No amnesty for Internationals

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This article was published 13/10/2009 (6138 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

SAN FRANCISCO — Another year, another landslide.

The names change but the storyline rarely does for the International Team at the Presidents Cup. Peter Thomson hands the reins to Gary Player who gives way to Greg Norman, but the matches themselves hardly ever deliver on the promise that a superior format to the Ryder Cup’s — and a usually superior field — would suggest.

When the Internationals need a big performance, they get a small one.

And to be fair, Team USA’s stars don’t shy away from the jugular when they see one exposed.

Sunday, fittingly, it was Tiger Woods, putting the exclamation point on a 5-0 week, settling a two-month old score with his PGA Championship conqueror, Y.E. Yang, and winning their match 6-and-5 to score the Cup-winning point with seven games still technically in progress.

That’s technically, because among them was Mike Weir’s tussle with Justin Leonard, which Leonard squared at the 18th hole just moments before Woods holed an eight-foot birdie putt at the 13th to finish off Yang. If Woods had missed, Weir and Leonard would have had to go to extra holes. The two stood on the 18th green watching on the big screen to see if Woods would hole the clinching putt, then shook hands on their halved match.

Weir, no doubt, was relieved that a trying week at Harding Park Golf Course was finally over.

“Yeah, it was probably fitting,” said Weir, who went 2-2-1 over four days during which he was, by turns, hero and goat, a characterization that could easily have been attached to any number of his teammates.

“What can I say? It was kind of tough, from my perspective, when we saw so much red on the board. We didn’t get off to the start we wanted. It was tough.”

They trailed by three points after Saturday’s 10 matches, and that made the singles all but academic. The final score was 19-1/2 to 14-1/2 for Fred Couples’s loosey-goosey American squad.

A landslide.

“We left too much to do today, and the U.S. team obviously came out very motivated,” said Aussie Geoff Ogilvy, who played horribly the first two days, but rebounded for a 2-and-1 defeat of Steve Stricker that ended Stricker’s bid to go 5-0 — four of them with Tiger as a partner — and got the only full point the Internationals earned in the first half of Sunday’s draw.

That was the story: Norman, the second-guessers will say, left too much of his power to the late going, and some of his best players’ matches only served to make the final margin a little less lopsided. The crucial fast start evaporated when Camilo Villegas fumbled away an early 2-up lead on Hunter Mahan…and captain’s pick Adam Scott ran into Stewart Cink when the British Open champ’s game was in blinding form…and Robert Allenby played horribly and was steamrolled by Anthony Kim…and Ernie Els went quietly against Sean O’Hair, who never gave the Big Easy any room to breathe.

When the U.S. won four of the first six matches, all eyes shifted to the other half of the draw where Woods was throttling Yang, and you knew exactly who was going to end it.

Yang was way, way out of his depth against Woods, who made birdie after driving into the trees to close out the match.

“Well, you know, he got me once, and I figured I could get him here,” said the world’s best player. “He got off to a good start, birdied the first and I made a mistake there, but after that I played pretty good.”

It would be close call to name Woods the Americans’ MVP over Mickelson, who won with three different partners and carried both Kim and O’Hair when they were struggling, but record notwithstanding, there was no doubt who was the Internationals’ best: Tim Clark, the little South African who left with a 2-2-1 record, same as Weir’s, but struck the ball beautifully and made clutch shot after clutch shot in his last four matches.

He beat Zach Johnson 4-and-3 Sunday, and Johnson simply hadn’t a snowball’s hope. The American birdied five of six holes in a stretch on the back nine, and only won one of them. Clark was eight-under-par on the day, and his scorecard from No. 9 through No. 15, where the match finished, read: 3-3-3-3-3-3-3.

— Canwest News Service