Corey Pavin Bans Twitter, Tips His Hand for Ryder Cup

In what I guess is an effort to make sure the team room is filled with twelve guys who are not attached to their mobile phones, Corey Pavin has banned the use of Twitter for his Ryder Cup team while in Wales.

Does that make him a bit of a prude? Sure. (Same goes for Monty who, despite probably not knowing what Twitter even does, joined Pavin in banning his team from using it this week.) Effectively, though, it impacts just four players - Rickie Fowler, Bubba Watson, Zach Johnson, and Stewart Cink. Oh, yeah, Hunter Mahan has an account but he's busy getting ready to marry a former Dallas Cowboys cheerleader, so he's not doing much tweeting.

This is a good thing in one regard. It saves us from strings of tweets between the first four about how excited they are to play in the Ryder Cup, sharing random pictures of ugly British food, and telling us just how depressing Celtic Manor's Twenty Ten Course is. 

(For what it's worth, I'm a big fan of Cink on Twitter. He provides quality insight with humor and honesty. The other guys aren't bad at all, just they don't share a lot of inside baseball.)

I doubt Corey Pavin thought of the public sanity when making this call. He was probably thinking more along the lines of Colin Montgomerie, who opted to have his team room soundproofed.

Frankly, though, what Pavin is doing is worse. For fans of Twitter and these five American players, they lose an opportunity to feel a connection to what should be an interesting match. The Ryder Cup has a lot of passion to it, but it is intended to be fun. The intensity inside of the ropes is matched by the friendship and bonding off of the course. Twitter creates a window to that.

Ultimately, banning Twitter is about more than 140 characters. The information that a player could share is fairly limited. Leaks of pairings or sharing the tone of the team room are really the only buckets of information that could impact the European strategy or momentum. This is a tactic which may well be telling of how Corey Pavin will approach managing the American team in the seven days to come.

Pavin's move is true to his personality - quiet and insular. He likes to keep things close to the vest. One need only look at how uncomfortable it has been for him in engaging the media for the last eighteen months. From Jim Gray to his own Twitter account, the experience has been confusing, sometimes mundane.

The current captain has largely shunned the attitude of the prior, successful captain. Corey Pavin may have kept the selection system devised by Paul Azinger, but Pavin seems disinterested in Azinger's military-inspired approach that helped the American players bond in a way that propelled the team to victory. Pavin wants to do things his way.

Pavin wants the American squad to play like twelve men, not four groups of three. He indicated that in how he consulted many of the players on his team to make his wild card selections. Maybe there was a tinge of doubt in his mind that needed last minute quelling, but he really just wanted to be inclusive.

The broader picture of Captain Pavin is a man who wants his team to be close, quiet, and fairly stoic. It sounds like Pavin himself, no? 

It's said that teams eventually look and function very much like their leader. The evaluation of that influence and, by extension, Pavin as a leader begins tomorrow in Wales.

The true test is how his players will embrace him. Among his own squad, Pavin is an outlier in terms of age and personality type. There might be some home bodies, some quiet types, but this American team is young, brash, and aggressive. Pavin doesn't exactly score there on the Myers-Briggs. The question will be if his personality and approach rally his men or lose them in the middle of battle.

Want to dismiss the importance of the captain? Just ask the Europeans how they felt about the aloof approach Nick Faldo took two years ago. And then remember who's trying to win the Ryder Cup back. That's what the Americans are flying into tonight, lead by a man who is much different than the self-described codebreaker who took the Yankees to Valhalla - literally and figuratively.