A number of European and American players will be going into the final two majors of the season with one eye firmly on Bethpage Black and the 2025 Ryder Cup.
The Ryder Cup hits like no other tournament at the highest level of men’s professional golf. Rory McIlroy, for example, has shown sides of him in the event which fans barely ever see elsewhere.
Making a Ryder Cup team is a career highlight for so many. Unfortunately however, some do not get to enjoy a sole Ryder Cup appearance like Thomas Pieters did in 2016, when the Belgian won four points from five matches. No player on either side won more points that week.
It is very rare now that a captain will leave their rookies out of the first day. Darren Clarke was the last captain to do it on either side, with Matthew Fitzpatrick and Chris Wood sitting out day one at Hazeltine.
The player who faced Tiger Woods in their one Ryder Cup match
You would have to go back to 1999 for the last time a captain left anyone out of all of the first four sessions. Quite remarkably, Mark James did not use Jarmo Sandelin, Jean van de Velde and Andrew Coltart over the first two days at Brookline.
It did appear that the decision was going to pay off. Europe took a 10-6 lead into the singles after blowing the Americans away over the first two days.
Famously, Ben Crenshaw said he had a ‘good feeling’ ahead of the singles. The US captain was so convincing that the Europeans would have been forgiven for wondering what exactly he knew.
What certainly helped was the visitors having seven rookies to America’s two. One of those on the European side was Coltart, with the Scot earning a captain’s pick.
And Coltart could have hardly asked for a more daunting challenge for his first, and only, Ryder Cup match, with Tiger Woods drawn as his opponent.
Speaking to the Sky Sports Golf Podcast in 2019 however, Coltart explained how vice-captain Sam Torrance helped him get over the initial concern the night before.
“He came up to us and was like, ‘Andy, this is brilliant, this is absolutely fantastic, this is the draw you wanted. This is a chance to make a name for yourself. It’s 18 holes, it’s not four rounds. Four rounds, Tiger’s going to beat anybody. 18 holes, anybody has a chance. It’s absolutely fantastic, I wish I was in there’. Your brain started to click and go that’s fantastic,” he said.
Of course, Brookline has an infamous place in Ryder Cup folklore. And one of the incidents which created some controversy came in Coltart’s match with Woods, with the then world number 66 losing his ball on the ninth hole in suspicious circumstances.
“The short of it is he’s sent it miles down the fairway on the par five, and I’ve dragged it slightly left. You can’t see the landing area, the fairway’s just down over a little hill, a little dip, can’t see it down,” Coltart added.
“Get misdirected for it from spectators over on the right-hand side. Spectators couldn’t go down the whole hole, they could only go halfway down on the right-hand side, and then they cut across to 10. So I’d gone left. We were being misdirected 30 or 40 yards away from where the ball actually was. It was only about three yards off the fairway, about a yard in the thick stuff. And by the time five minutes was up, a cameraman was actually sort of standing on it. So lost the ball, went back to the tee, lost the hole, lost three holes and lost the match 3&2.”
How Andrew Coltart was able to take out some of his frustration on Tiger Woods later in the day
Coltart lost match five, while the four names ahead of him in the order – including Sandelin and van de Velde – were also beaten.
Europe’s first win of the day came in match seven. And of course, everyone has seen the putt Justin Leonard holed on the 17th to ultimately beat Jose Maria Olazabal and win the cup for his side.
The putt sent the American players and fans into a frenzy as they found themselves on the brink of the most unlikely victory. For Coltart, the surge onto the green presented an opportunity to get a little revenge on Woods.
He said: “Myself and Miguel Angel Jimenez had gone across the green to remonstrate with them, and said ‘get off the green. What are you doing? Why are you carrying on like this?
“Tiger’s right in front of me with his back to me, and it’s almost as if this opportunity has presented itself from my future to come. I just thought, well, he’s not moving off the green, so I’m going to encourage him to move off the green. So I plant the instep of my left foot up his backside, just as somebody has taken a picture.
“I said [to him in 2018], ‘listen, the record books show that Tiger Woods beats Andrew Coltart 3&2, but I know I kicked your arse at the Ryder Cup’.”
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