ON this weekend in 2000, eight months after a highly controversial staging of the Ryder Cup at Brookline, the talk of Wentworth was of a book being serialised in the Daily Mail. In it, Mark James, the 1999 Ryder Cup captain, delighted in recounting how he had binned a good luck message from Nick Faldo.

This weekend, the talk is dominated by Paul McGinley's appointment as one of Faldo's two vice-captains for Valhalla next year, when Europe will be aiming for a fourth successive triumph. And despite the seven-year gap, I believe there is a direct connection between the two Wentworth reactions.

When Faldo was bitterly slighted by James in the book Into the Bear Pit, European Tour colleagues publicly maintained a deafening silence. Except for one.

Typically forthright, Paul McGinley broke ranks. "I think it is sad that the chairman of the Players' Committee of the European Tour (James) should treat the best player Europe has produced with such contempt," he told me at the time.

"As someone who represents us, I regret that Mark James should have decided to write a book and launch such a vicious, personal attack on Faldo. It is uncalled for and not something I would expect from an immediate past Ryder Cup captain."

Over subsequent weeks, James was seen to have seriously miscalculated the public mood, as he did the reaction of influential golfing people such as tournament sponsors. And McGinley was thoroughly vindicated when the Ryder Cup committee felt they had no option other than to remove James as a vice-captain for the next Ryder Cup at The Belfry.

At a time when Faldo badly needed friends in the game, McGinley had the courage to say what needed to be said. And while he wouldn't want the gesture to have earned him Faldo's favour, I believe it had a huge impact on the Englishman, which has not diminished in the intervening time.

For Faldo, it identified McGinley as a man of integrity and basic decency; a man who could be a trusted lieutenant in every sense of that term. And with the addition of crucial Ryder Cup experience and a passion for the event, he could not have wished for a better candidate, when he set about considering his options for Valhalla.

Explaining his choice of McGinley and Jose Maria Olazabal, Faldo said: "It is very important that they have a good rapport with the whole tour. They are both well seasoned players as well as being very well liked and respected. And open as well. Players of great character."

On the question of whether he planned to seek advice from former Ryder Cup captains, or leaders in other sports, it could be taken that James wouldn't be top of such a list. Either way, Faldo replied: "I thought a little bit about this, but I'm not sure how far to go. I may have a few inspirational ideas up my sleeve."

My feeling is that he will be very much his own man on such matters, admitting that relationships come more easily to him these days. "If I was still a competitor, I'd be heads down, blinkers on, all that sort of thing," he said. "But now it's quite interesting. For instance, with my TV hat on, I walked on the range where I saw Vijay and he turned to me and asked me 'what's the secret?' So I told him what my secret was. He looked at me for a split second and then told me his secret. If I had had a set of clubs there . . . not in a million years would there have been an exchanage like that."

McGinley's first connection with him was in 1991 at Welwyn Garden City, where he went for a coaching session as a member of the Walker Cup squad. Now, as Faldo put it, he has become a Ryder Cup vice-captain "who can say he holed a winning putt (2002). That's quite a nice thing to pass on. Not too many guys have felt that one."

In fact, they were inspired choices. Olazabal, now a serious candidate for the captaincy in Wales in 2010, can contribute priceless experience on pairings play, given the record of 11 foursomes and fourball wins which he and Seve Ballesteros compiled between 1987 and 1993.

Clearly, all of this is contingent on neither he nor McGinley making the 2008 team as players. Either way, their appointment, so early in the campaign, typifies the attention to detail which characterised Faldo's career.

- Dermot Gilleece