“Pat, he’s got a big noggin,” Furyk said. “We have a hard time getting him in a hat.”
An unfortunate narrative that often comes out after the U.S. loses a Ryder Cup is that there was either a lack of overall team comradery or outright dissension.
Jim Furyk, the host of this week’s PGA Tour Champions Constellation Furyk & Friends at the Timuquana Country Club, heard it as a Ryder Cup player and captain and he’s hearing it again after serving as one of Zach Johnson’s vice captains in Rome last week when the U.S. lost to Europe 16.5-11.5.
He said reports of disunity are “absolutely not the case.”
“I was in that team room each and every night,” Furyk said on Tuesday during a news conference to promote the World Champions Cup, a match-play event for PGA Tour Champions players in December. “Those 12 guys really bonded, really got along. I know we’re disappointed that we didn’t bring the cup back to the United States but I can say and I’ll stand by it, those 12 guys really got along well and supported each other. As captains, we couldn’t have asked for anything more.”
Furyk also said reports that Patrick Cantlay ostracized himself from the team and didn’t wear a USA hat during competition as a protest over not getting paid to play in the Ryder Cup were false.
The rumors were so viral that European fans on-site took their hats off and doffed them sarcastically whenever Cantlay passed their way.
Team USA vice captain Jim Furyk talks to Team USA golfers Collin Morikawa and Sam Burns during a practice day for the Ryder Cup golf competition at Marco Simone Golf and Country Club. Mandatory Credit: Adam Cairns-USA TODAY Sports
Furyk said that resulted in a show of U.S. bonding when the entire team and caddies took off their hats and waved them at the fans after Cantlay birdied his last three holes on Saturday to win a fourball match with Wyndham Clark against Rory McIlroy and Matthew Fitzpatrick.
“I’m not sure where [rumors of team disharmony] came from, especially after you saw the support Patrick had with the guys raising their hats in front of the green,” he said. “He took a lot of beating that day from, whether it was from the media, from the fans about not wearing a hat, the speculation that maybe he didn’t want to wear the American flag, whatever it may be. I think you saw the support from the players.”
Furyk said Cantlay’s decision not to wear a hat came down to being unable to find one that fit.
“Pat, he’s got a big noggin,” Furyk said. “We have a hard time getting him in a hat. He hasn’t worn one for three or four years in the Presidents Cup or Ryder Cup. If he’s going to birdie 16, 17 and 18, he can wear whatever he wants, I’ll say that.”
ROME — Every Ryder Cup offers a masterclass in provincial myth-making, somehow convincing the credulous that Europe’s team room is always friction-free and that only American fans are guilty of boorish behavior. This week in Rome, one of the Cup’s most enduring fables was exposed — the utopian notion that it exists on a patriotic plane entirely unsullied by something as vulgar as money.
That’s not because some team members feel they should be paid to play (a position that’s neither new nor entirely unpardonable). The finances matter enormously to Ryder Cup organizers, who depend on its proceeds to operate for the years between “home” editions. Widen the lens beyond individual players or even individual Cups, and it becomes apparent that this is the major event most vulnerable to radical change in whatever ecosystem emerges from the cash arms race disfiguring golf.
The Ryder Cup reliably showcases the sport’s greatest theater and passion. That’s the user experience. The apparatus around the Cup and its inner workings are strained, and demand a rethink that’s more pressing than any ideas we’ll see emerge from the post-mortem analysis of Team USA’s latest defeat.
Some of the issues are owed to the ownership structure. Europe’s half of the Cup is mostly held by the DP World Tour, with minor slices owned by a couple of regional PGA associations. There is no asset of remotely comparable value that the European circuit can bring to the new for-profit entity it is creating with the PGA Tour and, negotiations pending, the Saudi Arabian Public Investment Fund (plus sundry investors who don’t have a side hustle abusing human rights).
Yet as vital as the Ryder Cup is to the books of its various owners, it is commercially isolated. Business types gripe about its limitations in terms of opportunities and partnerships that global sponsors will pay handsomely for. Eventually, some enterprising corporate cipher will see a means by which it can be plugged into a bigger commercial platform to increase profits. Any such platform must be built around the world’s best players, so it seems ordained that wherever the major tours go in the coming years, the Ryder Cup must follow.
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And that involves major changes to what we know now.
