The home in Rachel’s Mobile Home Park ignited shortly after midnight.

The home behind it had flammable liquids on the steps, according to County Fire Marshal Randall Faggart. That house on Lot 16 was occupied. Fortunately a fire never ignited there, Faggart said.

But the mobile home on Lot 15 was completely destroyed, and investigators are still looking for a cause.

“The main breaker was off when the Fire Department arrived,” Faggart said. Generally, the first thing firefighters do is stop the flow of electricity, he added

Rockwell Rural Fire Chief Allen Cress said no one lived at the home on Fisher Road.

“The call came in shortly after midnight,” Cress said. Workers stayed with the house until after 4 a.m.

Though there was a slight drizzle falling at the time of the fire, investigators ruled out weather as a factor in the fire.

“I didn’t see any lightning,” Cress said.

Column by Mark Wineka

Somehow, the United States’ golf victory in the Ryder Cup didn’t give me the same chills-down-the-spine feeling as the U.S. hockey victory over the Russians in the 1980 Winter Olympics.

This wasn’t Jesse Owens running to gold in Berlin in the 1936 Olympics, much to Hitler’s discontent.

This wasn’t the Soviet Union and U.S. basketball teams fighting it out in the controversial 1972 Olympic finals. This wasn’t even equal to the U.S. women’s soccer team’s beating China for the World Cup this summer.

The 1999 Ryder Cup actually turned out to be an embarrassing display of pseudo patriotism and a sorry commentary on Americans’ so-called respect for the game.

When we don’t have a world war, cold war, Gulf war or peace-keeping war (there’s an oxymoron), Americans have a silly tendency to translate athletic competitions between countries into patriotic exercises.

Is it just me, or did it seem sort of silly for the U.S. Ryder Cup golfers Sunday to be standing on a country club balcony leading fans in the national anthem, waving American flags and spraying the crowd with champagne?

It all seemed a bit shallow. Their shirts were ugly, too.

This was the same selfish crew who held its own private gripe session several weeks ago to complain about not receiving a share of the Ryder Cup profits.

So much for patriotism. The players took some criticism for their obvious greed-driven concerns, and they probably spent this past weekend in Brookline, Mass., looking for ways to prove that they’re Americans first, millionaires second.

In doing so, they got a bit carried away and over-dramatic.

They also fed on a jingoist frenzy in the pro-American crowd and a team captain who’s rally cry was “Don’t Stop Believing.”

Please.

Far behind heading into Sunday’s final round, the players held a prayer meeting of sorts Saturday night in which Texas Gov. George W. Bush gave them a pep talk. Bush read a letter written by a soldier hemmed in at the Alamo.

To hear the golfers talk Sunday, it was just the inspirational jolt they needed for “American firepower” to assert itself.

The embarrassment for Americans came on the 17th hole Sunday when Justin Leonard made a 45-foot putt to apparently clinch a U.S. victory. Ignoring all semblance of golf decorum, fellow players, wives, girlfriends and American golf officials stormed across the green to congratulate Leonard.

In the stampede, the jubilant crowd trampled over the line of European Jose Maria Olazabal’s putt.

If Olazabal makes the putt — he later missed — the championship remains undecided.

The American players and their fans breached every rule of golf etiquette, especially in the gentlemanly tradition of the Ryder Cup.