Ryder Cup

The last two players named to the U.S. Ryder Cup team rank 52d and 66th on the PGA money list this year. Together, they've missed the cut in eight of 14 tournaments since May. Both 39, they're considered to be on the downsides of their careers. But Ray Floyd, the team captain, who announced their additions yesterday, feels there is no substitute for experience in the emotional international matches - especially on foreign soil. And that is why he chose Tom Watson and Lanny Wadkins to complete the team that will try to wrest the Ryder Cup away from Europe next month in England.

The Ryder Cup used to be a small, quiet garden party that gave the United States an excuse to beat up on a team of golf professionals from Britain every two years while American fans yawned. Now, however, the Ryder Cup, which has been in existence since 1927, has grown in stature to become the major international team golf competition. Golfers throughout Europe became eligible to join the British delegation in 1979, and the Europeans won the Ryder Cup in 1985 and retained it in 1987 and 1989.

What: 38th Ryder Cup matches When: Today through Sunday Where: The Twenty Ten Course at the Celtic Manor Resort in Newport, Wales, is the first golf course designed specifically for the Ryder Cup. The course combines nine new holes created by European Golf Design and nine renovated holes from the Wentwood Hills course designed by Robert Trent Jones Jr. Water comes into play on half of the holes. It plays 7,378 yards at par 71. Format: Four matches of fourballs (better ball)

When the PGA Championship began, 14 golfers still had a mathematical chance to qualify for the final four automatic berths on the 12-man U.S. Ryder Cup team. But in the jockeying for position at Crooked Stick Golf Club, only one spot wound up changing hands. Steve Pate, by virtue of getting into a five-way tie for sixth place (he shot 69 yesterday, for a 4-under-par total of 284), moved up one notch to edge out Tim Simpson, who missed the 36-hole cut, and claim the final position in the points standings, which have been accumulating since January 1990.

Jeff Maggert had the right idea. Though he knew he needed to finish eighth in the PGA Championship to make the U.S. Ryder Cup team, he drove all Ryder Cup thoughts out of his head yesterday and just played. Did he ever. He equaled the one-day-old competitive course record at Winged Foot Golf Club with a 5-under-par 65, jumped to third place in the final PGA standings, and earned a Ryder Cup berth for the second straight time. "It's been a tough week," Maggert said. "I was pretty mad at myself about the way I finished [Saturday]

The U.S. Ryder Cup team took the hardware, but the three days of golf matches played over the Ocean Course transcended winning and losing. Consider that U.S. team captain Dave Stockton worked more diligently than any of his predecessors in getting 12 millionaires to think together as a team. And he saw his selection of wild-card picks Raymond Floyd and Chip Beck justified. Paul Azinger and Fred Couples, the U.S. answer to fire and ice, showed rather definitively that they are the next legitimate superstars on the PGA tour.

The United States and Europe tied at 14-14 in the Ryder Cup matches yesterday, enabling Europe to retain the trophy and leaving both captains and both teams with feelings of relief. Each team had a chance to win outright at The Belfry. Four Americans lost matches at the final hole, where the golfers had to clear water on their tee shots and approach shots. However, after Jose-Maria Canizares of Spain secured at least a draw for the Europeans with a 1-up victory over Ken Green, the American side won the last four matches, with the victories by Mark McCumber, Tom Watson, Lanny Wadkins and Curtis Strange preventing Europe from winning the competition for the third straight time.

An outstanding performance by the team of Nick Faldo and Ian Woosnam helped Europe expand its lead to five points over a struggling United States team yesterday going into the final round of the Ryder Cup Matches at Dublin, Ohio. The Europeans, seeking their first victory on American soil in the biennial matches that began in 1927, took their largest lead ever, 10 1/2-5 1/ 2, in the matches held at Muirfield Village Golf Club. They now need only four points from today's 12 singles matches, each worth one point, to make a successful defense of the Cup they won in 1985 in Britain.

Curtis Strange had come to the point as captain of the U.S. Ryder Cup team that he dreaded - notifying those he had not selected for the final two slots on the team. He thought, however, that he would have a little fun with one of those he did pick, Paul Azinger, before announcing yesterday that Azinger and Scott Verplank would fill out the 12-man team that will compete against Europe next month. "When the [PGA Championship] tournament was over [Sunday], I knew exactly what I was going to do," Strange said yesterday during a news conference at the Atlanta Athletic Club.

It may be bad news for most golf fans that the Ryder Cup has been postponed, but it's good news for this week's PGA Tour stop, the Marconi Pennsylvania Classic, in western Pennsylvania. In the day since the Ryder Cup was delayed for a year, six U.S. team members have joined the field of the two-year-old event. Paul Azinger, Mark Calcavecchia, Scott Verplank, Stewart Cink, Scott Hoch and Pennsylvania native Jim Furyk, plus captain Curtis Strange, are now headed to Laurel Valley Golf Club in Ligonier, Pa. Ordinarily, players must commit to a PGA Tour event the Friday before tournament week.

