Pairing Off At The Ryder Cup

Aaah, the wonder of live television.

Sitting in the office on a Wednesday afternoon, getting ready for Thursday night's Chevy Florida Fishing Report and trying to figure out my next round of golf, I flipped on the Golf Channel's live coverage of the Ryder Cup press conferences in Louisville.

As it happened, European captain Nick Faldo was on the dais, receiving a grilling from the notoriously aggressive Euro-media. The topic was Faldo's pairings for the opening day of the Ryder Cup, information that historically has been guarded by team captains as closely as US presidents have guarded the Book of Secrets.


"I've found it...he's playing Westwood with Stenson!"

As silly as it may sound to anyone who doesn't play golf or follow the Ryder Cup, these pairings are kind of a big deal. The pairings are blind, meaning that the opposing team isn't supposed to know the order or combination of your players until shortly before the day's matches begin. The trick for a captain is to anticipate what the other side might do, and attempt to stack his team accordingly -- while also paying attention to the desires and personalities of his own team (see the disastrous Woods-Mickelson pairing at the '04 Cup).

Anyway, one of the European television networks apparently got a clean camera shot of Faldo's Friday pairings, which were allegedly written in his own large hand on a piece of paper he was carrying around at Valhalla. I say "allegedly" because, even though the media gathered in Kentucky made repeated references to this camera shot, I couldn't find anything about it online as of this writing. But they were insistent.

Faldo, who has reinvented himself as an affable television personality since leaving the game, seemed to revert to his mid-1990's churlish persona when pressed about these pairings. At various points during the press conference, he claimed that the piece of paper in question was:

1. A pairings sheet for Thursday's practice round
2. A randomly organized roster, simply for his own reference
3. A list of lunch orders for his squad
4. His NFL picks for this weekend

Okay, maybe not the last one, but...he looked bad. Real bad. Best I could tell, he was caught red-handed, flashing his presumptive Friday pairings within camera range, a Ryder Cup captain rookie mistake if ever there was one. And when pressed on the matter -- one European reporter claimed that not only had everyone in the press room seen it, but it was now being beamed back home -- Faldo went into a smiling, sarcastic, bite-me routine without ever giving a straight answer.

Faldo, for those who don't follow the game, was known overseas as combative with the media during his playing days. The Golf Channel panel, particularly the exceptional golf writer John Hawkins, speculated that the Euro press may have seized on this gaffe as a chance to stick it right back to him. If the goal was to make him sweat, it worked.

All of which begs the question -- who cares? If that was indeed his Friday pairing sheet, what would it matter?

Well...imagine if you were a Major League Baseball manager and knew, in advance, the precise pitching lineup you would face that night. You knew you would see Kazmir for 6 innings, Bradford in the 7th, Wheeler in the 8th, and Percival to close. Would that information be useful to you? Could you not plan your offensive lineup accordingly?

It's akin to stealing the playbook, or knowing who's coming off the DL right before the game. That's why the pairings matter. That said, there was a solution for Faldo, one that apparently never occurred to him.

It's Wednesday. The event starts Friday. Nothing is set in stone until they hit the course that morning. Faldo could have easily blown this off by saying, "Yes, it was a pairings sheet -- one of about six that I had in my pocket. I've written down a half-dozen different possibilities for Friday, and the camera caught me looking at one of them. That might be the one I use. And it might not."

Done.

Instead, he deflected, denied, obfuscated, smart-assed, and treated the questioners like dirt -- which will do absolutely nothing to get them off his back, and places even more stress on an assignment that's already akin to a month's worth of wearing underwear that's four sizes too small. He had a great chance to throw one more psychological wrench at the Tiger-less US squad...and blew it.

Granted, it's easy to sit here and think that clearly, as I'm not the one facing the klieg lights and the microphones. But ask yourself this: would Paul Azinger make that mistake? And would he then compound it by tap-dancing on the podium? Not in a million years.

Of course, there's also the possibility that Faldo was pulling a dummy on the European tabloid press, sporting a fake pairings sheet precisely for the purpose of throwing off the Americans and/or sticking it to the media. Possible, but not likely.

From here, it looked like a rookie mistake.