Friday, September 23, 2022

Your Friday Frisson - Prez Cup Edition

Just a few weeks ago your humble blogger wasn't even sure the event would be played.... 

OK, it's not exactly Ali-Frazier, but this is still quite the schizophrenic header:

The 2022 Presidents Cup is off to a nightmare start. Still, it’s far from over

Well, three days I'm guessing....

There’s no question that the star-spangled spectators who streamed through the Quail Hollow Club’s gates on Thursday morning were looking for a win for the red, white and blue.

But even they didn’t want things to start like this.

The Presidents Cup is not the Ryder Cup. In the Ryder Cup, Team Europe has proven itself such a formidable opponent that even in last year’s 19-9 rout at Whistling Straits, there was no thought of feeling mercy. That was payback for previous lost Cups. It was Team USA defending its home turf. Team Europe still leads the modern Ryder Cup’s history, after all, they’re 11-9-1 since 1979, when the team added continental Europe.

The Presidents Cup has a decidedly different history. Since the first competition in 1994, Team USA is 11-1-1. This rivalry is not a rivalry. For the Presidents Cup to keep its juice, the
Internationals need to prove themselves worthy opponents. Even if the Internationals are this Cup’s little brothers, every little brother would rather get beat up than ignored, deemed unable to handle the punishment.

That doesn’t mean the Internationals need to actually win this week. But it sure would be nice if they kept it close. The 2019 edition of the event was spectacular, after all; the U.S. staged a final-round comeback to win 16-14. Those of us watching relished the competition and never once questioned whether it was a fair fight.

Dylan Dethier is using an especially narrow definition of "start", focusing on the Adam-Scott - Hideki Matsuyama pairing, of which I first heard on Golf Channel's Tuesday night coverage.  My reaction was skepticism, unaware of any connective tissue between Trevor Immelman and Hal Suttton.  The comparison to that famous Wood-Mickelson pairing might seem a stretch, but Trevor seemed to be trying to make the same kind of statement, but with two guys well past their sell-by dates.

And this also where the different format plays into the strategy, because putting your two horses (or alleged horses) together makes your other pairings weaker.  I like it a lot more in a four-match setting as opposed to five, not that you're going to look good when your can't lose team are closed out on the, checking notes, 13th green

But is it far from over?  I don't know about the far bit....But while Trevor's first group played like the D-flight, those other four matches were another matter:

As the day wore on, the other four matches began to tighten. No U.S. squad could pull away. Sungjae Im and Corey Conners held steady at 1 down to Justin Thomas and Jordan Spieth. Tom Kim and K.H. Lee went from 2 down to 1 down to tied with Cameron Young and Collin Morikawa. When Sam Burns and Scottie Scheffler double-bogeyed No. 15, the Internationals seized advantage, then poured it on with birdies at 16 and 17. Suddenly there was a black-and-yellow flag on the board. Taylor Pendrith and Mito Pereira made birdie at 13 to tie up their match, too. Suddenly what had looked like a 5-0 start could flip. For a moment, fans began to do the math — could the Internationals finish the session with the lead?

Well, the only folks thinking that the yellow and black could take a lead had likely been overserved at the concession stand, but still.... Shane Ryan captures seven critical moments, including the final match that I didn't see play the 18th hole:

1. Mito Pereira's errant drive/Taylor Pendrith's missed putt

The lingering memory here will be Pendrith missing a 10-footer to halve his match against Tony Finau and Max Homa, but the truth is that Pendrith was the better player in his anchor pairing with Pereira. Just two holes later, he buried what felt like a do-or-die 24-footer to halve the 16th hole and keep the match all square, and it was Pereira whose errant driver on 16 and 18 made things tough on the Internationals in a very winnable match. The final drive was the real killer; Pereira hooked his tee shot on the last, and it was all Pendrith could do to blast from the rough 205 yards into the greenside bunker. As Homa and Finau made a standard par, Pereira scrambled to 10 feet, but Pendrith couldn't make the putt. It was the difference between a 3½-1½ margin and the more dire 4-1. Pendrith didn't speak to the media, but Finau praised his partner Homa for two clutch drives on 16 and 18.

"Whoever hits the fairway is going to have the big advantage," Finau said. "Homa stepped up after Mito missed the fairway and hit the middle of the fairway. So he set us up for me to be able to aim at the middle of the green and force them to putt to have the match. And Taylor, you know, hit a good putt and it just missed."

That was a dagger.   They had a chance to get of there down 3 1/2 - 1 1/2 (or even 3-2), and just coughed up that full point.  

Did someone mention daggers?

3. Cameron Young's gut-punch bomb

As the day wound to a close, an optimistic fan could still talk himself into a 2½-2½ tie for the Internationals; that's how tight the final three matches were. In the third match, Collin Morikawa hit one of his extremely rare mediocre approach shots to 25 feet on the par-4 17th, it seemed at the very least that the Internationals would be able to extend the match to the 18th hole. Instead, Young hit one of his most aggressive putts of the day ... ​​right into the bottom of the cup.

