SPORTS EXTRA / RYDER CUP : TEE for TWO : The Best Golfers From the United States and Europe Have Turned the Ryder Cup Into One of Sport’s Most Intense Rivalries : U.S. Has the Best Team on Paper--Again--but They Have Been Burned Before

History has not been kind to U.S. Ryder Cup teams. Recent history, at least, and because we have attention spans shorter than a tee, that’s all that counts.

Anyway, here are the hard-luck lessons:

It is 1995 at soggy Oak Hill Country Club in Rochester, N.Y., and it is raining defeat.

This happens even though the U.S. has one of its deepest teams, has the reigning Masters champion in Ben Crenshaw and the U.S. Open champion in Corey Pavin, the golf is being played in upstate New York and the European team has players such as Philip Walton and Howard Clark, who probably couldn’t caddie for the U.S. team.

It is 1997 at soggy Valderrama Golf Club in Sotogrande, Spain, and it is raining defeat.

This happens even though the U.S. has probably its deepest team, has the reigning Masters champion in Tiger Woods, the British Open champion in Justin Leonard and the PGA champion in Davis Love III; the matches are being played on greens that should favor the superior U.S. putters, and the European team has players such as Ignacio Garrido and Per-Ulrik Johansson, who probably couldn’t even drive courtesy cars for the U.S. team.

So here we go again, this time at the Country Club, right here in Paul Revere’s backyard, and the situation appears so familiar that the whole thing is sort of unsettling.

Yes, the U.S. team is favored, by a couple of touchdowns. Yes, some of the European players look as if they couldn’t have gotten in without a ticket. Yes, the U.S. team has 10 of the top 20 players in the world rankings. Yes, it has been six years since the U.S. team has won and incentive has to be a factor.

But none of that may matter.

There are plenty of questions that need to be answered.

Namely:

* How has an underdog, undermanned, underappreciated team of Ryder Cup golfers from Europe overcome so much?

* Why can’t the U.S. Ryder Cup team perform up to its potential?

* How has the Ryder Cup become the centerpiece of an argument that players from Europe are simply better and that the supposedly best players in the world continually lose to them in match play?

In the meantime, the U.S. must content itself with the old days, when the Ryder Cup stayed on this side of the Atlantic Ocean.

The fact is, the U.S. has a 23-7-2 record in Ryder Cup play, but that record was largely built against teams limited to Britain. The U.S. has won only five of 10 matches since the competition was opened up to continental Europe in 1979, and Europe has either won or retained the Cup in five of the last seven meetings.

Chances are, these Ryder Cup matches are going to be the most memorable ever. It has been pointed out that the Ryder Cup became a lot more interesting when a U.S. victory wasn’t the foreordained outcome. Check. Now there’s a chance the Ryder Cup will be less interesting if there isn’t a U.S. victory.

All the fuss is about that Ryder Cup trophy, which is only 17 inches tall and weighs slightly more than four pounds. Who is destined to hoist that thing Sunday? Recent events tell us it’s going to be the European team. That’s history.

Still, the Ryder Cup may be trying to tell us something.

Dick Coop of the University of North Carolina is a sports psychologist who has worked with such golfers as Payne Stewart and Pavin, among others. Coop also was the one who introduced a skinny kid who played basketball at North Carolina to the game of golf. That would be Michael Jordan.

Anyway, Coop knows something about the brain game as it relates to golf, which seems to have something to do with the Ryder Cup. So why do underdog, underappreciated players beat up on the power brokers?

“The more complicated the data, the more likely it is a multi-varietal cause,” Coop said.

Yeah, we were afraid of that. Coop translated himself: “It’s probably not just one thing.”

So let’s try some theories on for size.

The Underdog Mentality: Barking Up the Right Tree

The U.S. team is strong. The European team is weak. Oh, really?

“Every coach in the world wants his team to be portrayed as the underdog,” Coop said. “It’s the ideal situation. It completely takes the pressure off.”

If that’s the case, then Mark James needs to nail his players’ shoes to the ground or they’ll probably just float off.

To be sure, it’s far easier to play without being burdened by the weight of expectations, and Europe certainly has held that advantage in recent Ryder Cup matches. What Europe has done, basically, is show up, wait for the media fallout to anoint the U.S. team as “the best ever”--which happens, oh, every two years--then walk out of the shadows and kick butt.

For instance, consider Walton and Clark. They might sound like the explorers who found the Northwest Passage, but they’re the guys who tilted the 1995 Ryder Cup in Europe’s favor.

The U.S. had a 9-7 lead after the first two days and needed to win only half of the 12 singles matches to keep the Ryder Cup. It didn’t happen. Tom Lehman got the U.S. off to a good start with a rousing 4 and 3 victory over Seve Ballesteros. But Clark, from England, came right back in the next match and knocked off Peter Jacobsen, 1-up. He even did it with flair, making a hole in one on the par-three 11th hole.

From then on, the U.S. was playing catch-up. The next-to-last match of the day had Walton, from Ireland, playing Jay Haas. Haas had to win to keep the U.S. alive. Sorry, Yanks. Walton scored a 1-up victory on the 18th hole when Haas drove into some trees and missed the green, which allowed Walton to win with a two-putt bogey.

It was just as bad at Valderrama, where the U.S. big three--major winners Woods, Leonard and Love--were a combined 1-9-3.