The road to redemption is hard and unyielding, riddled with potholes and good intentions, a forced-march slog through a wasteland, with only a flickering promise of salvation. Eldrick has been traveling that road for two years now, leaning into the wind, resisting and persisting, remaking his swing, remaking his life, seeking forgiveness, or if that's an unreasonable expectation, maybe a smile and a nod. Wasn't it just yesterday he was Tiger - no last name needed - the child prodigy who drove golf balls off the ends of the earth and snaked in 80-foot putts and finessed his way out of all sorts of trouble?

Mark Sheftic is on the U.S. PGA Cup team for the second straight competition, and the feeling is one of which he will never tire. "It means just as much as the first time," Sheftic, a teaching pro at Merion Golf Club who lives in Blue Bell, said Thursday before assembling with his teammates for the opening ceremonies at CordeValle in San Martin, Calif. "Any time you get on this team, it's hard to describe. I don't care if you're in it for the first time or the 10th time.

AS THE SAYING goes, there's the known and then there's the unknown . . . That pretty much sums up the first-round leaderboard at the second and last AT & T National to be played at Newtown Square's Aronimink Golf Club. And that's the way it can sometimes be on the PGA Tour, especially at a stop where no player ranked among the top 14 on the planet shows up. They're still going to hand out a trophy come Sunday afternoon. The rest mostly gets filed away under details. So, in no particular order, these were some of the sightings you had yesterday on this Donald Ross masterpiece: Dean Wilson, not to be confused with Mark, who won twice earlier this season.

IN CASE YOU haven't been paying attention, the golf world, as a wise man once sang, is a-changing. The 2011 season is half-over. Tiger Woods has played nine holes in the last 11 weeks. Phil Mickelson is 41. Baby-faced Rory McIlroy, who is 22, just won the U.S. Open by eight shots, after blowing a four-stroke, 54-hole lead at the Masters in April. International players have won the last five majors, the last four by guys in their 20s. There are three Americans in the top 10 of the world rankings: No. 5 Steve Stricker, who is 44 years old himself, Mickelson (6)

Justin Rose says Aronimink isn't the kind of layout you can "bully. " He should know. He's the defending champion of the AT & T National, which begins Thursday in Newtown Square. A year ago the Englishman, who turns 31 at the end of July, had just won his first PGA Tour title a month earlier at the Memorial. Then he came here and shot 10-under-par 270 at Aronimink to win by one over hard-charging Ryan Moore (final-round 65). "It's a golf course you can't chase scores on," Rose said on a recent teleconference.

THE YEAR IS only half over, but it's already been quite an eventful one for West Chester resident Sean O'Hair. And not all of it's been for the better. In late January, he and his wife Jackie welcomed their fourth child, Trevor Ryan, into the family. Since then, he's switched caddies, again, gone back to an old swing coach and fallen to 90th in the world rankings. Did we mention that he became involved in a very public "situation" with noted hothead Rory Sabbatini, even though O'Hair apparently had nothing to do with instigating it?

CASARES, Spain - Luke Donald will meet Martin Kaymer in the semifinals of the World Match Play Championship on Sunday, with the world's No. 1 ranking firmly in their sights after the elimination of top-ranked Lee Westwood. Westwood fell to Ryder Cup teammate Ian Poulter in the final 16 Saturday on the Finca Cortesin course. Second-ranked Donald struggled against Johan Edfors, needing a playoff to beat the Swedish outsider in the first knockout round. But he rediscovered his consistent best to defeat Masters champion Charl Schwartzel by 2 holes in the quarterfinals.

With Ballesteros' passing at 54, the golf world is a sadder place Golf Inq: www.philly.com/philly/blogs/golfinq/ There never will be another like Severiano Ballesteros. Since he first burst upon the worldwide scene as a 19-year-old at the 1976 British Open, where he finished second, the man known to all by one name - Seve - captivated golf fans of all ages and nationalities with his talent, his imagination, his competitiveness, his passion, and his swagger, for the next two decades.

MADRID - Golf great Seve Ballesteros has suffered "severe deterioration" in his recovery from a cancerous brain tumor and is being cared for at home. The 54-year-old Spanish star was resting at his home in the northern Spanish town of Pedrena, where he has mostly been since undergoing four operations in late 2008, his family said yesterday. "The family will inform accordingly about any change in his health condition and takes this opportunity of thanking everyone for the support that both Seve and his own family have been receiving during all this time," a statement on the golfer's website said.

GUESS WHAT? Former track star Marion Jones is sorry she lied about using steroids, and says she wishes she could change "certain things in my past. " Guess what else? She has a new book coming out today. Jones, who served 6 months in jail in 2008 after lying to federal investigators about using steroids told the Associated Press that her time behind bars was "probably the worst part of my life. " In the book, "On the Right Track," Jones writes that the 1 1/2 months she spent in solitary confinement - which came as punishment for fighting another inmates - was particularly difficult.