Greetings!
Is the Presidents Cup actually going to be … interesting this year?
The International team has been down a combined 9-1 after the last two Thursdays at this event so trailing 3-2 might feel like they’re leading. It’s their best first day since 2019 when they actually led 4-1 after Thursday, and the U.S. had to win singles 8-4 to avoid its first loss in this event this century.
Let’s get to what happened on Thursday and what’s in store for Friday’s round.
Name drops today: Anderson Varejao, AI (the basketball player, not the machine learning experience), Eliud Kipchoge, Noah Lyles, Brad Pitt, Duff Foreman, K.H. Lee and Jon Rahm.
Today’s newsletter is presented by Cobra.
According to Wyndham Clark, crowds at Medinah lacked juice on Thursday.
The noise “just kind of dissipated as the day went on,” said U.S. captain, Brandt Snedeker. It was quiet all over the golf course, which means you could probably hear some sounds we love to hear.
Like Si Woo Kim flushing his Cobra OPTM LS Titanium fairway wood to the tune of a 3 and 2 victory over Patrick Cantlay and Chris Gotterup.
Or Hideki hitting his Cobra King RadSpeed Tour 5-wood (which Jason tells me is club is based on the the legendary Cobra Baffler from 1975) and beating Cam Young and Xander Schauffele 3 and 1 in their match on Day 1.
I’m not going to look up whether anyone else in the P Cup is using a one-off Cobra club like these two. Instead, I’m going to choose to believe that Cobra was the only undefeated entity on Thursday, going 2-0 in its matches — both against the U.S. side.
May it hold up over the next three days, and may you also also take a gander at that fairway wood Si Woo was gaming. So good you’re gonna be doing the night night in your own matches the rest of this fall.
And now, onto the news.
1. Early on, I though the U.S. looked extremely comfortable, especially compared to early on at the last two Ryder Cups. This is not surprising. The Presidents Cup is a much less competitive environment than the Ryder Cup.
But the difference between the two is a bit shocking.
There are still nerves in the Prez Cup because you don’t want to be the first time since 1998 to lose. You don’t want to go full Allen Iverson and 2004 Dream Team, which lost to Puerto Rico, Lithuania and Argentina en route to a bronze medal. Its third, fourth and fifth losses in Olympics history.
On the flip side, the U.S. should still be relatively confident in the Ryder Cup. They get guys like Bernd Wiesberger and Rasmus Højgaard on the back end of those teams.
And yet, they could not look more different in their overall disposition at these two events.
2. I thought this from the Data Golf live blog on Thursday summed that up quite well.
At last year’s Ryder Cup, the Europeans putted the lights out in the opening session to jump ahead 3–1, gaining almost 10 strokes over the US on the greens. So far today the US has flipped the script, already 8 strokes better than the Internationals on the greens.
Data Golf
That ended at just a 3.75 SG advantage, but it is emblematic of the entire thing. Europe just makes more putts! But ask yourself why. When is it difficult to make putts? When you’re uncomfortable. When is it easier to make putts? When you’re comfortable.
That is my entire point here.
One probably-too-deep theory I have is that the Presidents Cup feels more like a regular PGA Tour event than the Ryder Cup does because … the PGA Tour runs the Presidents Cup. Same media people they see at Memorial or Quail Hollow. Same officials. Same all of it. The advantage Europe always has on the Ryder Cup side is that it has the same folks running things as it does week to week on the DP World Tour.
And while I only halfheartedly believe this theory, it’s still interesting to consider because — as with all team events — the sample size is so small that almost anything could be the reason a team struggles or doesn’t.
3. I enjoyed the Scottie match on Thursday even if the idea that the broadcast put forth that this match was “one of those classics” did not exactly come to fruition. Regardless, I felt invested in it. Which is not always the case when it comes to the Presidents Cup.
I love golf that makes us even a little bit nervous, and for some reason I felt nervous watching the last 4-5 holes in this match. Some of the reason is probably because Scottie has a wide variance (maybe the widest variance of anyone) when it comes to what he has to gain and what he has to lose this week. I definitely sensed and felt that. Surely he does, too.
But some of it was probably because the International team had a real chance to win Day 1 and put just a sliver of doubt into the U.S. side going into Friday’s matches. That is thrilling and consequential, and thrilling and consequential almost always lead to nervousness, even from afar.
4. (As a reminder — and something I should probably say more often — we are dissecting tiny, tiny sample sizes here, which is part of the fun but also sometimes slightly unfair to players on some level).
Another reason I was probably feeling this match has to do with Scottie and his ongoing legacy at team events. In that first match out, he won the first hole and didn’t win another. He birdied two of the first three and then didn’t make another.
Though he hit the ball decently and gained strokes from tee to green, Scottie was — all things considered — not very good on Thursday relative to how good he actually is, especially down the stretch.
Burns was a bit better and saved them with two birdies on the back that flipped their match and kept the U.S. from being down 3-2 (which they should have been).
Why should they have been down 3-2? Well, it took an almost historically bad putting performance from Sungjae and Min Woo, who lost nearly four shots on the greens. If they make anything, that match is a tie or a loss for the U.S.
This isn’t exactly novel, but this tweet got me thinking about how Scottie and Tiger play golf so similarly and how much both have struggled relative to their overall status at these team events.
Scottie is a marathon runner. He grinds your soul down, doesn’t make mistakes, manages the golf course incredibly well and mentally punishes you over and over again. But he needs 72 holes for this to play out. And I’m convinced if tournaments were 90 or 108 holes, he would have 40 wins and 10 majors by now.
Match play is different. The decisions are different. The shots are not the same ones you would hit in regular tournament. Different lines. Different choices.
In one sense, Eliud Kipchoge is the fastest runner in the world. However, if he faced Noah Lyles in the 200, he would get destroyed. It would be difficult to watch.
That’s obviously an extreme example, but I think it gets at the idea of how different team match play is compared to a 72-hole stroke play event.
This post will continue below for Normal Club members (all 1,056 of them) and includes a JT take, a wild Scottie stat, the best hole from Day 1 and my favorite duo at this event ...
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