Olly the Skipper

There is no one better suited to the role of European Ryder Cup captain than Spanish legend Jose Maria Olazabal, writes Lewine Mair

Graeme McDowell, Rory McIlroy, Padraig Harrington, Martin Kaymer, Lee Westwood and the rest all said much the same in that January week when Jose Maria Olazabal was announced as captain of the 2012 Ryder Cup side. Namely, that that they could not wait to be in the team room at Medinah with the Spaniard as their leader.
In truth, it was as if the hairs were standing up on the back of McDowell’s neck already as the Irishman continued with an awed, “You can almost feel the emotion coming out of the guy.”
Though the public announcement was saved until January, the decision had been taken some three and a half months earlier – during the course of the 2010 match at Celtic Manor. That week, Olazabal’s input was such that the players told Thomas Bjorn, the Tournament Players’ chairman, that it would be a waste of time were they even to consider anyone else.
Yet the fact that Olazabal, winner of the 2001 Hong Kong Open, should have advanced his cause at Celtic Manor was more down to luck than anything else.
Colin Montgomerie, when he was given the 2010 captaincy ahead of Olazabal on account of the latter’s recurring rheumatic-related problems, had said that his first move would be to ask the Spaniard to be one of his vice captains in Wales. A task which would be altogether less onerous than the captaincy.
In the event, he never did get in touch. Other, that is, than when he appointed Bjorn and Darren Clarke to be his assistants. That was when he rang an apparently somewhat bemused Olazabal to say, "I’m not going to choose you because it’s more important that you concentrate on getting well."
On the one hand, Montgomerie may well have been thrown by conflicting rumours concerning the Spaniard’s condition. On the other, it is not impossible that this gloriously competitive soul felt that he did not want a repeat of 2008. Which was when it was said of Nick Faldo’s captaincy in Valhalla that the only mitigating factor was the role played by Olazabal.
The latter had delivered the most impassioned of speeches on the Saturday night, one which might have made all the difference to the overall result had it come a little earlier.
Moving on to 2010, Olazabal had planned to watch the match from home until Nespresso, the coffee people, asked him to become an ambassador for their company. In the shorter-term, they wanted him to entertain their clients at Celtic Manor.
On the day of his ambassadorial appointment – in Crans-sur-Sierre last September – Olazabal did not mind saying that while he was keen to make the most of this new departure, nothing could ever come close to being inside the ropes as a player.
The Nespresso people did not find that difficult to understand. For their part, they were more than happy with the golfer’s commitment and the genuine interest he was taking in their product. Why, he had even mugged up on which foodstuffs married best with each of the different blends. However, no sooner had Olazabal, the coffee connoisseur, flown into Wales for the match that the desperate weather conditions changed everything.
If the Ryder Cup was to be completed, all the players would need to play all the time – and for that to happen, Montgomerie and his team would require an extra pair of hands.
Monty, at this point, was as eager as anyone that Olazabal should join the fold and said, blithely, that the Spaniard’s talents were wasted as a coffee ambassador. Nespresso took that in good heart and Olazabal was released with no questions asked.
As anticipated, Montgomerie’s captaincy dominated the headlines that week. It was the Scot in full cry and he was first-class. Behind the scenes though, Olazabal’s injection of passion had precisely the same uplifting effect as had applied two years previously.
It was a matter of minutes after he was named as the 2012 captain that someone put it to Olazabal, “What is it about you and the Ryder Cup?”
He had no difficulty in explaining. "It all started at Muirfield Village in 1987," he began.
That was his first appearance and he was paired with Seve Ballesteros as the pair won three matches out of four. “I didn’t know what the Ryder Cup was at the start but I saw the way that Seve played and how much it meant to him,” he said. "He passed that attitude on to me… and on top of that, it was the first time we had won on American soil. The whole experience was so unique that it sticks in my mind.”
Olazabal, who speaks of the match being "welded to my heart", missed out on the 1995 instalment because of his rheumatoid poly-arthritis and that dark, blank year – a year in which he could barely drag himself from his bed – had added an extra dimension and depth to the way he could talk to players. In truth, you would have to suspect that if McIlroy had fallen into chat with him some three or four years earlier than he did, he would never have made those comments about the Ryder Cup being nothing more than an exhibition.
George O’Grady, the CEO of the European Tour, spoke recently of how he had always picked out Olazabal as one of the game’s good shepherds in a pro-am context. He explained that where Monty fitted well with captains of industry, Olazabal was always a good bet for those who might find the occasion a little daunting.
As recently as last year’s BMW at Wentworth, O’Grady sent him out in the company of two youngsters who were on Duke of York scholarships at Wellington College. The party was doing well but, the moment Ollie noted that the boys were getting a bit carried away, he sounded a note of caution. “Our scoring’s nothing special,” he advised, as mischievous underneath as he was sombre on the surface. “You will need to make a lot more birdies if we’re going to get in among the prizes.”
The lads buckled down and, to Olazabal’s great glee, they went on to win the event with room to spare. The story ties in with what Bjorn said about Ollie in Abu Dhabi. "If you ask Jose Maria a question, you always get an answer. And if you need help, you always get the help. The respect he has built up across the years is shared not just by everyone on the committee but by the entire membership," the Dane said.
Nothing has as yet been decided, but when it comes to the finer points of the 2012 match, Olazabal is keen to see the number of wild-cards down from Monty’s three to two. Why? Because he feels that the greater the number of picks, the less the value accorded the points’ system.
"To make the relevant top 10 – five through the world rankings and four through the European Tour rankings – you need to have had a great year. And it would be a shame to tell any of those guys, ‘You’re not in’."
Olazabal, who won 18 and halved five of his 31 matches in seven Ryder Cup outings, will bond with his prospective team-members through playing alongside them and, today, he is entirely fit enough to do just that. At the same time, he will remain in close contact with his old comrade-in-arms, Ballesteros. Ballesteros’s opening gambit, when he heard that Ollie had been given the captaincy, was to advise that he should do as he had done in 1997 in discouraging players from sleeping with their partners.
Ollie merely chuckled when he passed on that piece of news, leaving it to Westwood to throw a bit more light on the matter.
"Seve,” said Westwood, helpfully, "never actually said anything, but what I can tell you is that Laurae [Westwood's wife] and I pushed the beds together by night and someone pushed them apart by day."
 

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