Brian Viner: Torrance forever the captain who leads from the front

'The adulation has been incredible, even in America. I walked on to the range and got a standing ovation. It was unbelievable'

Our meeting takes place at 10am in the health and fitness centre at Wentworth golf club, which causes a bit of a problem because Sam Torrance needs a drag on a roll-up, and the Wentworth health and fitness centre, not unreasonably, has a no smoking policy. Helen, who represents him on behalf of the International Management Group, is dispatched to ask whether the club will offer special dispensation to Europe's victorious Ryder Cup captain.

Helen returns. "They say: 'Can you wait 10 minutes while they turn the smoke alarms off in this room?'," she says. Torrance lights up anyway, and adds, with a basso profundo chuckle at the irony of it, that he was in the health centre at 10 the previous morning quaffing a pint of Guinness. It's not like IMG to miss a trick, but I'm surprised they haven't already marketed the Sam Torrance Guinness-and-ciggies health and fitness plan.

After all, in the afterglow of the Ryder Cup, he could have lent his name to a line of rubber-shafted drivers, and they would have sold like hot cakes. He has not yet, however, turned his Ryder Cup success to any commercial advantage, which is rather reassuring to hear; his equivalent in football would by now have had sold his diaries for £500,000, and be starring in TV adverts for footwear, dog food, sanitary towels, imitation butter and a chain of pizza restaurants.

But Torrance, at least for now, is content merely to bask in the warmth of public appreciation. He and his lads are, I suspect, five up with four to play in the voting for top team in next weekend's BBC Sports Personality of the Year show. And, as you would expect of a man who has always lived life to the full, he is enjoying it all immensely.

"It's very sweet," he says. "Wonderful, absolutely wonderful. Everywhere I've gone the adulation has been incredible. People in the street, in shops, everywhere. And not just here, in France, Taiwan, even America. In France, at the Lancôme [Trophy], I walked on to the range and got a standing ovation. It was unbelievable.

"And when I went to America the other week for the Warburg Cupin which he was soundly beaten, 4 and 3, by his rival Ryder Cup captain, Curtis Strange, yet cared hardly a jot] I was taken to the trading centre in New York, which for a golfer, was an incredible thing to see. I have no idea what goes on there, just that a trillion dollars, which I think is a thousand billion, is traded every day. It's the size of an American football field, no partitions, thousands of computers everywhere, and these electronic boards for putting up the stock prices, but that day they said: 'Sam Torrance, winning captain of the European Ryder Cup team'. And again I got a standing ovation."

Which of course is no more than he deserves, having masterminded such a famous victory at the Belfry. So what of that victory, specifically the Sunday strategy to stack the top of his singles order with his best players?

The former Ryder Cup captain Bernard Gallacher, and aspiring future captain Nick Faldo, have both told me that the significance of the captaincy is somewhat inflated, that you can shrewdly deploy your best pairing only to see it fold 5 and 3? Similarly, Torrance's decision to stick the heavyweights at the top, beginning with the heaviest heavyweight in Colin Montgomerie, could have backfired.

But it didn't, and so has gone down as more or less the golfing equivalent of a tactical masterstroke by another heroic Monty... who cleverly lured the main thrust of the German counter-offensive to the British flank during the Normandy Landings, thereby freeing the American armoured formations for the push through France and Belgium. The difference being that that Monty, of El Alamein rather than the Belfry, did not get as many standing ovations.

"I decided to do it that way," says Torrance, "over three years ago at the Sunningdale centenary dinner. By the way, that's also where I met David Purdie [an urbane Scottish obstetrician celebrated for his after-dinner speaking skills], who helped me with my speech-making and was fantastic, because I was petrified about that.

"Anyway, at Sunningdale there are a pair of twins, Tony and David Holland, and I'm still not sure which one it was, David I think, who said to me as we were having dinner: 'Put your best out first, your worst out last, and you can't go wrong'. That stuck in my mind. And I couldn't see a scenario where it wouldn't work. If you're four behind, you've got to go from the start. If you're tied, you've got to go from the start. If you're ahead, get further ahead.

"So on the Saturday night I said to the boys, Jesse, Woosie and Haeggman [his assistants Mark James, Ian Woosnam and Joakim Haeggman]: 'This is what I want to do, any objections?' And we wrote it down, who we thought was playing best, who we thought was playing worst. Not worst, that's not a good way of putting it, but you know...

"I had no idea what Curtis was going to do in the singles, and didn't care. I'm a gambler, I play cards, but I didn't want to pre-empt myself, I didn't want to think 'he'll do this so I'll do that' because you can screw yourself up. It's not like picking a football team."

Torrance gave the Ryder Cup official David Garland two envelopes. One contained a list of 12 names, the other just one, that of the man who was to be withdrawn if the event of the opposition having to withdraw a player through injury. Understandably, Torrance will not reveal that name even now, although it seems logical to assume that it was the final one on his list of 12: Jesper Parnevik.

