Ryder Cup 2012: Europe's captain José Maria Olazabal to lead with blend of passion and calculation against USA The one surprise was that he did not receive such an honour sooner: he was known to be angry at being passed over for Montgomerie at Celtic Manor, but has since expressed relief that his wait for this week's duel at Medinah afforded him the necessary to respite to recover physically. For if nobody can intuit Olazábal without Seve, then equally no one can appreciate his powers of resolve without knowing the agonies he has endured. In the mid-Nineties he was so stricken by the arthritis in his feet that he was forced to crawl to the bathroom on hands and knees, and wondered whether he would spend the rest of his life in a wheelchair. Holed up in his house in Hondarribia, beside the seventh fairway of the Royal San Sebastian Golf Club, he had sought the counsel of every specialist in the US, to no avail. Eventually, Olazábal recovered sufficiently to be weaned off the bombardment of painkillers. He could strike a golf ball freely again, producing a sensation he described as "heaven," and summoned up the force of will to grasp his second green jacket at Augusta. Painful relapses have ensued, but the determination drawn from those ordeals imbues the figure we see today: single-minded, statesmanlike, utterly fixed on seizing his moment. As for the brand of leadership we will witness these next six days, Olazábal is adamant. "I'm going to be myself," he said in a recent BBC interview. I won't be all over the players, as they know their strengths better than I do. I will just remind them how special the week is, and pass on my emotions as best I can. His command will represent, he suggests, a fusion of the passionate and the calculating, the visceral and the technical. The unadorned emotion is a quality derived almost exclusively from Ballesteros. When Olazábal was first invited, as Spain's pre-eminent junior talent, to play alongside Seve at Pedreña in a charity day, he remembers a 15 year-old so reticent that he could utter barely a word to his idol. But in a Ryder Cup context six years later, thrown in with Ballesteros by Tony Jacklin at Muirfield Village, his self-belief burgeoned under the influence of his elder. On the ninth hole of the Friday foursomes, he recalls, the two of them had been pitted against the US duo of Payne Stewart and Larry Nelson, and while Ballesteros had just sliced a drive deep into the woods the Americans luxuriated in the middle of the fairway. "Seve still looked at me and said, "By the way, we're going to win this hole. Just chip the ball out and leave me 100 yards to the pin. The Americans hit their second and it faded right, into the water. What did I tell you? Seve said. Then he hit a wonderful sand wedge to three feet and, naturally, we won. The relationship was symbiotic: as late as 1993, with Ballesteros's accuracy so shot to pieces that he struggled even to keep his tee-shots in the correct postal district, Olazábal's steadiness rescued them for a win over Tom Kite and Davis Love III. So strong was the bond than it appeared their cause reflected not simply an esprit de corps but a deep Iberian pride. Such a feeling was etched across the tear-streaked face of Olazábal at Valderrama in 1997, after a Ballesteros-led victory in the first Ryder Cup held in continental Europe. It is a little-documented fact that, in almost two decades competing on this stage, he never once partnered a British or Irish player. However much we are steeped in memories of Olazábal the Ryder Cup phenomenon, we are afforded precious few insights into the man. Olazábal, who has never married, guards the sanctity of his personal life with uncommon ferocity. Even during his early-Nineties pomp, public engagements were jettisoned in favour of winters spent shooting quail with his close friends in the Gipuzkoa hills. In the 21 months of his Europe captaincy, the same mask has never slipped. His guarded statements border on the bland and yet, behind the team-room lock, he becomes capable of flights of Ciceronian rhetoric. Those extremes of the Latin temperament, forged by his deeds with Ballesteros and fortified by his own prolonged struggles, could yet prove Europe's blessing in the Medinah crucible.