"I definitely hit it a little bit too hard," Young said. "It is a really fast one, and it's obvious that it's really fast. But the greens are so, so quick. And there's so much slope that it's very easy, I think, to hit something hard enough to go four, five, or six feet by. It doesn't necessarily really have to be a bad putt. But fortunately it didn't do that."

The Americans by then had the match pretty well under control, but still...

5. The Spieth/Thomas ham & egg act flips the 15th hole

Time and again, golf's two most famous friends managed to rescue one another from incredibly tight squeezes, starting on the par-3 fourth when Thomas hit his tee shot on the 168-yard hole
about 125 yards, and Spieth bailed him out with a pitch to inside three feet. The most important moment, though, came when Thomas returned the favor on the 15th. Spieth faced an incredibly long putt and ran it 26 feet past the hole. Clinging to a 1-up lead, Thomas did this:

Conners, who had a seven-footer for par that he thought could win the hole, suddenly needed it to halve the hole. When he missed, suddenly the Americans were 2 up with three to play, rather than all square.

I might have used "dagger" a bit early, because the JT putt was the moment of the day, to this observer, mostly because of how poorly the Spieth-Thomas team was playing, against Trevor's second team.

JT himself put it like this:

“Oh, it was a big grind,” Thomas said afterward. “I mean, you know, we played a really, really good team, a team that hits a lot of fairways, a lot of quality shots. I hit some unbelievably questionable shots, and I think that’s why we make such a great team. We can salvage when we don’t have our best stuff on a day like today.”

 Most notably this one:

How questionable were a few? So odd was one that Golf Channel analyst Paul Azinger labeled it “one of the worst shots you’ll ever see a good player hit.” We’ll just let the stats tell our story. On the 168-yard, par-3 4th, Thomas teed off, caught as much turf behind the ball as ball itself, and hit it 126 yards.

Doing the math, that left Spieth with a 44-yard pitch.

“I’m just laying you up to a good yardage,” Thomas joked to Spieth, according to the broadcast.

He beat me to that line....

Here's the bit that has to trouble Trevor, though.  Except for the Cantlay-X-Man team, which wasn't tested, and Collin Morikawa, how do we think the Americans played?   I though they scraped it around pretty poorly, none more so than the glam Scottie-Sam Burns pairing at the finish.  Don't we think they'll raise their game as the week goes on?

Shane had this NLU Tweet on Collin Morikawa's iron game, which did look pretty sharp:

As someone once said, these guys are good.

So, what does Trevor need today?  the match is pretty simple, beginning with the blindingly obvious observation that they can't fall any further behind.  They need to won this session to keep the weekend interesting, and here are your pairings:

Match 6, 11:35 a.m. — Jordan Spieth/Justin Thomas (USA) vs. Adam Scott/Cam Davis (INT)

Match 7, 11:50 a.m. — Scottie Scheffler/Sam Burns (USA) vs. Sungjae Im/Sebastian Munoz (INT)

Match 8, 12:05 p.m. — Kevin Kisner/Cameron Young (USA) vs. Mito Pereira/Christiaan Bezuidenhout (INT)

Match 9, 12:20 p.m. — Xander Schauffele/Patrick Cantlay (USA) vs. Hideki Matsuyama/Tom Kim (INT)

Match 10, 12:35 p.m. — Billy Horschel/Max Homa (USA) vs. Corey Conners/Taylor Pendrith (INT)

Do we see 3 - 3 1/2 points there for the Internationals?  

This has a couple of surprises:

Sitting USA: Tony Finau, Collin Morikawa

Sitting INT: Si Woo Kim, K.H. Lee

Surprised to see Si Woo on the bench,  given that he was on the only International team to notch a point.  Same goes for Morikawa, who seemed awfully dialed in.  Obviously he's a perfect fit for foursomes and we'll likely see him in that on Saturday, but I take this to mean that Tony and he will go both Saturday sessions.

I also find it interesting that he moved the team that played best yesterday out of the lead-off slot, and is now leading with two teams that didn't play their best yesterday.  It's a different task today, just go out and make birdies, and you'd have to expect that Scheffler-Burns team to play much better today, no?

One last thought in previewing today's matches is to note how problematic the fourball format is.  You'll have noticed the earlier tee times and TV window, as fourballs takes an eternity these days.  They make passingly few bogeys, especially with the course specifically set up to produce a birdie-fest, so the format has ventured dangerously close to unwatchable.  See if you agree when watching today's action.

Golf Digest has a couple of thoughtful pieces on this event that we'll sort through, beginning with this Shane Ryan musing:

Is the Presidents Cup method of setting matches better than the Ryder Cup?

Before listening to Shane, I'll just say that I think it's better for this event, which has a greater need for marquee pairings, but wouldn't want it for the Ryder Cup.

Shane frames his argument by stepping into Ernie's shoes in 2019, specifically his Sunday singles lineup, which is criticized by Paul McGinley for it's weakness in the early matches (a critique I don't find entirely convincing):

If you ask Paul McGinley, the biggest mistake Ernie Els made in an otherwise stellar captaincy at
the 2019 Presidents Cup in Melbourne came on Saturday night as he prepared to set his next day’s singles lineup. Holding a 10-8 lead that could have been even bigger, the International team captain opted to hold some of his best and most experienced players for the end of the lineup, apparently reasoning that if the match was close overall, he would have his stalwarts ready for the tense closing moments. Els kept some strength up top, but threw some of his more inexperienced, less successful charges into the fray in early positions.