Strange, too, handed Garland two envelopes. And five minutes later Garland posted up the draw, from Montgomerie v Scott Hoch down to Parnevik v Tiger Woods. "It looked good," Torrance recalls. "There were positive vibes coming from each match. You know, a couple of weeks ago I saw Philip Price [who played and defeated the mighty Phil Mickelson]. I said: 'I've got a bone to pick with you'. He'd written somewhere that he'd been thrown to the lions and was not expected to win. I said: 'That's bollocks'.

"It was always going to come down to the last four. I did think: 'Should we put one [of his best players, a Monty or Garcia] in there?' But then I thought: 'No, I don't care who you are, when it comes to the last four or five holes in the singles, in the Ryder Cup, it doesn't matter what you've done in your career before'. In fact that's what Lee Westwood had said earlier in the week, that it's not what your form's like, it's how you respond to pressure. He came out with that on the Tuesday and I thought: 'Brilliant, here's one of the guys who's struggling and he's said that, and that's exactly how it is'."

Torrance must have explained a thousand times where he was, and what he was thinking, on that final afternoon. But endearingly he shows no reluctance to recount it for the 1,001st time. "I wanted to see everyone off the first, and I did that, but before Price started I walked with my son across to the ninth green and caught Monty on the 10th tee. He had just gone three up on Scott Hoch, and it was great just to stand there, and give Hoch a nice look."

Torrance chuckles his deep, alcohol-and-tobacco-weighted chuckle. "And the end was ridiculous. Oh Christ. I was at 17, and Niclas Fasth is coming up there with [Paul] Azinger, and Price is coming up 16 two up. [Pierre] Fulke I think is all square and [Jesper] Parnevik is one down. So it's getting to the crunch. And [his wife] Suzanne's there with me, and I say, 'I'll go down 18 with Niclas, you bring in McGinley'. So I leave her there, and watch Niclas hit a great drive, Azinger hits a good one too, and then there's this humunguous roar from 16. I think: 'Christ, Price has won'. But he hasn't, it was his birdie putt. Then there's another huge roar, so now he has won, and all we need is a point, and I think: 'Christ, this is it, and Suzanne's not here, oh shit'.

"Anyway, Niclas hits it on, and Azinger's in the bunker, and I walk across the bridge and I'm in bits now. For three years I have never once thought: 'We're going to win'. I never did that to myself. But now I think: 'This is it, we only need a half, and Azinger's in the bunker'. My face is contorted, there are tears streaming down my face, and up comes David Duval, puts his arm on my shoulder and says 'nice spot', meaning great place to stand. That was fantastic of him, because he thinks it's over as well. And then Azinger holes the bunker shot! I never thought it was going to cost us the cup, but it brought me back to reality."

And then McGinley... "Yeah, and then McGinley... by which time I'm sitting with my head down, praying. And Furyk's in the bunker too, and he nearly holes it as well, it touches the side of the hole." For a second I think Torrance might start crying again. "Oh Christ," he says.

The elation continued into the following week (on the Monday, on the trip back to his home near Wentworth, he spent the entire champagne-fuelled car journey picking up congratulatory text messages; fortunately he wasn't driving), and into the following month, and doubtless will last well into next year. But what now for Torrance? He was asked by a number of his players to stay on as captain for the defence of the Ryder Cup in 2004, but declined. Did their exhortations put him under pressure?

"No, Christ, I'd hope they'd say that," he says. "But no. It might be a selfish decision, it is selfish, but it's also right. It's been a wonderful relationship. I played in eight, was vice-captain once, and now captain, it's time to stop. And by the next one I'll have been on the seniors tour [possibly in America, he hasn't yet decided] for maybe 18 months, so I won't know the players as well.

"We really knew each other this time, and we used the extra year [the 12-month postponement, forced by the 11 September attacks] wonderfully. I'm sure Curtis did, too. Normally it's two weeks from making the team to playing in the thing, that's the time you've got to gel, but we had the whole year, so we had four or five dinners, we played the Belfry, we were drawn in tournaments together, you see [Padraig] Harrington or whoever at a tournament and you know you're on the same team later in the year, so there's something special between you."

It is well-documented that Torrance sought the advice of Sir Alex Ferguson on how to motivate a team, less well-known that he also talked in some depth to Sven Goran Eriksson, on a flight to Spain. "But what Alex told me was the best thing, that there are no superstars in a team, that they're all equal. That was the biggest thing I got from anyone."

And now, I venture, it is he who is the motivation guru, so what will he say when others come to him for advice? "To make each one of your team feel very special. I had a different gift waiting for them in their room each night ... a wallet, a decanter with a quotation from Auld Lang Syne on it, a wonderful box of cutlery with the players' signatures engraved on each knife. We gave those to the American team as well."

I wonder if they use them?

The BBC Sports Personality of the Year is on BBC1 on Sunday 8 December at 8pm.