U.S. Ryder Cup team not dwelling on past

Louisville, Ky. — Let’s see, the Europeans have won five of the last six Ryder Cups, including the past three. In the last two contests the Americans have been paddled like freshman during a pledge initiation. And this time around the premier weapon in the American arsenal, Tiger Woods, is injured and can’t play.

So what — other than an improving exchange rate — makes the Americans feel like they have a chance to regain the famous gold trophy that seed merchant Samuel Ryder commissioned in 1927?

How about a short memory?

“It’s a lot like the rest of the game of golf where you have to put your bogeys and doubles and your missed putts and your shots out-of-bounds and in the water, you have to put all that stuff behind you,” said Duluth’s Stewart Cink.

So since the past can’t be reversed, the American players aren’t concentrating on what happened at the K Club in 2006 or at Oakland Hills in 2004, locations of the two most recent thrashings. They’re focused only on this weekend.

“We’ve got a fresh captain and we have a fresh course,” Cink said. “It would really do us no good to dwell on the past.”

Captain Paul Azinger adamantly said, “The past is the past. What difference does the past make to us? Those are different teams, different players, different course, different years, different times. I don’t care about the past. We know what the past is.”

Azinger decided the best way to change the future was by avoiding the same mistakes. He sold the PGA of America on the notion that the best way to change the fortunes of the U.S. team was to alter the way the squad was chosen.

He bartered for — and received — an unprecedented four captain’s selections. Perhaps even more importantly, Azinger helped change the selection process. The emphasis was shifted to the current year; previous teams were based on a two-year qualifying system.

And instead of players only earning Ryder Cup points for top-10 finishes, the qualifying emphasis was shifted to earnings, with double dollar values awarded for money won at a major championship. The idea was to reward guys who came up big in the spotlight.

“I felt like the selection process was kind of antiquated,” Azinger said. “We’ve done a lot of things to try to correct the selection process that’s been going on here and if we’ve done it right, then we’ll be competitive. We’ll just have to see.”

And even though Woods was unable to play, the Americans ended up with eight solid players through the points list: Phil Mickelson, Jim Furyk, Anthony Kim, Ben Curtis, Boo Weekley, Kenny Perry, Justin Leonard and Cink.

“It would be difficult to argue that the top eight players on that system of ours, that you would look at any one of those guys and say, ‘How did that guy make this team?” Azinger said. “We have exactly who we want to have on this team, without of course Tiger Woods, the greatest player on earth. Other than that, I don’t know what other changes I can make.”