The qualification system in Europe has been modified more frequently than Cher’s face, but every tweak has had the same rationale: accommodating stars who mostly compete in the U.S. while preserving a pathway to the team for guys who ply their trade at home. Leveraging the Ryder Cup to reward loyalty to the DP World Tour is parochial but necessary. On the opposite shore, the PGA Tour has no ownership stake but is the means by which players qualify. These systems (mostly) work now, but what happens if top players one day commit to a lucrative global schedule of tournaments elevated above the current American and European circuits? The Ryder Cup qualification system will immediately become unfit for purpose.
The fix for that is something that should be considered now: go to 12 captain’s picks and dispense with the points system entirely. Such a move would certainly have opponents, but plenty of pros. It would be tour-agnostic and grant skippers the latitude to choose on form and compatibility, and to do something that’s impossible with automatic qualifiers: leave at home those openly ambivalent about being here. It would also restore authority to captains, particularly future U.S. leaders, and not leave them hostage to the preferences of the automatics, which is what Zach Johnson essentially admitted has been his situation.
(If the team is to be drawn from whatever strata exists, why not the captaincy too? Former players are by disposition and circumstance myopic and deferential to their colleagues. Why not a captain from outside the traditional golf sphere? Someone recognized for their ability to get the best from the best. While the captain hits as many shots as the spectators, playing status need not be a consideration. Make it a position for proven performance specialists, not past their prime players.)
For all the pablum about continental rivalries, the modern era in the Ryder Cup has always been tour versus tour, PGA against Europe. The old legends — Ballesteros, Faldo, Woosnam — felt disrespected when they traveled to the U.S., which only fueled their determination to stick it to the Yanks every two years. Now, at least half of the European team lives stateside and both Scandinavian standouts this week — Viktor Hovland and Ludvig Aberg — spent their formative years in U.S. colleges. The old enmity is being diluted, and that will only accelerate as the lines between tours are blurred. What the Ryder Cup cannot lose or imperil is its heartbeat, the thousands of spectators who bring the noise regardless of what side of the ocean it is held on.
The concerns voiced in the aftermath of the 44th matches in Rome will be short-term in nature — what went wrong for the U.S., who is to blame, what must be done. However entertaining these recriminations may be for onlookers, those of us who love the Ryder Cup must grasp that the years ahead will bring challenges even more daunting than trying to beat Europe at home.
ROME – The City of Eternal Light may not have been built in one day, but the Ryder Cup in Rome may have been lost in one after Team Europe jumped out to a 6 ½ – 1 ½ lead over the Americans.
It was a dominant performance by the Euros, who lead after the first session for the first time since 2006. In fact, it was a clean sweep and the U.S. didn’t hold a lead in any match until Justin Thomas made a birdie on the sixth hole in the first match of the afternoon session.
Here are four more things to know from Day One of the 44th Ryder Cup.
Johnson needs decisions without fear or favor, but doing so runs counter to the U.S. culture that has been cultivated.
Two numbers confer stature among elite golfers. World ranking is one, despite the mutterings of LIV loyalists. Europe’s Ryder Cup team boasts the second, third and fourth-ranked players in the game, so captain Luke Donald had them lead off Friday’s opening session at Marco Simone. Rory McIlroy, Jon Rahm and Viktor Hovland each returned a point. Major championship victories also separate top players. U.S. captain Zach Johnson’s starting line-up combined for four major wins. The guys he benched have 11, including two this year.
If pressed, Johnson can probably offer reams of analytics and statistical profiling to support his decision-making, but then many a dubious position can be defended by data that confirms what we wish to believe. If the U.S. goes on to lose for the tenth time in the last 14 Ryder Cups, the calls Johnson made before lunchtime on day one will be picked over mercilessly. Yet, to paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, it may be his responsibility but it is not his fault. Or at least not entirely.
The American skipper has been consistently transparent about how much influence he grants his players, and during a Tuesday press conference essentially acknowledged that the U.S. captaincy is crowd-sourced. “I can say this in full confidence with our six guys that made this team: Those guys were, you know, adamant they wanted those six other guys to help complete their team,” he said.
“Adamant.”
So the locks for the team decided who would get the picks.
Scottie Scheffler (lock) and Sam Burns (pick) are close friends. They played together three times at the Presidents Cup last year and didn’t win a match, losing two and halving one. Advocacy for a pairing with that record ought to be dismissed by a captain, not indulged. And certainly not sent out first in alternate shot when one guy is struggling to find fairways and the other has issues finding the hole from short range.
Much will also be made of who didn’t work the early shift.
