Even in the best of times — and we are far from those — selecting a Ryder Cup team is a fraught business, potholed with byzantine qualification systems and overlaid with personal biases and enmities. The challenges facing the 43rd Ryder Cup matches, scheduled for Sept. 25-27 at Whistling Straits in Wisconsin, extend far beyond the picking of squads to the existential.
The season of ill in which we find ourselves has no guarantees, least of all that a golf tournament will take place. But if the Cup is actually played, and the various stakeholders are proceeding as if it will be, then we face a reckoning about who will actually play, since the qualification process is now more compromised than a North Korean election.
The PGA and European Tours have canceled a raft of events until May, and probably beyond. The European circuit crowned its last winner in Qatar on March 8. Its next scheduled stop is the Irish Open on May 28. That’s 81 days during which the cream of either continent should have been earning Ryder Cup qualifying points at elite events like the Players Championship (canceled), the WGC-Dell Technologies Match Play (canceled), the Masters (postponed) and the PGA Championship (postponed).
Even if we are to optimistically assume play will resume on both Tours with the next events not already nixed — the Irish Open over there, the Charles Schwab Challenge over here — how to adjust for the diluting impact of the coronavirus pandemic on the qualifying process?
I put that question to Rory McIlroy a couple of days before the mass exodus from TPC Sawgrass, when the enormity of the consequences for professional golf was only just becoming apparent with tournament cancellations. Should the standings be frozen at the point where the golf world went sideways? Should his European team skipper, Padraig Harrington, get more than the three picks he has been allotted?
“I would say the simplest thing then would just be to go off the world rankings,” McIlroy offered. “Just choose the top 12 from the world ranking, or the top nine and then obviously Padraig has three picks.”
Using an outdated points ranking that was frozen when undermined by world events could recreate the situation faced when the September 11 attacks pushed the 2001 Ryder Cup back a year, McIlroy cautioned. “I don’t think we’d want a situation like back in ’01 where guys made the team and they postponed it to 2002, then a few guys who made the team weren’t playing very well,” he said.
September 11 fell just 17 days before that Ryder Cup, leaving no option but postponement. There is perhaps even greater global uncertainty this time around, but with the comparative luxury of six months lead time to plan accordingly. But not everyone is convinced there’s a need to adjust.
“This is about halfway through, isn’t it?” Brooks Koepka said with a shrug when I asked about the crippled qualifying process that might leave some top U.S. players reliant on the grace of captain Steve Stricker, including Bryson DeChambeau, Patrick Cantlay and Rickie Fowler. “At the same time, you should have gotten off to a good start, you know what I mean? You’ve had a year and a half to figure it out. And if you can’t get in that position in a year and a half, you probably don’t deserve it anyway. I don’t think there should be more picks or anything. It should be what it is.”
The U.S. team standings, which Koepka currently leads, are calculated on points accumulated in 2019 at the majors, WGCs and Players Championship, with added weight given to 2020’s regular PGA Tour events — of which only 10 have been played — and majors, none of which are likely to be played as scheduled, if at all. Even if both Tours resume play in May, team standings will remain compromised. But some benchmark still needs to be applied to team selection, McIlroy insisted.
“You still have to make it somewhat objective,” he said. “You can’t make it totally subjective and Padraig says, ‘Okay, these are the 12 guys I want playing.’ There has to be some sort of criteria.”
Whatever semblance of a schedule golf’s governing bodies are able to realize for 2020 will reflect our dark new reality and the Ryder Cup, if it is part of that lineup, will too. Harrington has even mooted the notion of playing it without spectators should health regulations permit, which the crafty captain surely knows would only advantage his own team in an away game.
A crisis can also present opportunities, and when we finally reach a point where the focus can legitimately turn to such trivial matters as golf then this could be the time to scrape away the decades of compromises and fudges that have come to define the selection of teams, to create a process that is fair and flexible enough to adapt to the wildly unpredictable circumstances of our modern world. Whenever it takes place, the next Ryder Cup won’t be like any of the 42 editions that preceded it. It should be treated as an opportunity to ensure none that follow it are either.