James returns to a tough and changing world

Former Ryder Cup captain makes comeback after illness but struggles to compete with the game's big hitters

My arrangement with Mark James is to meet him behind the 18th green at the end of his first round in the British Masters tournament at Woburn.

Knowing that the chairman of the PGA Tour Committee, former Ryder Cup captain and notorious letter-binner can be a testy character, especially when he is playing poor golf, I am probably even more anxious than he is that he enjoys a decent round. When I arrive at the course he is two under par. Things are looking good. But when he reaches the 18th tee he is back to level par. Oh dear. Then I watch him double-bogey the 18th, missing a short putt in the painful process. Oh dear, dear, dear.

Accordingly, it is with some trepidation that I introduce myself. And yet James is geniality itself. Can it be that the trauma of testicular cancer, which was diagnosed in October 2000 and treated with heavy doses of chemotherapy, has encouraged him to take golf less seriously? After all, there were moments when he felt he was staring death in the face, and when his friends, too, contemplated losing him. "If you die, I will be really, really cross," declared a telegram from the impish David Feherty. So what's a double-bogey in the scheme of things?

When we reach the comfort of the clubhouse I put it to him: has cancer altered his perspective on his sport? He smiles. "No, golf still makes me livid," he says. "Everyone throws fewer clubs as they get older, so I might look outwardly as if I've mellowed, but inside the cap is screwed tighter on to the volcano, that's all."

During his illness – "they don't really say you're cured, but things couldn't be more encouraging" – he did not play golf for seven months. "The first time I picked up a club, I was terrified. And I literally nearly fell over. I'm hitting it OK again now, but I was playing well before I got ill [he was second in the 2000 English Open] and I haven't come near that sort of form since. Just marking time until the Senior Tour [he is 48, two years shy of qualification age] was not what I had in mind but that seems to be the way it is working out.

"The thing is, it's very difficult to compete with the big hitters now. The money's bigger than it used to be, but if you miss cuts you don't get any, and it's costing a couple of grand a week to play. The game has changed in the last two years. It's dependent on big hitting, so they are stretching courses and playing into the big hitters' hands. They're focusing too much on length, when what they should be doing is making the greens smaller targets. Greens haven't become smaller targets for the last 100 years. If anything they've become larger. We're frequently hitting driver to a smaller target than the green to which we're hitting mid-iron, which is ridiculous."

I offer the punitive condition of Carnoustie, at the 1999 Open Championship, as a case in point.

"Exactly. That was a classic example of the game changing. The fairways were 15 to 20 yards wide, the greens 20 to 25 yards wide, so you're taking iron play out of the game, making it all about driving and putting.

"If you want to protect courses from the expertise of the pros, make the greens smaller targets. But why protect them at all? Tour pros are supposed to be good. Let them shoot 25 under. Except that people seem to hate it. They seem to think it brings the course into disrepute."

Speaking of bringing things into disrepute, James did rather a good job of that himself, with the admission, in his widely-publicised book Into The Bear Pit, that at Brookline in 1999 he had chucked away Nick Faldo's good luck message to the European Ryder Cup team, of which he was captain.

His new book, After The Bear Pit, documents the resulting hullabaloo, which ended with James being forced to resign as Sam Torrance's vice-captain for the (subsequently postponed) 2001 match. I ask whether, looking back, he would do things differently?

"I don't think so, no – I have no regrets," he says. "I'm not trying to abrogate all responsibility, but I was surprised how black and white the press seemed to make it. It was so obviously not a situation where you should back someone 110 per cent and oppose someone else 110 per cent. Like with Roy Keane and Mick McCarthy, you know that someone has been badly treated, but without all the facts you can't be sure who it is.

"You could certainly argue that I shouldn't have said in the book that I binned the letter," he says. (I note the words "that I shouldn't have said in the book"; he doesn't question whether it was right to discard the letter.) "But it was indicative of how strongly I and others in the team felt at the time. In the run-up to the Ryder Cup comments were attributed to Faldo that did not do Monty any favours, and were critical of me."

Here I provocatively venture my pet Faldo theory, that he is the same person off the course as the one who has won six majors on it, so those who take pride in his golfing achievements should therefore cut him a whole load of slack before criticising his behaviour elsewhere.

James narrows his eyes. "Are you saying that I should have accepted criticism of me and my No 1 player as just Nick being Nick?" Maybe, yes. A short laugh. "The trouble is that it came at a crucial time, three or four weeks beforehand. One day Nick might be captain himself, and will know that at that time you want everyone feeling positive."

Bernard Gallagher, James' predecessor as Ryder Cup captain, recently said that, if Faldo wants the captaincy next time, he should be given it.

Does James agree? "Er, I think there are a number of people who deserve to be captain and Nick is one of them. I suspect that in the eyes of many tour pros, maybe [Ian] Woosnam or [Bernhard] Langer have stronger claims at the moment."

Whatever, that's a debate for the future. For now, Torrance has the job of leading out the Europeans at The Belfry in September, with James as unofficial right-hand man. Does he resent being denied the official vice-captaincy?