Like Jordan Spieth and Justin Thomas. Sure, neither has played well recently, but the former is a talismanic figure with a winning record in foursomes, while the latter is a .500 and unlikely to be intimidated by the raucous opening-day environment. Or Brooks Koepka, a current major title holder, who blistered Marco Simone in the last practice session on Thursday.
Team USA golfer Justin Thomas (right) lines up a putt on the ninth hole as golfer Jordan Spieth looks on during day one fourball at the 44th Ryder Cup golf competition at Marco Simone Golf and Country Club. Mandatory Credit: Kyle Terada-USA TODAY Sports
Captains hewing to an analytics-based strategy must know when to adapt in fluid situations, but tentative leaders may view changing tack as an abandonment of all their advance planning, ultimately finding themselves adrift with a life vest that won’t fully inflate. To his credit, Johnson rejiggered partnerships for Friday afternoon fourballs and his players displayed a flicker more life. But he could ill afford a misstep that gifted Europe a sweep of the first session, and he knows it.
Europe already had a strong team. Now it’s a strong team buoyed with confidence. Rahm’s heavyweight swagger is even more pronounced, his burly embrace serving to settle the young rookie Nicolai Højgaard. Hovland has shown more emotion in this unremunerated team affair than he did while winning more than $30 million on his own last season. By sunset, McIlroy had already won more points than in the entire ’21 Ryder Cup, and Tyrrell Hatton barely had reason to reach double digits in cuss words. None of those facts augurs well for Team USA.
To stem the tide, Johnson needs to make decisions without fear or favor, but doing so runs counter to the culture that has been cultivated in the U.S. team over the last nine years.
After the acrimony at Gleneagles in ‘14 — when the most impactful shot any Yank delivered came during the Sunday night post-mortem press conference, and was directed at his own skipper — the PGA of America formed a widely-mocked task force. The objective for the organization was obvious: absolve itself from future criticism by handing over control (and potential blame) to the players themselves.
The toxicity, theatrics and treachery were eventually eliminated: Phil Mickelson, Bryson DeChambeau, Patrick Reed, who has a better chance at winning one of his lawsuits than another Ryder Cup. But congeniality in the team room wasn’t just a by-product of the task force, it was the goal. Players at ease will perform well, went the logic. And while last year’s Presidents Cup showcased a unified, brilliant American team, ensuring comfort and companionship for 12 individuals isn’t always conducive to a winning performance.
As with the PGA Tour, the players now wield enormous power when it comes to the Ryder Cup, especially on the U.S. side. Their influence is decisive when it comes to choosing captains, picks and pairings. The actual team leader is there to give speeches and provide air cover. Johnson will defend the process and culture that has the U.S. facing a rough weekend in Rome because he’s loyal to his guys and a true believer in the task force product. But he’s going to face harsh criticism for decisions over which he almost certainly had something less than complete control.
There’s a ways to go in this Ryder Cup, but if the U.S. loses there will be plenty of blame to go around. But don’t expect it to be fairly apportioned. Team USA’s captain has been stripped of power, but not of responsibility.
The host course, Marco Simone Golf & Country Club in Rome, is a public-access layout with tee times available on the course’s website starting at 190 Euros for international players. The course playing to a par of 71 with the scorecard showing 7,181 yards. The rough is deep and thick, putting an emphasis on accurate tee shots to relatively tight fairways.
The Americans, captained by Zach Johnson, are trying to win on foreign soil for the first time since 1993. Team Europe, meanwhile, is hoping an influx of young talent will help captain Luke Donald reverse a lopsided loss at Whistling Straits in 2021.
Marco Simone may discombobulate the cast of 24 actors this week, but not with nuance or intricacy.
GUIDONIA MONTECELIO, Italy — Short of news that Rees Jones is gassing up his bulldozer, nothing makes golf course architecture aficionados reach for the Pepto Bismol quite like a Ryder Cup, or more specifically, a Ryder Cup in Europe. While editions held in America still occasionally visit sublime course designs — The Country Club, Oakland Hills, Bethpage Black in two years — those staged in the old world offer a quadrennial reminder to purists that the Ryder Cup, like a presidential election, is now essentially a commercial enterprise.
