Sportsmanship Wins the Presidents Cup

Welcome to The Debrief, Box Score’s freewheeling conversation about the sports we love that begins when the action stops.

Jim Gorant
Jim is the author of several books, including Fanatic: 10 Things All Sports Fans Should Do Before They Die, and a former Sports Illustrated senior editor.

Laz Versalles
Laz is a freelance golf writer who lives in Los Angeles. You can find his work on Skratch, The Wall Street Journal and other corners of the internet.

Farrell Evans
Farrell is a Box Score co-founder, former Sports Illustrated golf writer and the executive producer of The Land We Share, a documentary about the intimate bonds between the Shinnecock Hills Golf Club and the Shinnecock Indian Nation.

After the International team led most of the way, Team USA righted the ship in Sunday singles and won the Presidents Cup 17-13. What stood out most to you during these four days at Medinah?

Jim: What stood out most to me is how bad they are at this. It’s confounding how the Americans consistently underperform in these events. It took a heroic, last-second rally against the odds to not get completely embarrassed. And I don't know exactly what the solution is. 

Listening to Golf Channel analyst and former European Ryder Cup captain Paul McGinley throughout the weekend was really interesting. He was giving a course on how to perform in match play, how to take it on both physically and psychologically. And I hope somebody in the US hierarchy was taking notes, because it’s a lot of the stuff they don't do. So my overall impression is good for them for rallying, but not really an impressive performance.

Farrell: There was hope, as the International team was coming into the last day with a three-point lead, that we would have this great moment that would make the Presidents Cup something that people care about. And ultimately, we didn't get that. It was pretty close, but it's still not the Ryder Cup. In the end it was a reminder of what the Presidents Cup is not.

It was absolutely a missed opportunity. The US team has won 11 straight Presidents Cups against this aggregation of players from everywhere. There are some great players who played for the International side, but it’s not the European team that shows up for the Ryder Cup. If the International team had won this year and it had been a rout, then we could have gotten excited. Because honestly, prior to 1985 at the Belfry, the Ryder Cup was just a sort of glorified exhibition that people really didn't care about all that much. And so now you have a continuation of that. Is there any anticipation of the next Presidents Cup? I think a victory Sunday by the International team would have given us that.

Laz: We lost to Great Britain and Ireland in the Walker Cup (even if the reality is that half the team are kids who grew up in Orlando and the Bay Area and don’t even have British accents), we lost the Solheim Cup, and we lost the Ryder Cup. Team-wise we’re not doing great. 

Europe’s 1985 Ryder Cup win at the Belfry really started in 1976, when a 19-year-old Seve Ballesteros took runner-up in the British Open, and everyone thought, “All right, we should probably start looking at getting this guy involved. How do we do that? We bring all of Europe into the Ryder Cup.”

The Belfry in 1985 was all about a personality and that personality was Seve. So if we were looking for this Presidents Cup to be a sea change moment for the International team, there had to be a protagonist at the front of that. And honestly, I think there’s one there: Min Woo Lee. The guy clearly has a chemistry with Geoff Ogilvy and it got me thinking that maybe what this Cup needs is to go backward. What if the Presidents Cup was Australia and New Zealand versus the US? Australia and New Zealand could put a team together that would probably get its ass kicked for a while, but I think it would be better than what they have now, which is kind of flat TV when it’s going up against so much else on the calendar.

Jim: Maybe short term, an International win would have helped the event. But if the Belfry had been just one win, it would have also gone away. Europe followed it up. It has to continue to happen over time. It has to become an actual competition. One time didn't make that happen. The US-Europe rivalry grew larger because there was a lot of personal animus that took place on the course. Seve and Paul Azinger. These personalities jumped out. They didn’t like each other and that came across and made the Ryder Cup more compelling.

A win by the International team wouldn’t have transformed the event unless they could follow it up, and they don’t have the depth of field right now to do it. That’s the one problem with limiting the International side to just Australia or even Asia. They're already lacking in depth. As it was, the International team averaged 50.8 in the world ranking, and that’s drawing from every territory they could.

