Is this the greatest Ryder Cup team ever?

MJ: I was paired with Sandy Lyle in all four matches. We played together for England as amateurs so we knew each other well and were friendly off the course and it worked well actually winning the first two games. We played well the second day but just didn’t win.

They were heavy favourites, their rookies were guys like Pate, Crenshaw, Lietzke and Rogers so they were extremely good rookies. We hadn’t won since 1957 but we were ahead after the first day so the morale was good. There were no celebrations as we knew what an uphill task it would be but were doing alright.

HI: Ray and I won one and lost one on Friday and then lost to Pinero and Langer on the Saturday morning. We played well but they scored better, I remember it was one of those matches where you wondered how you had lost but they were great at getting it up and down.

PR: We used a composite course which we had introduced at the first two European Opens so there were 15 holes on the Old and three on the New.

They started on the 2nd on the Old and, having eliminated two short par 4s, the 1st and 3rd on the Old, it stretched to 7,067 yards quite easily and they finished on the 18th of the New which is a better green and gets you back to where you started.

Lee Trevino worked it out and understood it, Tom Kite had won the European Open the year before and he quickly become a very knowledgeable Walton man.

Lee Trevino

JW: John Jacobs thought the 18th should be played as a short par 4 as there was a tented village on the 18th of the Old. We have a back tee for it but they thought the Americans weren’t as good wedge players as ours so they didn’t use it but that wasn’t quite true.

EM: They used to have back tees which you never saw which they called the News of the World tees which they used in the matchplay in the 50s and 60s. They were no more than 10-foot square and hidden in the heather, they never used those in the Ryder Cup for some reason but you will see some of them in use at the British Masters.

MJ: We lost seven out of eight on the Saturday, you never have the feeling of a whitewash as you are too wrapped up in your own match. There would have been quite a few scoreboards so we would have known what was going on.

JW: The unfortunate thing for us was that it is always held in September and that is the Autumn Equinox when the weather isn’t terribly good.

I went down to Ewell Village on the Saturday night and it was blowing a gale and pouring with rain and I wasn’t really sure that we would have a tented village the following day.

Kite won the European Open the year before and he had a tremendous battle with Lyle on the Sunday with 10 birdies to Lyle’s eight. The conditions favoured the Americans as the course had softened up.

MJ: Larry Nelson won all four of his matches; he was faultless, very straight and length wasn’t as important as it is today, and he putted well and he was a good match player. Add those up and you’ve got a pretty good player. If you were waiting for him to make a mistake then it wasn’t really going to happen.

HI: I don’t know if it was the greatest team but it was certainly 12 players that were playing well at the time. Great might be a word reserved for longevity like Arnold or Jack but all of us were certainly in form. There wasn’t a chink in the armour anywhere along the line.

Their better players were tasked with playing every match and that can be wearisome. It just becomes a numbers game. If you throw enough weight against another side then it becomes unrelenting.

Howard Clark

MJ: I don’t think it mattered who you played against. Trevino was probably one you might pick as one you wouldn’t want to face.

They were definitely the best American team I have seen, they were on a par with our team in 1987 which is our best line-up.

EM: If you added the rest of the world, so players like Nicky Price and Greg Norman, the score wouldn’t have been that much different. I don’t think I’ve seen a stronger team than that one in 1981. As far as performances go I don’t know how we managed to win in 1995 but that’s a different question.

PR: The Ryder Cup is still the most outstanding thing I’ve seen in my 66 years as a member.

We have a competition on the Ryder Cup course that we play late summer which is played by the low handicappers and that is a Stableford which is good as it’s a hell of a difficult course. That has been going on every year since 1981.