As the economic importance and global stature of the event has grown, there’s been a commensurate dilution in the caliber of host courses on the eastern shore of the Atlantic. You have to scroll back more than 40 years to find one that earns near-unanimous praise for its design merit: Walton Heath, in 1981. In the years prior, the biennial battle visited Royal Lytham & St. Annes, Muirfield and Royal Birkdale, all Open Championship hosts of indisputable stature. Then, starting in the late ‘80s, Europe began to dominate, fans began to pay attention, broadcasters began to pay significant rights fees, and corporations began requesting ever-more extensive hospitality suites.
So for 30 years, Ryder Cups in Europe have illustrated the difference between a great golf course and a great venue. They’ve had plenty of the latter, none of the former. Marco Simone Golf and Country Club continues that tradition.
Early morning preparations are made prior to the 2018 Ryder Cup at Le Golf National on September 27, 2018, in Paris, France. (Photo by Ross Kinnaird/Getty Images)
The DP World Tour owns a sizable chunk of the Ryder Cup, and proven loyalty to the circuit is a factor when it comes time to award its most prized asset. The Belfry (’85, ’89’ ’93) held its first European tour event in 1979. Valderrama (’97) had been a regular tour stop for almost a decade. So too for the K Club (’06), Celtic Manor (’10) and Gleneagles (’14). Le Golf National (’18) paid its dues even longer.
An alert, ambitious developer will spot a sure-fire, if long-term strategy for securing golf’s premier team event: build a course with ample room for infrastructure, offer terms favorable to the suits at HQ in Wentworth, then wait a decade. The Ryder Cup is a prize earned, not an honor bestowed.
Talk to enough people who play golf for a living and you’ll learn that most see the course merely as a stage upon which great actors perform. For idealistic design nerds, however, courses are a central character in the drama, of such nuance and intricacy that they make even great actors forget their lines. Marco Simone may discombobulate the cast of 24 actors this week, but not with nuance or intricacy.
The Ryder Cup is match play, and an ideal match play course encourages short-term risk-taking. There are enough holes here to encourage that, or sufficient flexibility with the set-up to manufacture it. Sure, the design is uninspiring and the aesthetics limited — save for a few ruins scattered around the property and a distant view of the dome of St. Peter’s Basilica — but functionally Marco Simone is up to the ask. It’s not a great course, but it might be declared a great venue when the circus pulls out of town.
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This being Italy, logistics could prove troublesome, though perhaps not as dire as at the Solheim Cup last week in Spain. Rush hours and the national nonchalance about timekeeping could see travel to the course take long enough for a couple of governments to form and collapse. And players will not be immune if such issues arise.
Most European venues in the last four decades have been resorts with accommodations on-site, meaning that teams, administrators and hangers-on didn’t need to leave the grounds for the entire week. Whatever happened beyond the wall was not their concern. In Rome, both teams are staying at the Cavalieri hotel, 10 miles from Marco Simone. That journey might take 30 minutes, or it might be a multiple of that. Since their hotel is within earshot of the Vatican, they might have to whisper the lord’s name in vain during delays. That began on Tuesday. One coach griped that his ride took well over an hour. His driver had no idea where the venue is located.
That’s a gentle reminder that golf doesn’t rank among the dozen most popular sports in Italy, but also emphasizes a reality unsettling to design devotees: if the Ryder Cup is to be used as a platform to grow golf in new territories, then the odds of there existing a must-play course is almost zero.
The boxes that purists most want to see checked are wholly optional for Ryder Cup organizers here. A great course is a bonus, not a baseline. If you want elite team competition on elite designs, the Walker Cup has you covered.
MacIntyre’s golfing endeavors and accomplishments have certainly put Glencruitten on the map.
If you thought getting your hands on a ticket for the Ryder Cup in Rome was tricky, then try getting a seat inside the Glencruitten clubhouse when local hero Robert MacIntyre strides out for Team Europe at the Marco Simone course.
“It seats about 80 in the lounge but we’re probably expecting about 200,” said the club secretary, John Tannahill, as he envisaged the kind of jam-packed, boisterous fervor you used to get when the Colosseum was going like a fair back in the day. The good folks of Oban may not be decked out in togas and tunics, but you get the idea.
Glencruitten sits along the western coast of Scotland, about 100 miles northwest of Glasgow. MacIntyre grew up in the nearby city of Oban and has played at the club since he was young.
Bob’s Italian Job has gripped the town.
“The place is buzzing,” added Tannahill. “When you drive out along the esplanade, there are big banners with ‘good luck, Bob,’ It’s great.”
MacIntyre’s golfing endeavors and accomplishments have certainly put Glencruitten on the map. “It’s amazing to think of its profile now and there has certainly been an upturn in American visitors coming off the cruise ships,” noted Tannahill. “Maybe it’s the Bob effect?”
