Was Strange to blame for leaving his best until last? No

Torrance gamble could have backfired

Sometimes the simplicities we impose on our judgements of sport are rightly dismantled, if not cut into small pieces and thrown to the dogs. No doubt that is the proper fate of my submission here last week that if by some mischief of the gods the names of Colin Montgomerie and Tiger Woods were placed together in the final line-up of Ryder Cup action we should perhaps make a call to the League Against Cruel Sports.

That did not happen and nor, mercifully has a visit from the men in white coats, but of course any review of the 34th playing of a match which not so long ago seemed to have exhausted both its manners and its point would be hollow indeed without reference to the glory of Montgomerie and the angst of Woods.

If hindsight can expose all kinds of misjudgments, however, it can also impose some of its own. The vilification of the American captain Curtis Strange is surely a classic example. Those notorious twin impostors who attach themselves to victory and defeat were organising a lynch party on Sunday night. That was maybe inevitable but it didn't make the thinking behind it any less spurious.

Strange is the goat of a Ryder Cup littered with heroes and rampantly revived as a spectacle of the highest quality – it has rarely been less than that – that does not necessarily have to descend to the manners of a rough bar-room in south Boston, Massachusetts.

His decision to hold back his praetorian guard of Woods, Phil Mickelson and Davis Love III for the mopping up of a broken Europe rather than a frontal assault is being roundly condemned as one of the dimmest strategic moves since the French built the Maginot Line. It is of course another simplicity, another verdict that ignores the reality of the action.

Europe won the Ryder Cup not because Sam Torrance out-thought and out-captained Strange, though in some ways that may well be true. Europe won because Montgomerie was immense, Phillip Price produced the round of his life against Mickelson, Bernhard Langer played from one of the most acute memories in all of sport, and Paul McGinley got up and down with extraordinary nerve on the last hole after playing a poor second shot. Take away any of those elements of the last day's action, plus the doggedness of unfancied Europeans such as Niclas Fasth and Pierre Fulke, and Torrance would have been just another gambler who lost.

Strange took it in the eye magnificently. His speech from the abyss of defeat was filled with grace and closed, magnificently, the book on the disfigurement brought by the appalling excesses of Brookline Country Club three years ago. Strange called his shots and they misfired, but he couldn't go out on the course and play a shot, he couldn't presume to tell major league golfers how to play the game as Seve Ballesteros did in Sotogrande five years ago and in the process made an ordeal for his players that somehow they survived.

Even as McGinley was, perhaps just a little tackily, jumping in the lake, Strange was asked if he had got his strategy wrong. "Oh," he said, "we are second guessing already." But he insisted he would not have changed anything except, no doubt, the touch and resolution of some of his seven major tournament winners. Strange's disposition of his troops is being seen as a disaster but as Montgomerie and Scott Hoch went to the first tee on Sunday morning the American captain was running four points ahead of his immediate predecessors Tom Kite and Ben Crenshaw, and this after the first-day implosion of the world's leading player.

Woods was a headache for Strange – and a rather sullen opponent of the idea that the Ryder Cup, and a format so exquisitely pitched to draw every possible drama out of the three-day contest, inevitably captures the imagination of the game's leading players. Woods' disaffection appeared to be touching phobic levels by the end of the week, just as Montgomerie seemed endangered only by an overload of bliss.

Where Ryder Cup reality settles between these two extremes is not the least fascinating question in the wake of Europe's refusal to submit to an American team of vastly more experience and achievement. Some were saying that this was Montgomerie's major. Another simplicity. Montgomery's record in the Ryder Cup was already impressive and what he produced on Sunday, and the previous two days, was an extension of his reputation in team golf rather than any revelation. Bizarre as it may seem, Montgomerie finds the Ryder Cup a theatre of reassurance more than a challenge and to imagine that he will go to Augusta next spring emboldened by his slaying of the Americans has to be wishful thinking. Montgomerie unleashes his talent on the Ryder Cup; Woods seems to check on his like a miser re-examining the contents of his purse.

Maybe one day Woods will be seduced by the peculiar aura of the match. Maybe he will finally listen to the relentlessly ignored wisdom of the great Walter Hagen, who said that all professional golfers should take time to smell the flowers. But perhaps it is too soon for Woods to step down from the obsessive level of commitment without which he could not have dreamed of accomplishing half the achievements that now stand against his name.

Perhaps the real truth is that the Ryder Cup will always stand apart from the rules of the game from which it springs. Golf is the ultimate game of the individual in that nobody disputes that often the most resolute opponent is yourself. Of whom could this be more true than Montgomerie? At The Belfry he was a god in charge of his universe. At a major he conducts virulent rows with himself. At a major he scours the gallery for a reason to explode. At the Ryder Cup he invites hecklers to share his clubs. You might say Monty was liberated by the last few days, or that he was given a hiding place.

Certainly, there is no avoiding the diametrically opposed effect of the Ryder Cup on possibly the greatest golfer the game has ever known and on the man who dominated Europe so profoundly for seven years. One theory must be that because Montgomerie came to golf so much later than Woods, and that he needed to be persuaded that his talent was so strong it must be exposed to professional competition, his sense of belonging when a major tournament comes to its climax is so much less pronounced. A high place on the leaderboard over the last nine holes of a major has long been the Tiger's natural habitat. For Monty it is territory guaranteed to expose his uncertainties about who he is and where he is.

At the Ryder Cup Montgomerie's sense of his own identity is encouraged at every point, and never more dramatically than when Torrance scrawled his name at the top of the European singles line-up on Saturday night. The player said that he was as shocked as the rest of the world by his place at the top of that list. But by Sunday morning he had plainly grown by some inches.

There is a thunderous democracy to the Ryder Cup and if you doubt it you only have to scroll down a list of some unlikely heroes. Constantino Rocca beat Tiger Woods 4 and 2. Brian Barnes beat Jack Nicklaus – twice. One day a young student of golf may work through the records of both the major championships and the Ryder Cup and speculate on why C Montgomerie was a non-entity in one and a colossus in the other. We can only wish him good luck as we ponder the mysteries of golf, and the enduring appeal of the Ryder Cup.

Some of the claims it made for itself last week were more than a little grotesque, but when the action came it was glorious. The Tiger may well feel the magic of it some day, but probably only after he has won at least another 10 majors. It is his life and his glory but, after Sunday, maybe also his loss.