Here he was, suddenly thrown in with his arch enemy, Woods, in front of the entire golfing world, in the most celebrated match in golf in years, and in his hands was a driver he didn’t even recognise. Why Mickelson made his change from Titleist clubs and balls to Callaway clubs and balls a week before the Ryder Cup and not a week after is a question only his psychotherapist can answer. It would be like Britney Spears, finally about to play the Royal Albert Hall, deciding to change to an entirely new reggae sound.

Somebody said to Roger Maltbie, NBC’s on-course announcer: “Wouldn’t you hate to be Phil in a situation like this and you’ve got a brand new club in your hand?” To which Maltbie answered: “I’d hate to be in this situation with anything in my hand.” Mickelson took a kind of double-parked lash at it and the ball wound up in a place only a full-bladdered dog could love — behind a tree.

Hey, it’s no shame. Since Europe joined the fun in 1979, the Ryder Cup has become sport’s Spanish Inquisition. The pressure is merciless. It’s harrowing yet quiet, like silent screaming. Every guy who stands on the 1st tee looks like he’s in a Hitchcock movie, like Rod Taylor when he realises there are 100,000 birds staring at him. And yet there’s not a dollar at stake. “On the first tee in 2002 (at The Belfry) I was gulping air like mad,” Monty recalled for Golf Digest recently. “The electricity was unbelievable. It was massive.”

Paul Lawrie recalls the first tee in 1999 at Brookline: “I can remember standing there feeling almost every part of my body moving . . . I can remember thinking: ‘Just don’t miss it.’” Nobody missed it this time around, but it wasn’t for lack of trying. Only three of the eight Europeans managed to hit the fairway and one of those was Miguel Ángel Jiménez, who looks like a retired Black Sabbath drummer and wouldn’t care if he’s hitting a shot in front of Jesus and his Disciples as long as he knew he had a good cigar and hair stylist waiting for him at the 19th.

“To me, the loosest people all morning were Monty and Harrington,” a marshal who chaperoned each tee-shot said. “They were joking, chatting. They were here late last night, too, practising. I didn’t see Tiger and Phil doing any joking and chatting. And I didn’t see them practising late last night, either.”

Just for the record, Monty and Harrington birdied six of the first eight holes and went on to win 2 and 1. Hey, Hal Sutton, ain’t that stronger ‘n new rope?