For all their wonderful golf, and despite the United States being deserved champions, and even ignoring, for a minute, all the magnificent shots they pulled off, the irony of this home victory yesterday was that it was sealed by the player with the worst touch in the field.

The brilliance of this is that Paul Azinger planned it this way. He had the course cut so that it would be an ideal shooting ground for J. B. Holmes, for a local boy who could thump his driver 350 yards, and so it was that, when the US needed one more point and their fans were scanning the score-board for the clincher, Holmes stepped up to the 16th tee, ripped a massive hook so big that it cleared the gallery, bounced off the roots of a tree and ricocheted back on to the side of the fairway.

Soren Hansen, his opponent, had just birdied the 15th to level the scores and must have felt as lucky as a deer in Boo Weekley’s gunsights. Drive for drive, Holmes was regularly 50 yards longer than Hansen and on the 16th, even with the hook and the tree, Holmes’s ball was 20 yards nearer the green than the Dane’s.

At this stage, any fan of European persuasion could probably have relaxed because Holmes’s strength is his brute force and his weakness is everything that occurs once he has put his driver back in his bag. An archetypal Holmes hole is to rip a monster drive, fluff the pitch and scramble for par; if you could give Weekley, his four-ball partner, a bullet for every time this occurred when they were playing together, he could probably finish off the entire deer herd in Richmond Park.

How the 2008 Ryder Cup was won

Follow the final day's play from Valhalla as the 37th Ryder Cup draws to a dramatic conclusion with today's singles matches

• Mission accomplished for United States

• Justin Rose's Ryder Cup diary: I'm heartbroken

• Analysis: misfiring big three cost Europe dear in Ryder Cup

Europe surrender under brilliant assault

The US reclaimed the Ryder Cup for first time since 1999 with a sustained performance in the singles matches at Valhalla

• Elementary approach pays off for J.B. Holmes

• Nick Faldo's bold approach backfires in failure to reclaim initiative from US

• Ryder Cup warning signs to watch out for

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• Is Faldo to blame for Europe's defeat?

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The way Azinger saw it, though, was that for all the monster drives wasted, there are always a handful that come good. A perfect four-ball man, in other words. So when he selected Holmes as one of his captain’s picks, he could never have imagined that the singles would be where the Holmes law of probability would come good.

As they stood on that 16th green, Holmes and Hansen knew the significance of their match. They knew that Jim Furyk was three up and that his likely victory would take the US to 13½ points. So Hansen needed to extend the match, to get a half at the very least, and Holmes needed to be the man to regain the Ryder Cup.

But here, when the pressure was at its most extreme, when the whole of Valhalla, it seemed, had decided to watch, Holmes did not deliver his archetype, he delivered an ace: a wedge to within five feet of the flag.

Why would a player of such notorious inconsistency deliver here, at this most unlikely moment? A sports psychologist could have him on the couch for the rest of the week – at least he could if Holmes had not suddenly become an Alist celebrity.

“JB! JB! JB!” was the noise that filled the air. And then Holmes, not content with this one-off glimmer of perfection to the 16th, did it again on the next hole. Except on this occasion the drive went straight and the pitch went to within two feet. And that was that.

Except even these three strokes of magic were not the golf of a thoroughbred. On the 17th fairway, a good 40 yards closer to the pin than Hansen, Holmes was able to watch Hansen’s approach, watch it hit the green with too much pace and roll off back left.

Most thinking golfers, at that stage, would not have risked shooting at the difficult pin position and gone for the safety of the centre of the green. Why risk fluffing it, especially when you have fluffing it in your DNA?

Again, over to the sports psychologist for the answer. Or to Holmes. “I’m a professional golfer,” he said. “I can’t shoot away from the pin.” Oh yes? Since when?

But that is the story of how the Ryder Cup was won. A man with shoulders like a bear and an inability to see the sense in playing safe is suddenly two feet from the flag and has the chant of “JB! JB!” stalking him again.

In fact, Holmes closed the deal so quickly that it required Furyk to finish up on the 17th after him to win his match against Miguel Ángel Jiménez and deliver the final, required half-point. So it was Furyk who sank the putt that delivered the victory – and there may be purists out there who like the sound of that.

But the 17th was where it all happened. It was on the 17th that Hunter Mahan, a true thoroughbred, holed out from 40 feet to take a certain half-point off Paul Casey. That was another turning point, a real battle between two high-quality players who went toe to toe all the way down the 18th.

Casey’s job, too, had been to keep the Ryder Cup alive. He had also found himself in a match on which the outcome of the contest would hang.

And it was when he had squared it that all eyes suddenly turned to Holmes versus Hansen. Not the most glamorous of match-ups. Holmes made it into the world’s top 50 only in April. Anonymity is not an option any more.