What’s more, Costantino Rocca crushed Woods in the singles, 4 and 2, after the U.S. had begun with three victories in the first four matches.

Sam Snead was the captain of three U.S. teams and in 1937 played on the first U.S. team to win on English soil. He said that your opponent is always dangerous, even if conventional wisdom says otherwise.

“That guy across from you can still play,” Snead said. “I don’t give a damn who he is. Sure, the Europeans have been underdogs. Hasn’t exactly hurt ‘em, has it?”

Just What Makes a Team? Poor Excuses Accepted Here

It is generally agreed that the U.S. players are better than the Europeans, the depth and quality of the U.S. PGA Tour are better than the European tour’s, the money is better and the courses better. This is leaving out things such as courtesy cars, child care, locker rooms and buffets, but you get the idea.

Of course, this works totally to a European advantage in the Ryder Cup. The poor, little team from Europe. . . . This is not reality, Coop says.

“They’ve got 25 players who are pretty good,” he said. “We’ve got 75. But we, as Americans, think their tour is not very good, not very deep. You only need 12 players in Ryder Cup.

“So we underestimate them because we don’t know them very well.”

The European team uses that as a springboard. Because the European players play on what is a generally an inferior pro circuit, they are banded together in a common circumstance. Being the downtrodden ties people together. You saw “Les Miserables,” right? Enough said.

There is also an us-against-the-world outlook. Coop has seen it many times before.

“It’s like, ‘The only ones who think we can win are in this locker room . . . or dugout . . . or clubhouse . . . or whatever,’ ” he said.

For this reason, European captain James is in a perfect position. If he loses, he did it with young, inexperienced overachievers who got together against the plunderers and just missed catching lightning in a bottle. If he wins, he’s a genius for molding a new, young, brash pride of lions and taking European golf shining brightly into the 2000s.

Mercenaries: U.S. Team That Doesn’t Care Much

It’s not a very favorable perception, but it’s one that is floating around. For instance, the top 30 players on the PGA Tour this year--those who make it into the $5-million Tour Championship--are certain to have passed $1 million in prize money already.

If money is the goal, then what’s the Ryder Cup about?

The way it’s set up, the PGA Tour is all about winning and the money list. There is so much money that it tends to dominate, and it can also warp a player’s perspective.

Of course, money comes in handy for spending in Europe too, but it doesn’t seem to obliterate the sensibilities, as it does here.

And as for the Ryder Cup compensation issue, it was a total public relations disaster. The U.S. players have a point about gaining a greater say in where the money they generate should go, but it never should have been debated in public. Multimillionaires grousing about money is unseemly.

Intangibles: Big Grab Bag to Explain Big Defeats

In the interest of tidiness, there are loose ends that need to be tied up. And when some people do that, they offer reasons for the recent European dominance:

* Europe is better at match play.

Maybe. The U.S. is 0-3 in the last two Ryder Cups and the Presidents Cup. Coop believes our upbringing as athletes contributes to this situation.

“We are brought up to be individuals,” he said. “It’s all on ‘them.’ It’s not on ‘team.’ Then when we get to a situation where it’s a team we’re playing and it’s a little harder for us to adjust to that.”

* The U.S. team has too many personalities.

Maybe. Snead remembers trying to come up with pairings during his captaincy.

“When I sat down with the players and asked who wanted to play with who, who liked what player, I just listened. I couldn’t believe it. I said, ‘Hell, send another team. These guys don’t want to play together.’ ”

The facts are that figuring out the pairings is probably the biggest headache Ben Crenshaw faces. Ask Tom Kite, who went down in flames with his pairings, all the while trying to do the right thing.

* The Presidents Cup is a big distraction.

Maybe. Time will tell whether there simply are too many match-play events. Now there is one a year, the Ryder Cup alternating with the Presidents Cup.

The Presidents Cup, conceived by PGA Tour Commissioner Tim Finchem as a U.S. vs. anybody-but-Europeans match-play event, has been played three times so far and has yet to become a hit, especially with the U.S. players. They pretty much went through the motions last December in a crushing 20 1/2-11 1/2 defeat at the hands of their international foes, even though Jack Nicklaus was the captain.

“It’s become a little bit ho-hum,” Coop said. “ ‘How can I get up every year?’ The Presidents Cup has taken some of the luster off the Ryder Cup, or it will in the next few years.”

* The captains need better training.

Maybe. The way it is now, it’s on-the-job training. Or, as Coop put it, “It’s almost like you’re flying the airplane while you’re building it.”

To fix it, how about a line of succession, with one year’s assistant captain moving to captain at the next Ryder Cup? It would take planning, it would take guts, it would take somebody with a vision to get it done. In other words, it’s probably not possible.

The captain’s job is hard, mixing egos and personalities and getting the players to play their best at the right time.

“It’s much more complex than getting them all in the same color shirts,” Coop said.

True. The way things have been going for the U.S. in the Ryder Cup, the shirt issue and the player-ego issue seem equally important. Or they’re going to seem that way until the U.S. team finally wins.

It has to happen, doesn’t it?

“I think they’ll win this time,” Snead said. “They should. I hope so. Gosh, Europe, the odds are stacked against them.”

And you know what that means. Europe has the U.S. players right where it wants them.