After Ryder Cup loss, what's next for the United States?
You don’t often get endings in sports as narratively perfect as this one: Francesco Molinari, who had paced the European Ryder Cup team with five wins in five matches, getting the winning point for Team Blue on the 16th hole at Le Golf National in Paris. And the reason he won that point? Because Phil Mickelson, who contributed literally nothing to the United States’ scoring effort, hit his tee shot into the water.
Once again, Europe wins the Ryder Cup. Once again, America loses the Cup on European soil. Once again, an apparently stacked Team USA flops across the pond. Once again, a crew of world-beating Americans looks overmatched and underprepared for both a European course and European galleries.
What now?
The easy answer, of course, is that America just waits two years, until the Cup comes back to U.S. shores, and then pulls a customary brute-force throwdown to wrestle it out of European hands. But that’s a graceless solution, one that – as the U.S. saw in 2012 with its Medinah collapse – isn’t nearly as guaranteed as Europe’s team-first, precision-strike approach.
So let’s take a hard look at this year’s team and the reasons for its failure in Paris. What can we learn? Let’s find out.
The captain’s picks flailed
Jim Furyk will get plenty of grief – that’s always the way with the captain – but the question is, how much criticism is a result of hindsight? For instance, several critics questioned the idea of pairing Webb Simpson and Bubba Watson, but that proved to be a winning combination in a needed moment on Saturday afternoon. Others wondered why Furyk didn’t split the pairing of Justin Thomas and Jordan Spieth to spread their winning mojo out, but European captain Thomas Bjorn let the Tommy Fleetwood-Francesco Molinari pairing ride all the way through all four matches.
Furyk’s captain’s picks came in for plenty of grief, too, going a combined 2-10, with both of those wins courtesy of Tony Finau. Mickelson is the outlier, given that he’s been on a slide for months. Could a more precise ball striker like Kevin Kisner or Xander Schauffele have contributed more than Mickelson? Absolutely. But Mickelson didn’t lose this by himself, the above anecdote notwithstanding. No, the simple truth about this loss is this:
The best players didn’t play their best
Woods and Mickelson, two of the all-time greats, combined to go 0-6. Bryson DeChambeau, coming off two wins in the FedEx Cup playoffs, went 0-3. World No. 1 Dustin Johnson went 1-4, and two-time 2018 major winner Brooks Koepka needed an 18th-hole save to salvage a halve and go 1-3-1. Woods, exhausted after an unexpectedly long run of golf, looked uninterested all week long, and it showed in his play. Rickie Fowler, like Mickelson, appeared overmatched. Patrick Reed, so tough on American soil, didn’t start crowing and gloating until late Sunday afternoon, long after it mattered.
Bottom line: it doesn’t matter who’s captaining the team if the players don’t play up to their abilities. And only Thomas, Finau and Simpson can walk away from Sunday saying they did.
The alternate-shot format doesn’t fit the United States
This is a weird but unmistakable truth: the U.S. just doesn’t do well in alternate-shot formats. America lost six of eight this year, continuing a long, strange trend. Maybe it’s that the U.S. is a team of individuals, maybe it’s just that Team USA doesn’t practice this kind of format enough. Whichever, it’s an essential aspect of Ryder Cup games. Might be worth ditching some of those Tuesday practice sessions for money in favor of some alternate-shot showdowns.
While we’re at it, the Americans’ failure in singles is a worrying concern, too. Jordan Spieth and Bubba Watson are both winless in this format. Whatever needs to be done to get the U.S. players more comfortable in this solo format, U.S. golf needs to do it.
There’s no alpha dog
There’s no one player on the U.S. team with the right combination of talent, gravitas, intimidation and charisma to rally the troops. No Ian Poulter or Sergio Garcia or Rory McIlroy, in other words. Reed’s Captain America act works well with the fans, but Furyk’s lineup neutered Reed – he can’t play lead dog when paired with the G.O.A.T. – and he’s not a favorite in the locker room, to put it politely. Koepka and DJ, the toughest dudes in the room, aren’t exactly once-more-unto-the-breach rally-the-troops types. Woods still has the feel of an isolationist going along with this team thing just because he has to. Mickelson is always playing so many different angles it’s tough to tell where his true loyalties lie; after his 2012 shivving of then-captain Tom Watson, everyone’s wise to watch their back around him. Spieth and JT are probably the best bets for this role going forward, but they’re not there yet.
The U.S. faced a locomotive
If there’s some comfort that the U.S. can take in this result, it’s that nobody this side of 1986 Jack Nicklaus and 2000 Tiger Woods could have held up against this year’s Molinari-Fleetwood team. Plus Henrik Stenson parachuted in with an unexpected gem, Poulter summoned up ghosts of Ryder Cups past, Garcia became the winningest Ryder Cup player of all time, McIlroy found his stroke more often than not … in short, the Europeans were locked in all week long, blitzing Le Golf National’s fairways and greens in a way the U.S. couldn’t have matched without cheat codes enabled. And hey, speaking of Le Golf …
The course overwhelmed the Americans
The only player with any real experience on Le Golf National was Thomas, who played in the French Open earlier this season and, perhaps not coincidentally, was the team’s strongest player beginning to end. Bjorn did sculpt the course to his team’s advantage, crafting tight fairways and oatmeal-thick rough. That nullified the Americans’ Aaron Judge-esque bomb-and-gouge advantage off the tee. Tight flag placements and subtly shifting greens didn’t help, either. When the Ryder returns to the U.S., every player in the European side will have extensive experience with Whistling Straits, site of three recent PGA Championships. If America wants to win the 2022 Cup, Spieth, Thomas, DJ and the younger set ought to book annual trips to the Marco Simone Golf Club in Rome, starting now.
Europe’s a true team
Every two years, the U.S. rounds up a dozen of the best golfers on the planet, points them all in the direction of the first tee, and wonders why America gets waxed. Meanwhile, the Europeans bond in a way that seems, well, foreign to Americans.
Look, for instance, at the lineage of Spanish golfers, from Seve Ballesteros to Jose Maria Olazabal to Garcia to Jon Rahm. There’s a connection there that’s not just nationalist, a bond you don’t see anywhere in the United States team. (Florida golfers represent! No?) Perhaps that will change in future years – Woods, for instance, hasn’t shown any inclination to bridge the gap between generations until very recently – but at the moment, the cross-generational bonding that naturally develops among the Europeans just doesn’t exist in America.
Bottom line: there’s no reason America has to care about the Ryder Cup. Certainly, plenty of fans go with the typically American “we’re no good at it, so who cares?” approach. Which is fine, as long as you don’t mind getting your ass handed to you every four years, guaranteed.
To swipe a slogan from the SEC, the Ryder Cup just means more to Europe. For America, it’s a chance at another trophy and a good party every couple years. For Europe, it’s a calling. And until the U.S. hits that level – until, for every player, losing the Cup hurts worse than losing a major – it’s going to be a rock-strewn road back to victory.
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Jay Busbee is a writer for Yahoo Sports. Contact him at jay.busbee@yahoo.com or find him on Twitter or on Facebook.
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