Ryder captain a no-win situation

There must not be any hangovers from getting pounded regularly in the Ryder Cup, because someone is always willing to stand up there at the helm and steer the U.S. ship as it capsizes every two years.

It’s like clockwork. A cuckoo clock. Wind it up and it falls apart.

You can understand the PGA of America’s position, that you can’t just send a team out to the golf course to play Europe without having a captain, and you probably can also come to terms with the notion that when he’s offered the job, Paul Azinger won’t say no. The Associated Press reported Wednesday that he is going to be the next U.S. captain.

But, really, is there anybody out there who truly believes the captain is the deal-breaker in this Ryder Cup business?

Actually, there are only three factors that decide the outcome of the Ryder Cup: Players, players, players.

Europe had eight Ryder Cup players ranked in the top 20 compared with five for the U.S. Europe is so strong, there are three players who didn’t get chosen who would have been better than the bottom three on the U.S. squad -- Ian Poulter, Carl Pettersson and Thomas Bjorn.

The problems the U.S. is experiencing in the Ryder Cup have been expanding faster than John Daly’s waistline and the reality is that every U.S. captain has had very little impact on the outcome.

All right, Ian Woosnam might not have had to do too much either, but the fact is that Europe won on his watch, and he proved he could chug a pint of Guinness with the best of them.

The morbid statistics show that Europe has won the Ryder Cup five of the last six times, three in a row, and the last two by the same 18 1/2 -9 1/2 score, the largest margin of defeat the U.S. side has absorbed since the competition started in 1927.

This is no playground, although more than a few U.S. captains have taken a trip down the slide. And it didn’t matter what they tried to do to brake.

Lanny Wadkins was a tough-talking, old school guy at Oak Hill in 1995 and that was a mess. Tom Kite was the uber-friendly, touchy-feely captain who invited Michael Jordan to watch from his golf cart at Valderrama in 1997. It was ugly. Curtis Strange adopted the Wadkins approach in 2002 at the Belfry and it worked just as well as it did for Wadkins.

In 2004, there was Hal Sutton, a cheery, outspoken, burly, throwback to, well, Jackie Burke, who wouldn’t have had a chance either at Oakland Hills. The defeat was of such historic proportions, everyone agreed it would never be seen again. And it wasn’t, until Tom Lehman saw it in September at the K Club.

The only U.S. captain in the last 13 years who had a different experience was Ben Crenshaw, in 1999 at Brookline, presiding over the greatest last-day comeback in the Ryder Cup. But as much as it goes down as a great win, it should probably be regarded just as much as a great fluke.

Soon it’s going to be Azinger’s responsibility to turn things around in 2008 at Valhalla, and as we have learned from past captains, it’s always a thankless job and mostly a futile effort. When the Ryder Cup started dividing its focus between the competition and all the banquets and ceremonies and stipends and clothing and including even a chef and the in-laws in travel plans, the captain became more of a ringmaster and less of a, well, coach.

So much time and energy is spent on pairings, or what player should play with what player. This is not so difficult, because all the players know if they like each other or not, and also how their games mesh. Or collide.

There’s one idea that hasn’t been considered yet by the PGA of America. Let Tiger Woods choose the entire team. He can fill out the lineup card too. What difference would it make? Nothing else is working.

In the meantime, somebody get Azinger on the phone right away. Make sure he knows just what he’s getting into. He can call collect. It’ll be a short conversation.

thomas.bonk@latimes.com