Words I never thought I would utter: Boo Weekley is a Ryder Cup hero. That is the same Boo Weekley who had never played in a match-play event prior to this year’s Accenture Match Play Championship when his caddy had to tell that it was ok to concede a putt; the same Boo Weekley who had never been out of the country prior to last year’s British Open at Carnoustie where he asked Paul Laurie (1999 Champion, also at Carnoustie) how he qualified, and told the BBC that he thought Milton, Fla. was the birthplace of golf; the same Boo Weekley who wore camouflage dry-fits under his golf shirts in Scotland and claimed Carhartt and Mossy Oak as sponsors; the same Boo Weekley who, just this past spring, wasn’t sure what month the Ryder Cup was held in, and who couldn’t tell you what hemisphere China was in after he got there to play in the World Cup.

Yes, that Boo Weekley is the hero of the 2008 Ryder Cup matches, the man who brought a group of disparate, spoiled, egocentric loners together and gelled them into a cohesive unit; the man whose management and motivational style would be considered brilliant if he weren’t so comically unaware that he had a management and motivational style; the man who took cheerleading in golf to a new level, and who dismissed European criticisms of irrational exuberance by saying “I don’t care what they think.” That, my friends, is the man who made history in Louisville.

“I’m these guys biggest cheerleader. It ain’t about me,” Boo said between snuff spittles and snorts. “There ain’t no I in this team. This is about playing for the flag. I was here to do whatever it took. It was like I told Paul (Azinger), if he needs a cheerleader I’m your boy. That’s what I was here for. I don’t care what nobody says about it. The folk here (in Kentucky) are Southern folks, and so we sort of clicked. That made it great.”

For the better part of a decade, the U.S. has looked for an advantage in these bi-annual matches, something that would turn the tide in favor of the brow-beaten yanks. Tiger Woods couldn’t do it. Phil Mickelson did nothing. Hard-nosed captains like Curtis Strange and good-buddy captains like Tom Lehman couldn’t right the ship. What America needed was, as the BBC called him, “an archetypal American,” a guy who knows more about trot lines than tea parties; a guy who couldn’t pick Queen Elizabeth out of a lineup, but who would call her ma’am anyway, because ma’am and sir is what you do.

Boo Weekley is the guy in the background when the bust goes down on “Cops,” the one in flip-flops and a t-shirt with his arms folded across his beer-belly. He is everyman. He is us.

In this year’s team room there were no alma mater cheering videos, no letters read from the Alamo, no long mystic speeches about finding one’s soul; there was just Boo telling stories about wrestling an orangutan, and inventing words like “compatibate.”

“They done wrote about that word in Europe,” Boo said. “We got it on the wall in that little room we got.”

On Sunday, Boo fired up the crowd by straddling his driver like a hobby horse and riding it down the first fairway a la “Happy Gilmore.” Jim Furyk buckled over with laughter, and Azinger called it “one of the greatest things I’ve ever seen in my life.”

Weekley was 2-0-1 for the week, but his influence went much deeper than two-and-a-half points. From Saturday morning on, the crowd let everyone know who had taken the reins of the Ryder Cup. The chant said it all: “Boo-S-A! Boo-S-A!”