Like Never Before, It's All About the Captains

The blue-and-gold Europe golf bag lettered with the name of Padraig Harrington stood alone at the side of the tee box, awaiting the start of the practice round. No caddies, no coaches, no players. Just the bag. It was there for 10 minutes, sending a silent message to the watching US spectators: your opponents include the winner of the last two major tournaments. Look on his works, you Yanks, and despair.

"There's Paw-drayg," said a young man wearing wraparound shades, JB Holmes-lookalike mustache-and-goatee combo and a "US Embassy, Kabul, Afghanistan" baseball cap. "He can hit it a mile," he added to a friend after the players finally appeared, before taking a gulp from his plastic beer glass. "He wins 'em all. He beats Americans! Dammit, we're gonna KICK. HIS. ASS."

Mind games are the stuff of the Ryder Cup build-up, with every tiny piece of circumstantial evidence endlessly examined for its possible significance. The enforced absence of Tiger Woods, the world's No1 player, thrusts Harrington, noted for his modesty, into a position of pre-eminence: the one on whom all the others keep an eye. It remains to be seen whether Nick Faldo, Europe's captain, can make the most of such a player's presence in his team room, or whether Paul Azinger, his opposite number, will use the absence of Woods to get the rest of the United States players, veterans and rookies alike, to treat the added responsibility as a challenge.

Faldo, who is hoping to celebrate a fourth European triumph in a row, looks back to his playing days and remembers the 1981 tournament at Walton Heath, where the crushingly victorious US team contained 11 men who had won majors. Now Azinger is the first American captain in Ryder Cup history to go into battle at the head of a team without a single player who has won a major during the year. The role of favorites, however, can be as burdensome as that of underdogs can be stimulating, and it looks very much as though the tournament will be won by the team whose leader can tune himself in to the internal dynamics of his line-up and elicit the greatest advantage from a complex range of perceptions and expectations.

Never in the history of the Ryder Cup has the pre-tournament debate been so dominated by the personalities of the two captains. Their predecessors have often provoked mild debate but this time Faldo and Azinger have virtually monopolized the build-up. Big characters are essential to the dramatic interest of any competition and, in the absence of Woods, the media spotlight has switched away from the players and on to two near-contemporaries with entwined destinies - from their occasional bitter personal rivalry during their playing days to their apparently amicable partnership in the television commentary box.

Azinger has had the easier job. His good humor covers the hint of an inferiority complex lingering from his playing days and the US media do not question the motives of an engaging man who, while in his mid-30s, got the better of cancer. His decision to send six rookies to face Europe is applauded as a brave recognition of the need to erase the memory of past defeats, and his tilting of the side towards a kind of blue-collar golfing ethic embodied by the big-hitting Holmes seems calculated to strike a chord with the crowd who will line the course today. Should he fail to lead the side to victory, the reaction will be one of disappointment rather than scorn.

His adversary is batting on a very different wicket. For all his late-blooming bonhomie and the arrival in his vocabulary of a Boris Johnson-like set of expostulations, including "Cripes!", "Crumbs!" and "Gosh!", Faldo cannot escape a past in which his great career as a six-times major winner was seen to be founded on an ironclad solipsism. Those who were around during his playing years find it hard to accept that his pursuit of Ryder Cup captaincy - with the £1m or so that it brings - was impelled by anything other than that same self-centredness.

A man of his achievements and temperament will always find it hard to sit quietly in the background, and it was tempting to conclude that when he described the make-up of the ideal Ryder Cup player this week - "big heart, strong in mind and strong in battle" - he was basing his template on the attributes of the player who is closest to his own heart.

Criticized for molding the team to suit his own needs, he has been teased and tested by the representatives of the British media in the days leading up to the tournament, most obviously when a photographer took a picture of a piece of paper that appeared to contain his pairings for the opening foursomes. As he attempted to laugh it off, his clumsy sarcasm reminded listeners that he is at his least amusing when he is trying to be funny.

There are those who believe that, aside from the business of making speeches and supervising the design of the players' uniforms, a Ryder Cup captain's influence is overstated, and the blossoming of the likes of Sergio García and Lee Westwood in this environment certainly seems largely self-generated. But a bunch of individuals on one side or the other will need to perform to spectacular effect if, on Sunday night, the outcome of golf's premier team competition is not to be seen as the result of a straight fight between the minds and wills of two men whose strengths and weaknesses have been so thoroughly examined this week.