The idea of Elmer and Beatrice from Wyoming enjoying a bucket list 18 holes having been intrigued by Jim Nantz’s attempt to utter “Glencruitten” during the Masters coverage is a delightful notion.
The second hole at Glencruitten Golf Club. (Photo courtesy Glencruitten Golf Club)
A homely, down-to-earth club, the kind that Scotland does so well, Glencruitten hasn’t changed. MacIntyre, despite his fame and fortune, hasn’t either.
“Everybody knows him and his family are steeped in the club,” said Tannahill, who became a member in 1980, a couple of years before MacIntyre’s dad, Dougie, started as an assistant greenkeeper. “I used to go on golf holidays with his grandfather too. There is a group of older members here who come and have coffee and a bacon roll and go out for five or six holes. They’re up at the club for a blether really. Bob, wherever he has been in the golf world, will come in and the first place he goes to is them. He loves that.
“We’re a small club, our fees are low and it can be a struggle at times, to be honest. Like a lot of clubs, we’ve had a drop-off in juniors but it’s coming back. Bob has helped on that front. You couldn’t ask for a more inspiring figure. We have the two shinty teams in Oban, the football and the rugby. All that takes place on a Saturday and that doesn’t help the golf club. We have 350 members paying £360 a year. It doesn’t generate vast sums. But we have a great crowd of members. That’s the important thing.”
MacIntyre’s rise into the shimmering pantheon of a Ryder Cup player is another wonderful chapter in a fascinating sporting tale. Rather like the 3-wood approach for the ages to the last green of July’s Scottish Open, which took him to the cusp of glory only for pesky Rory McIlroy to conjure a world-class finale, his ascension remains a thing of wonder.
Robert MacIntyre tees off on the 14th hole during the final round of the 2023 Genesis Scottish Open at The Renaissance Club in the United Kingdom. (Photo: Octavio Passos/Getty Images)
“I was watching him sizing up that shot and was thinking, ‘God, what’s he going to do here?’” reflected Tannahill of a shot and a result that effectively sealed his Ryder Cup berth. “But in many ways, that illustrated his single-mindedness and his ability to do exactly what he wanted to do in the moment. He’s not scared to make big decisions and he gets them right most of the time.
“I don’t think anyone here would’ve envisaged him at the Ryder Cup, though. Yes, it was the dream but could it be a reality? To be one of six to actually qualify and not rely on a pick? Well, that’s unbelievable. His whole journey has been special. Every week, we’ll look and wonder what he’s going to do next. Lots of golfers have the talent but they don’t have that extra something that gets you to a different level.
“His family had a tremendous competitive background through the shinty and Bob has that spirit too. The Ryder Cup will be right up his street. He thrives in the team environment. I’d say the European team room will be a bit more tranquil than the shinty team bus.”
Whatever happens in Rome next weekend, Tannahill and the Glencruitten members will have a rare old time.
“The bar is well stocked,” chuckled the 70-year-old of the various kegs, optics and bottles that will probably pour out the same volume of liquid that is in the Firth of Lorn. “I fancy Europe, I think they’ll do it,” he said. “And we’ll just wait on Bob holing the winning putt.”
It could be edge-of-the-seat stuff. If you can get a seat, that is …
So many questions for both teams to answer in Rome.
The 44th Ryder Cup gets underway Friday morning at Marco Simone Golf and Country Club in Rome, and there are plenty of questions surrounding both teams.
Rookies litter each roster, and some key stars on each squad are playing less than ideal coming into the week.
But the Ryder Cup is different.
Before the action, we take a look at five burning questions, starting with a player whose selection to represent the United States has been a hotly debated topic across the sport.
“We have watched a lot of losses … I think that we are ready to be on the other side of that.”
The captain’s picks have been made, the teams are all set and the countdown to the Ryder Cup, which begins Sept. 29 in Rome at Marco Simone Golf & Country Club, has begun in earnest.
In a little more than a week, 12 of the best players from both Europe and the United States will square off in the biennial bash as the Americans look to win the Cup on foreign soil for the first time in 30 years.
Ahead of the 44th edition of the Ryder Cup, Americans Collin Morikawa, Scottie Scheffler, Jordan Spieth, Justin Thomas participated in a wide-ranging Q&A through a partnership with Rolex that covered what makes this event so special to them as well as a primer on the course and more.