Scottie Scheffler conceded a 32-foot par putt to Nico Echavarria on the 15th hole of their singles match because a fan yelled during Echavarria’s tee shot. What did you think of Scheffler’s conceding that putt, and did the overall atmosphere at Medinah feel more sportsmanlike after widespread fan misbehavior at Bethpage for the Ryder Cup last year?

Laz: On the first day, the crowds were the right temperature. I think they were the right distance. I think it’s fun to be patriotic and cheer USA. There’s a right way to do it. There's a wrong way to do it. I think the Chicago sports fans really showed that they appreciate that. I’m not going to pick on Long Island or New York or fraternities, but it seemed like there were more adults in the room at Medinah and I appreciated that.

Farrell: I thought Scheffler was a gentleman in that concession. On the atmosphere at the Presidents Cup versus the Ryder Cup, I was at Medinah when they played the Ryder Cup there in 2012. I just feel like you don’t have the same appetite for the patriotism and “USA versus the world” at the Presidents Cup that you have at the Ryder Cup. It has a lot to do with the US winning 11 in a row. You have the same firepower on the International side, so you’re not going to have the same sort of back and forth. 

To Laz’s point, Tom Kim wants to be that Seve-like figure. He did it in his first appearance but I don’t think he has the energy behind him. Adam Scott has played in a million of these things and he’s just going about his business. Afterward, the International captain Geoff Ogilvy was like, Oh, well. The Americans are great in singles. We’ll see you next time.

Jim: Conceding that putt was a classy move by Scottie and the right thing to do. I appreciated seeing that. It was weird, though, on the next hole when Echavarria turned around and shushed the crowd after Scheffler basically bailed him out and allowed him to keep playing. That was a weird turn of events. But overall I thought the atmosphere was pretty good. There was very little cheering of bad shots by the International team. Sunday was definitely the rowdiest, but still pretty under control compared to Bethpage, which I don’t think was anyone’s idea of how these things should go down. 

Jackson Koivun, with a 2-0-1 record, was the only undefeated American player. What did he show you this week?

Farrell: That he could handle the pressure. This time last year, he was at Auburn, and now he’s playing in the Presidents Cup with Justin Thomas. He never seems to lose his composure. He never hit any really horrible shots.

Does it mean that he's going to be great? It does remind me of Rickie Fowler’s rise. Fowler played for the US team at the 2010 Ryder Cup in Wales the year after he went pro out of Oklahoma State. 

At a minimum, we know that Jackson Koivun has made the boys’ club. The same boys’ club that J.J. Spaun was not a part of, and the reason why he got left off the team. We know that Jackson is a guy who is going to get a lot of attention, and that people are going to expect to see on leaderboards. He gets credibility because he’s played in one of these team competitions.

Jim: Koivun was great and fun to watch. Definitely charismatic. But he reminds me a lot of those young players that don’t have any scar tissue yet. He was the best player in college. He won the NCAA championship. He’s won all these things. There’s nothing in his mind that would make him have any doubt at this point. But they call it the grind for a reason out there, because it does grind you down over time, potentially.

And also we’ve seen a lot of these guys come out—Rickie Fowler, Jordan Spieth—they come shooting out of the gate. Even going back to Sergio Garcia at Medinah in 1999. Here comes this great talent who is going to be a rival to Tiger Woods and it never really happened. That was almost the high point of his career. Almost, but not quite.

It’s almost easier in a way when you’re first out there. You’ve got all this positive reinforcement. You've got no reason to doubt yourself and you have all these good experiences. You haven’t missed five cuts in a row at some point like almost everyone does. You haven't been on the road alone for weeks and weeks at a time. Those things that make being a professional golfer hard, he hasn't really gone through yet. So really cool. The club twirls on 18 and all that—that was fun. And he certainly seems like a kid with a future, but wait and see. That’s the one thing you learn over time.

I also agree with Farrell about J.J. Spaun. Choosing Patrick Cantlay over Spaun, boy, did that put me in the wrong frame of mind. I don’t know Cantlay personally. He might be a wonderful guy, nice to dogs and all that, but he certainly seems surly on the golf course. He’s a super slow player, hard to watch and has expressed less than enthusiasm for these team events in the past. And then to go out of your way to pick him over a guy who was in the top 12 and has played great just seemed really weird to me.

