Gentle Ben No Easy Ryder

He looks like the kind of guy who hugs his teddy bear every night when he crawls into bed. He smiles a lot. He never has a bad word to say about anybody. He has a nickname that makes you warm inside.

So what gives with this new, hard-core, hard-bitten Ryder Cup attitude of Ben Crenshaw?

Unless it’s an act, the U.S. captain isn’t doing his Gentle Ben imitation anymore when it comes to the Ryder Cup. If anyone was expecting Crenshaw to roll over and let his players walk all over him, guess again.

Crenshaw is suddenly sounding pretty tough.

Maybe it’s because the United States has lost the last two Ryder Cup matches or maybe it’s because Crenshaw wants to be a U.S. captain in the soft-on-the-outside but barbed-wire-on-the-inside style of fellow Texan Dave Marr, but it’s clear that the Mr. Feel Good approach will be way, way out this September at the Country Club in Brookline, Mass.

“It’s extremely important that people know what we’re playing for,” Crenshaw said. “We’re playing for our souls.”

After getting dumped on their backsides at Oak Hill in 1995 and Valderrama in 1997, the U.S. team is a bunch of lost souls.

Through the years, Crenshaw has busily cultivated an image of being a soft-spoken, well, softy, but he is making it clear that’s unacceptable.

“Tom Kite had a theory that he wanted to play everyone equally,” Crenshaw said. “No one can fault the way Lanny [Wadkins] did it either. But their players did not perform. That’s the bottom line.

“I’m not in the theory of playing equally. If someone is playing well, they’ll be playing. If someone is playing poorly, they’ll sit down.

“I will listen to the players’ views on the pairings--to an extent. Then I’ll decide.”

Will the players buy that?

“Oh, yeah, this is what we have to do,” Crenshaw said. “They’ll understand a lot of things.”

As far as his captain’s picks, Crenshaw said one of his choices will be the player who plays the best this summer. He said his other choice will be someone whose game is suited for the Country Club.

For a U.S. team that was favored at Oak Hill and lost, favored at Valderrama and lost and then favored in the Presidents Cup and lost again, there are more troubling issues, such as: Are the U.S. players underachievers or overrated?

“Those are very fair and interesting questions,” Crenshaw said. “These players have to look inside themselves and ask themselves. Are we underachievers? Are we this good? Why have we gotten beat? Why aren’t we adapting? There are a lot of questions.

“I don’t know. I know what these guys are capable of. It still boils down to a three-day match. What’s telling is whoever has the feel and the confidence that week. We’ll see.”

IT’S A MAJOR . . . INVESTMENT

Before the first ball was hit in this week’s Andersen Consulting Match Play Championship, this question came up: Is this the fifth major?

Uh, you’ve got to be kidding, right?

Let’s let this event age a little bit, say, maybe 25 years, then bring the matter up for consideration. Right now, there’s absolutely no sentiment for elevating a two-day-old tournament to major status, no matter the $5-million purse and elite field.

Tiger Woods said, correctly, that the Players Championship has a better chance at being regarded as a major than the Match Play. But that’s not very likely, either.

“There’s four majors, that is it,” Woods said.

“Golf is all about traditionalists, and traditionalists don’t want to see another major added. Then you can’t compare yourself versus a Gene Sarazen versus a guy, like, say in 2050. You can’t relate and you can’t compare.”

This doesn’t mean that Andersen Consulting is unhappy with its role in the first-year tournament. The giant, 65,000-employee management, information technology and consulting firm with revenues of

$8.5 billion already considers its investment a huge success.

More than 1,000 Andersen clients are being entertained this weekend at La Costa, according to the company’s global director of public relations, Eric S. Jackson, who also said the company’s association with golf fits into its select audience of chief executive officers, chief financial officers and chief information officers of Fortune 500 companies.

“They read about golf, they play it, they study it, they love it,” Jackson said. “It’s important to Andersen Consulting that the Match Play be successful.

“We want our clients to walk out of here entertained,” Jackson said. “If you can’t put on a golf tournament, how could we handle a $200-million contract to install software and hardware?”

Andersen has a four-year deal to serve as the title sponsor of the Match Play, an agreement that is believed to be between $6 million and $8 million.

CHIP SHOTS

* Headline of the week comes from Martin Hardy’s column in the Express in London after Craig Stadler defeated Colin Montgomerie on Wednesday: “Monty’s eaten for breakfast by the Walrus.”

* The Skins Game is leaving Rancho La Quinta. The best bet is that the event, scheduled for Nov. 27-28, will stay in the Coachella Valley and move to either the new Tom Fazio-designed course at Bighorn or the new Landmark Golf Club layout at Indio that’s scheduled to be completed Nov. 1.

* Thanks to Woods, David Duval, Davis Love III and Ernie Els, the numbers are good at CBS, where Sunday’s fourth round of the Nissan Open had a 5.3 rating. That beat NBC’s telecast of the NBA game between Houston and Orlando.

* Casey Martin has played four Nike Tour events and made $3,238.

* Justin Rose, the English teenager who turned pro after his fourth-place finish at last year’s British Open, has missed the cut in all of his 14 pro tournaments. But he did manage a 71 last week at Qatar, his first round below par since September.

UH, THANKS, CRAIG

Greg Norman is one fine golfer, but he has one bad memory. Sizing up the first-round matches at the Match Play Championship, he touted Michael Bradley.

Said Norman: “Michael Bradley is [as] good as any young player out of Australia [that] I have ever seen.”

That’s just great, Greg, except Michael Bradley, 32, is from Florida. Bradley Hughes, 32, is from Australia. He isn’t playing at La Costa.