"I felt that the Ryder Cup committee were weak," he says. "They forced me to resign so the problem would go away, but they never asked me for my side of the story, I doubt if many of them had even read the relevant parts of the book, and the problem didn't go away, because the very day after I resigned Nick was still going to the press wanting me to resign as chairman of the Tournament Committee. He only stopped talking when Neil Coles had a go at him in the press. I think he then realised he'd probably said enough."

As, perhaps, have we. Enough of the Faldo letter. I tell James, for whatever it may be worth, that I wish the Ryder Cup had gone ahead as planned last year, 11 September notwithstanding.

He concurs. "Yes, I thought it should have gone ahead, but the Americans historically refuse to travel when there are global problems. It wasn't about sport happening so soon after [11 September], because baseball had started again. They just wouldn't come. Our players were pretty keen to play it, and if they had, there's no doubt that it would have been played in the right spirit."

The right spirit, of course, was manifestly lacking at Brookline, at least when Justin Leonard holed his extravagant putt on the 17th green. And the rancour between both sides continued afterwards. "There were some comments attributed to [the US captain] Ben Crenshaw that made my mind boggle, for instance that we played slow on purpose to disrupt their game, and I can only hope he was misquoted, because otherwise it's pretty sad."

Deliberate slow play would be devious indeed. Nonetheless, it is an open secret that The Belfry is systematically prepared, as doubtless Brookline was, to favour the home team. And James does not mind elaborating.

"Three or four of the American team are very long hitters, whereas everyone else is pretty much on a par. So on certain holes, if there is a 300-yard carry over a bunker and the fairway opens out after the bunker, maybe we'd reduce the fairway width, so the huge hitters won't have a big advantage. And we would have rough around the green at a length we were comfortable with. The flop-shot out of knee-length hay is their stock shot around the green."

James, in common with many successful golfers of his generation, not least Faldo, has recently started to dabble in course design. He has designed two courses so far, High Legh near Manchester and Matfen Hall in the North-East. What kind of course, I ask him, would he like to be considered a typical Mark James lay-out?

"So much is dictated by budget. If I had a virgin piece of desert in Dubai, and a decent budget, the fairways would be 25 to 30 yards wide, they wouldn't get wider at 300 yards, and the greens would be narrow.

"They would be smaller targets but longer, so they would still have the acreage. It would be 7,200 yards off the very back tees, 6,200 yards for members, and there'd be some water but not endless carries over lakes. The bunkers wouldn't be huge sand storage areas, and they would have lips. I can't understand the current fashion of huge bunkers with no lips. Wentworth have put two down on the left of 15, but they'd be better off with rough there. It's a better hazard."

Wentworth does not make the list of the courses he would choose if condemned to play just three for the rest of his (hopefully lymphoma-free) life.

"I'd probably go for Sunningdale, Woodhall Spa, and a links, maybe Portmarnock. Of the Open courses I think Birkdale and Sandwich are best. They've got so many good holes. If you play Gleneagles, for instance, there are seven or eight magnificent holes, and five or six you would have to be going off your head to design."

His least favourite leading course, true to irreverent form, is St Andrews. He doesn't quite echo Lee Westwood, who scandalously declared that the Old Course would not even figure on his list of the top 200 courses in Fife, but thinks long and hard when I ask whether, given the power, he would remove it from the Open rota?

"Probably not. I would prefer to toughen it up, but you need an Act of Parliament to put more bunkers in. It's a wonderful place, but as a course it doesn't stand up to modern golf."

And what, finally, of the US Open, unfolding this very weekend on Long Island? "I've only played it once or twice. I don't like it at all. They make the greens like concrete, and the greens are usually wider than the fairways. It's tough to hit more than 12 fairways a round. I didn't take up the last few invites I had to play in it."

How, I wonder, did the American golf establishment respond to this disdain for their blue riband event? "I haven't the faintest idea," says James with a grin. "Nobody was daft enough to broach the subject with me."

After The Bear Pit is published by Virgin Books, price £18.99. Mark James is donating a proportion of the proceeds to the Cookridge Cancer Centre.

Life and times: Mark James

Born: 28 October 1953

Height: 5ft 11in

Weight: 12st 10lb

Nationality: English

Club: Burgham Park, Morpeth.

Turned professional: 1976

Career earnings: £2,937,080

European Tour wins: 18

Other wins: 6

Ryder Cup appearances: 1977, 1979, 1981, 1989, 1991,1993, 1995 (win), 1999 (captain).

Alfred Dunhill Cup appearances: 1988, 1989, 1990, 1993, 1995, 1997, 1999.

Volvo Order of Merit position: 167 (£19,696)

Career high: 1999 Volvo PGA Championship (second place)

Family: wife Jane (married 1980)

Interests: All sports, science fiction (especially Star Trek), gardening, skiing

Nickname: Jesse

They say: "To say that the Americans have tarnished the game and endangered the future of golf is a bitter statement. We need to rise above this whole thing. Mark had his observations; we saw things much differently. I especially have a problem with his questioning of Tom Lehman's moral character." Ben Crenshaw in his book "A Feel for the Game", replying to comments made by James in his book "Into the Bear Pit".

He says (of the Ryder Cup): "I wouldn't say it was a fun way to spend the afternoon."