And again, even the myth of the Xander Schauffele-Patrick Cantlay pairing. The first time they played they were great, but they’ve been under .500 since. Still, you roll them back out there like they’re this great power pairing. The same with Scottie Scheffler and Sam Burns. Everyone wants to throw Burns and Scheffler together because they’re friends, but they don’t really deliver the goods. It feels like it’s more about this old boys’ network, who’s buddies with whom and who wants to play together, than about how are we going to win this thing. And that’s frustrating to watch.

Laz: Great job by Captain Snedeker. It was really smart to put Koivun with Justin Thomas. And frankly, Koivun didn't come out of the gate that well, and Thomas got him going and let him have a nice week. There’s a lot of that.

I think that points to something that I've always believed, which is that Cup records are wildly overrated. Because if you’re playing a guy who’s puking all over himself and you get a singles win, okay, great. If your partner is carrying you, which we see so often, great. Wyndham Clark played really good golf. I saw him hit some incredibly difficult shots, and there’s nothing he can do when Nick Taylor hits a ball to a foot from 148 to tap in for par when they had to punch out. It’s match play, which is weird, and it’s team match play, which is even weirder.

I think Koivun has a lot more in common from an approach perspective with someone like Scottie Scheffler. He's kind of more that almost autistic, blinders-on, competitive kid, like Scottie, like Jordan Spieth, where all they know how to do is just compete super-hard, almost too hard sometimes. I’m not ready to call him a breakout star yet, but he seems to have that tunnel vision that you see in athletes where nothing on the outside gets to them. They just go because they just have these blinders on. That’s what I see in him.

Does the performance of the US team in the Presidents Cup give you any additional concerns about their chances at the Ryder Cup next year in Ireland?

Jim: Not extra concerns, but it seems like they have not cracked the code by any means. And I don’t know that there’s any evidence that they've started to, or will between now and then. It seems like they're going to keep doing what they're doing, and this probably only feels like a reinforcement for them rather than any sort of warning flare.

But it’s interesting, like Laz mentioned, Justin Thomas had a great pairing with Jackson Koivun, but Thomas was guilty of some of the worst decision-making throughout the weekend. He under-clubbed across the water on the par-three, and then he tried to hit the short par-four across the water at a time he didn't need to. He played great in his singles match, but he seemed to make a lot of questionable decisions over the course of the event. But if he was helpful to Koivun, then good for him. It’s hard to extrapolate what this means for next year.

Farrell: They’re different events, and I’m not sure what we can learn. If the US took this exact team to play against what will be another really good European team, I just don’t know what will happen, because I think the pressure is very different. 

Laz: Do the same captains go to Ireland for the Ryder Cup? If the answer is yes, then, no, the Americans will not win. Jim said it earlier. They keep trotting out the two Bible study buddies, Scheffler and Burns. Here they come. 

When I saw Keegan Bradley there, I thought, that’s just a great symbol of why Europe wins. Here’s Webb Simpson. Here’s another guy. They’re all just friends. Guys, Europe is killing you through data. And somehow we’re still trotting out the pals. How many times do you have to lose that way before you realize, all right, maybe we should change the way we're doing things? I don’t think these same 12 guys go. So we’ll see what happens. But if the leadership mindset is the same, I don’t see them getting by the Europeans, who seem to have another gear that we can’t find as a team.

Jim: There's another interesting thing when you talk about the data. Do you think the Americans win the Presidents Cup if it’s a three-day event? Because I don't think they do. It's a classic Moneyball analytics thing, right? The Oakland A's proved that if you interpreted the data right—prioritized walks and all these things—over 162 games, those statistics were on your side and you could have a very successful team. But in a five- or seven-game series, you could lose to someone who's just flat-out more talented than you. And that's why they could never win the World Series, even though they had all those great regular-season records.

And in this case, the US was statistically a much better team, but over the first three days that didn't really prove out. It took the fourth day for the numbers to turn in their favor. It’s almost like you see the data at work, and there was just enough runway here for the data to work in their favor. In a shorter event like the Ryder Cup, where the statistics are closer, the advantage is not as big for the US, although they still have been the favored team in a lot of the recent iterations of that. It seems like the Americans need to lean into that and make it work for them. 🇺🇸