GLENEAGLES, Scotland
There is Team Europe at this Ryder Cup, but there is also Team Poulter: four British fans of varying ages who were on hand for Thursday's final practice session. They were wearing spiky, frosted wigs attached to visors in honor of Ian Poulter, the extrovert who stirs the European drink.
'Bought them on the Internet two weeks ago,' Ray McIver, a 61-year-old from Newcastle, said with a cackle. 'All I had to do was Google 'Poulter Wigs.' Five pound, 99. It keeps your head warm.'
That could come in handy in Scotland. Poulter is sporting a more sedate, monochrome coiffure for this Cup, but he still has the visor, the hair gel and the aura.
'Mr. Ryder Cup,' said David Howell, a former teammate.
Poulter was the miracle-maker in chief at Medinah Country Club two years ago, hoisting the slumping European team onto his wiry frame and carrying it all the way back from a 6-point deficit Saturday afternoon to a wild-eyed, Champagne-spraying fiesta in the twilight Sunday.
The Americans sound as if they have been throwing darts at Poulter photographs ever since.
'I lost two matches to Poulter at Medinah, so I would love to play him again, try to get those points back,' Webb Simpson said Thursday.
It is, by the way, usually 'Poulter' when the American players bring him up, very rarely 'Ian.' He is the sort of prickly Ryder Cup rival who seems best held at arm's length, even if he now lives with his family in Florida and is a regular on the PGA Tour.
He does have at least one admitted admirer on the American team. Patrick Reed, a 24-year-old Cup rookie who also does not lack for chutzpah, listed Poulter as one of those in his dream four-ball match even before Reed made this team. He has liked Poulter since they were in the same group at the 2012 Travelers Championship in Connecticut.
'He made you laugh literally the entire 18 holes we played; it was always just one-liners and jabbing a little bit,' Reed said. 'He was a lot of fun, real down to earth and easy to play with.'
But Poulter should be in a less convivial mood Friday when he and Stephen Gallacher face Reed and Jordan Spieth, another young American rookie, in a four-ball match at the Cup.
'There won't be much small talk,' Spieth said.
There will be plenty of noise, though, with Gallacher, the only Scot in the Ryder Cup, paired with Poulter, a 38-year-old Englishman who knows how to incite the Ryder Cup version of a riot.
'We've got a Scottish crowd that is going to be very vociferous, and we all know who rises to those kinds of occasions,' said Paul McGinley, the European captain. 'Ian is ready to go, and he's strong.'
Poulter is 12-3 in his four Cups. He has been the leading European point scorer in the last three editions, and he has presumably led the team in back slaps and full-flex fist pumps, the latter talent not always to the taste of his American foils.
'Everybody's got their own DNA, and everybody fist-pumps in their own way,' he said. 'It's not disrespectful in any way, shape or form. I feel that I've done it in a way that is natural to me.'
Poulter is now frequently packed into the same paragraph with past inspirational European players like Seve Ballesteros and Colin Montgomerie. It came as no surprise that he was singled out this week by the American captain, Tom Watson, as the player his team was targeting.
'I take that as a compliment,' Poulter said.
Yet it remains unclear whether he is truly ready to go this time. Poulter has had a middling season by his standards, with only three top-10 finishes, and needed a captain's pick to make the team. When he analyzed each of the European players in an article for The Daily Mail this week, this was his own analysis of Ian Poulter:
'He's been beyond useless all season, but look at that Ryder Cup record. I can promise you this: He's pumped, he's ready, and the postman is keen and eager to make another delivery.'
Perhaps. He was, after all, a captain's pick last time around, too. But match-winning form is surely not something that can be flipped on like a light switch. Inspiration and love of country (or, in this unusual case, continent) can work on occasion but surely not on every occasion, particularly when Cup pressure has a way of turning cracks into clean breaks.
Montgomerie, the portly Scot who was Europe's leader for many of his eight Cups, found form in a hurry in some of those matches, above all in 2004, when he was outside the top 50 and reeling from the breakup of his marriage. But he was also a leading golfer on the European tour week to week for seven years and finished second or tied for second in five major championships.
Ballesteros, a Spaniard who died in 2011, won five majors and 91 tournaments in all, many of them by breaking the rules that govern the most reliable way to maneuver a ball around a course.
Poulter, with 16 professional tournament victories and one second-place finish at a major, does not punch in the same weight class as Montgomerie, Ballesteros or even his current teammates Rory McIlroy, Sergio García and Lee Westwood.
But if Poulter is being judged on his performance over three days every two years, he is elite all the way, and that is also because he truly embraces the occasion, while many others simply talk about embracing it.
'Just the pride of what it means to put the shirt on, to walk over the bridge and through the tunnel and soak up the electricity that you get from the crowd is something which is the biggest adrenaline rush you could ever possibly have,' he said. 'Week in and week out, when we perform in majors, it's just not the same.'
Team Poulter was certainly ready to do its part Thursday. The four men, including Ray McIver and his son Michael, were shouting for Poulter's attention (and autograph) as he swaggered toward the seventh tee.
'The key thing about Ian Poulter without any doubt is that Poulter didn't go through a school of golf,' Ray McIver said. 'He didn't go to university. He used to sell Mars bars and tee pegs in the pro shop. He came up from behind, and he's up there with the big boys now. He's a working-class guy who's done it off his own back. That's why he's a legend.'
The working-class guy - busy signing shirts, flags, programs and God knows what else on the other side of the ropes - resisted the shouts for quite some time, but he finally turned their way, clenched both fists and gave Team Poulter what had it bought those wigs for: a frame-shaking double fist pump.
'A bad hair day but a great day,' Ray McIver concluded.
That has long been Poulter's winning Ryder Cup formula. High time, after the obligatory two-year wait, to find out whether he can make it work again at Gleneagles.
Post By http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/26/sports/golf/ian-poulter-is-europes-ryder-cup-lightning-rod-in-a-visor.html
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