The room was flat, the team were down and losing. With one day to put it right, a call to arms was needed and there was only one person who could provide it - the vice-captain. This was the scenario in the European team room at the 2008 Ryder Cup.
Sir Nick Faldo's side were struggling to summon the spirit that is usually at the heart of Europe's attempts to win the famous trophy in its biennial clash with the United States.
Someone needed to speak up and that man was Jose Maria Olazabal, the Spaniard who will lead Europe's defence of the regained Ryder Cup at Medinah next year.
"I still have goosebumps now about it," recalls Ian Poulter, who was Europe's star man in that 2008 match. "He didn't need to speak for long. He was very quiet but what he had to say was very meaningful. He said it with a lot of passion, he said it from the heart.
"When you get that kind of stuff from someone like Ollie, who has been that passionate for so long, it just moves everybody. It was a kind of lump-in-the-throat job."
In his message to the European team that Saturday evening in Kentucky, Olazabal told the players just what he would give to have the opportunity that they had to try to turn around the match. It brought tears to the eyes of many a hard-hearted professional sitting in that room, including the caddies, who were visibly moved as well.
"I think it's not so much what you say but how you say it," Olazabal told me. "It came from the heart, it came from my past experiences in the Ryder Cup, through good times and bad times. I think that's what really reached the players and the caddies there. From my point of view, I don't think I did anything special, I just spoke my mind and my heart."
If there was any doubt - and there wasn't much - that the Spaniard would one day be considered a shoo-in as a captain, it was removed by that speech at Valhalla, even though Olazabal's powerful words did not ultimately inspire a victory.
After all, this was a man who had forged a record-breaking Ryder Cup partnership with Seve Ballesteros, risen to the heights of the game by winning the 1994 Masters before rediscovering the ability to walk and resurrecting a career that appeared to have been cut short by a debilitating arthritic condition.
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The ailment, which left him able only to crawl on his hands and knees, first struck in the second half of the 1990s but he came back to win a second Masters in 1999. That was the same year he showed amazing stoicism and dignity in the face of the worst excesses of the so-called 'Battle of Brookline'.
Olazabal was also a player in the victorious European sides of 2002 and 2006 but it has always been an ongoing battle to remain fit enough to stay on tour. His condition made him hesitate over the captaincy for the 2010 Ryder Cup, his honest assessment that he might not be up to the rigours of the job allowing Colin Montgomerie to enter the frame.
Happily, Olazabal looks and feels fitter and stronger now. He is also embarking on four straight weeks of competitive golf in the European Tour's Gulf Swing, which begins here in Abu Dhabi on Thursday.
His inspirational qualities are in no doubt but he will also be a cerebral leader capable of astute tactical decisions. He has demonstrated this already by judging that he will be better served with only two rather than three captain's picks.
As Ryder Cup committee chairman Thomas Bjorn acknowledged, fewer of Europe's big names will be prepared to leave their selection to a captain's whim if only two picks are available to him.
On the subject of selection, Poulter wants the order in which the 2012 side is chosen altered so that the first five players on the qualifying list are the leading money winners in Europe rather than the leading accumulators of world ranking points.
This opens the door for more of the 'global' players to make the team, without the need for them to commit to extra European Tour stops.
Had this system been in place in 2010, Montgomerie would not have faced the difficult decision of leaving out both Paul Casey and Justin Rose.
Bjorn says such a change in selection policy may deprive the team of some of the European Tour loyalists who contribute so massively to the famed spirit that the continent's golfers take into Ryder Cup clashes.
But Olazabal's charismatic leadership should make up for that. Just ask anyone who was in the European team room in 2006.
Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/iaincarter/2011/01/passionate_olazabal_the_only_m.html
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