Hal Sutton sat alone in the lobby
of a Toronto hotel before the sun rose on the day after his 11th career
PGA Tour victory, a newspaper in his lap as he waited for a shuttle bus
to take him to the airport.
Andre Agassi won the U.S. Open.
The New Orleans Saints won their
NFL opener.
Oh, and a 41-year-old Louisiana
man with a new lease on life and unwavering confidence won the
Canadian Open. Sutton got to the golf secton and kept flipping the
pages.
"Anything good there in there
about you?" a hotel guest asked him.
Sutton smiled but ignored the
question. There was a time when reading too many stories about himself,
about whether he really was the next Jack Nicklaus, led to a slump so severe
it nearly caused him to find a new career during what should have been
his prime.
He went eight years without winning,
12 years before he actually felt anywhere near the same man who won The
Players Championship and the PGA Championship at 25.
"I went through a stretch where
everybody thought I was ... not living up to everybody else's expectations,"
he once said. "I was letting people influence my thinking. So I started
trying to make changes.
"I should have kept doing what
Hal Sutton knew how to do," he added. "I should have been myself instead
of trying to become someone else."
Twin daughters born in January
and another daughter who turns 3 in November make Sutton feel younger than
he is. Nothing turns back the clock like winning, especially the way he
dissected a difficult Glen Abbey course in the final round.
It was the kind of tournament
that reminds people how good Sutton was, and still is, and why he may be
one of the most reliable players for captain Ben Crenshaw when that little
exhibition with Europe rolls around next week.
Sutton has gone a dozen years
between Ryder Cups, another price he had to pay for his midlife crisis.
Losing made him tougher, more disciplined. He was so desperate to win he
stopped caring about the credentials he once carried.
That might not be a bad example
for teammates to follow if they don't want to see Europe load the Ryder
Cup onto the Concorde after next week.
"Experience is always a factor
if you're going to succeed," Sutton said. "But there is a lot more that
factors into succeeding at the Ryder Cup. We're all going to have to reach
down inside and do a little gut-check, and decide how bad we want this."
The American team is stacked once
again, loaded with the kind of can't-miss talent Sutton possessed in the
early 1980s.
All of their players are top 30
in the World Rankings, seven of them have won major championships. The
only rookie is David Duval, who happens to be the second-best player in
the world.
Still, only four Americans have
ever played on a winning Ryder Cup team, a list that does not include Sutton.
The pressure will never be greater than at The Country Club in Brookline,
Mass.
Pressure?
For Sutton, that was taking his
one-time exemption from the career money list to keep his playing privileges
in 1993, a time when he was hitting the ball so poorly he was embarrassed
to be seen on driving range next to the best players in the world.
But he reached inside, pulled
himself out of the pit and now has one more score to settle.
Sutton played in the 1985 and
1987 matches, which each carry a dubious footnote -- one was the worst
U.S loss in Ryder Cup history, the other was the first U.S. loss on home
soil.
"I have been on two talented teams,"
he said. "I have been on two experienced teams. And we came out of there
losers."
He has watched the past five matches
on television and saw a familiar theme -- the United States was better
on paper, Europe was better on grass.
"You can write it from as many
different angles as you want as to why we haven't gotten it done or whatever
else," he said. "I think it's going to have to come from inside."
Sutton has been relatively quiet
about the Ryder Cup. But a victory in his final tuneup before the matches
had him champing at the bit, even when the delicate issue of Ryder Cup
revenue was broached.
"The only thing I've got to say
about that is I hope we've all pulled together, and we're there for one
common denominator, which is to win that Ryder Cup back -- whether we get
paid to do it, or whether we have to pay them to do it," he said.
The next Nicklaus?
No, just a man who has experienced
his share of misery and wants to make sure it doesn't happen again.
