Presidents Cup Too Nice For Own Good

SAN FRANCISCO -- U.S. captain Fred Couples invited basketball great Michael Jordan to this week's Presidents Cup to serve as an "assistant assistant," a creative way to add a hyper-competitive personality to his team's mix.

Good idea.

Wrong guy.

Where's Lane Kiffin when you need him?

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It hardly matters that the University of Tennessee's football coach might not be able to put a golf ball in San Francisco Bay if he was standing atop the Golden Gate Bridge. He wouldn't be here to putt, only to say something Kiffin-ish.

Talk about a target-rich environment. International Team captain Greg Norman has one arm in a sling and his personal life on the gossip pages. You don't think Kiffin could turn Presidents Cup golf into 24-hour talk-show news?

He wouldn't even need a housing allowance. The former Oakland Raiders head coach still owns a home in the area.

He wears bright, ugly shirts and has a blonde, attractive wife; all perfect for golf. Talk about a gimme.

Kiffin could easily roll in, create an international incident, and still go back to Rocky Top with enough needle to continue fueling Urban Meyer's slow burn.

OK, it's not going to happen. Too bad.

He would only be doing it for all the right reasons.

Thursday at Harding Park GC the Presidents Cup begins play for the eighth time and golf still is not completely certain where the team competition between the United States and an International squad fits.

Is it a deserving stage for non-European golfers who previously had no opportunity to carry a flag into match-play team competition, or forever a Ryder Cup knockoff? Rarely does a sequel hold its own against the original, but there's Godfather II and then there's Jaws: The Revenge.

So will somebody please make the Presidents Cup armed and dangerous?

"That's not going to happen," Couples said. "It's a fun time to have between 24 guys."

If male bonding is the ultimate objective, group rates for the Alcatraz tour are available, but that's really not what Couples was trying to say.

The players, it seems, like the Presidents Cup just the way it is for all the reasons fans have been slow to give it their full passion.

Nobody sweats.

"It's a fun event," Couples continues. "Not so grueling, you know, five days of saying some word to someone and it gets blown out of proportion and they hate you. And then you go to Europe and they hate you more."

In the Presidents Cup's defense, the Ryder Cup was not always the Ryder Cup. For many of the years after being played in 1927 for the first time, it was an American tee party. The U.S. won 22 of the first 25 Ryder Cups played. Before Europe won back-to-back 1985 and 1987, the event burned with the passion of a weekend fishing trip.

Then, after all of Europe was recruited to join the team previously manned only by Great Britain and Ireland, the wins begin evening out. And nationalism took control.

"It has a history of some frictions," American Jim Furyk said.

As a result, many of the years since have not always been pretty or polite, but the Ryder Cup sure has become an event that raises pulse rates and tightens collars.

Will the Presidents Cup ever do the same?

"As far as I'm concerned, if I'm captain, I wouldn't tolerate that," Norman said. "I think in the spirit of what the game of golf is all about, a very, very fair and even spirit. You can't stop people pulling hard for their country. You can't do that.

"But as a captain, I would be discouraging guys to try and rub in it. And think that's unfair. I think that's one of the things that Freddie and I have touched on. Let's make this fun for everybody and make sure we don't get this thing put into a box where it become such a vicious rivalry that you can't pull yourself out of it."

Reasons to keep boiling blood out of the Presidents Cup are obvious. Golf's entire foundation is built on being a gentleman's game. Golfer don't play each other; they play the course. Never, the unwritten rules say, do you root against a player. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And every country loves it when their guys beats the bejeebers out of the other guys.

The Presidents Cup's problem, however, is keeping up with exactly who are the other guys.

Unlike Europe's Ryder Cup roster, the International Team comes predominately straight off the PGA Tour roster. Golf fans are as used to watching Fiji's Vijay Singh and Canada's Mike Weir as they are Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson. The players see each other week after week, one tournament stop after another. The only real difference this week is fewer fashion options.

"Every time I go to a tournament, it seems like I get paired with Retief Goosen, or Adam Scott or Vijay," Couples said. "So to get paired with them Thursday, the crowd senses no animosity, no hard feelings and they root just as hard,

"As the week goes longer, they will start figuring out that we see Vijay every week on TV but now he's going up against Americans, so we will calmly start to turn it the other way."

Yes, he said "calmly."

How nice.

Too nice.