This surprised McGinley because he had been impressed by the way Els opted for early strength in his lineups during the first four sessions. Why deviate come Sunday?

Ummm, because you have to play all twelve guys, and that inevitably exposes the International team's lack of depth?  Here's that Sunday line-up:

Who exactly does McGinley think should have gone earlier??  The problem, at least to me, isn't that he played Li Haotong and C.T. Pan, too early, it's that he had to play them at all.  Anyway, here's his take:

Here's where things get tricky: If the Presidents Cup used the same system as the Ryder Cup for setting pairings—which is to say, a blind draw in which both captains set their order without knowing what the other is doing—Els may have done exactly that. The fact that the Presidents Cup is different, with captains utilizing an alternating snake draft method in which one captain puts out a team or player, the other captain responds then puts out his next player/team, and so forth, creates a very different dynamic.

May have?  

This is just one of those truisms that has lost all connection to reality.  Since at least 1999, it's become conventional wisdom for the losing team to put their strongest players out first, which I guess makes some sense, although I think far less than most people assume.  Now McGinley is suggesting that teams in the lead always put their best players out first, but I've been reliably informed that each match awards the same number of points.

But what's really weird about Shane's piece is that it completely ignores the obvious purpose of the Prez Cup pairing process, which is to allow the captains to conspire to create marquee matches.  Everyone remembers Tiger and Ernie in the gloaming in South Africa, but most don't remember that the two paired off earlier (strangely, Tiger recounted this in his Hall of a acceptance speech, strangely feeling compelled to remind us all that he had already beaten Ernie that day).  Similarly, when they went to Canada, Tiger played Mike Weir in singles.

I'm totally OK with it for this event, which quite frankly can used the added buzz from those kind of staged match-ups.  But for the Ryder Cup, which is serious business, I prefer the blind draw and the mayhem and uncertainty that creates.

Is Shane Ryan getting any sleep?  Because he also has this encouraging piece up:

Soon?  That's a strong opinion given the current installment, but he predictably reminds us that the Ryder Cup took sixty years to become what is is today:

The Ryder Cup wasn't played from 1939 through 1945 due to World War II, and the truth is, there was absolutely no reason for it to come back. There was nothing wrong with event, per se, but it
had only begun in 1927, and the nascent enterprise didn't have a ton of traction in the world of professional golf through its first six matches. Miraculously it was resuscitated by a grocery executive from Oregon, Robert Hudson, who learned that the British PGA and most of Great Britain was broke after a long, devastating war, and paid for everything, from travel to food to lodging, to have them come to Portland in 1947. He even met the British team in New York to throw a party for them at the Waldorf Astoria and travel with them by train to the west coast. If not for him, the Ryder Cup might have simply been forgotten.

Fast forward 30 years. Between Hudson's Ryder Cup in Portland and the '77 event at Royal Lytham & St. Anne's, the Americans won or retained the Cup an astounding 15 of 16 times. "Lopsided" doesn't begin to describe it. Tom Weiskopf opted out of the '77 Cup because he wanted to hunt bighorn sheep, which sounds like a funny historical footnote except for what it said about the stature of the event. It took Jack Nicklaus and British PGA president Lord Derby to insist on expanding the British and Irish team to all of Europe, and even so, after two more blowouts, it was one lost sponsor away from going under in 1982. Then Tony Jacklin took over as captain, the Europeans rose from the dead, and almost overnight this match-play exhibition, which had limped along for more than half a century, always seemingly about to collapse without much sound or fury, became one of the greatest institutions in golf.

If you'll pardon the extended history lesson, there's a point here: It took 60 years for the Ryder Cup to become transcendent, and the Presidents Cup, which is not yet 30 years old, is also going to be great. We just need to stop worrying and put our faith in father time.

It's a great story of how the event was saved, although I always thought it cruel that he staged it in Portland, which is quite the unnecessarily long journey for the GB&I team.  Of course, the good news is that in 1947 Portland was likely still barely habitable....

Again, though, it seems to me that Shane is missing so many obvious points that his plea seems silly, although here I mostly agree:

The Ryder Cup should have died several times, and it took the extraordinary energy and vision of certain individuals to ensure that it staggered on until the point at which it became unstoppable. Sure, LIV Golf has at least temporarily gutted the International team, but so what? It may not last very long, and even if it does, match-play team events are no stranger to huge upsets. It's not very likely that anything will trouble the Americans this year in Charlotte, but imagine if the Internationals make a run? What a great upset story that would be. That kind of narrative is in play every single year, and will be until parity is established. In other words, it's fun even when we think we know the outcome.

It is fun because team match play rocks.  Let me allow Shane to finish:

So why are so many people so insistent on giving it the Julius Caesar knives-out treatment? It's
not detracting from anything else even now—would we really prefer whatever late-September filler event would replace it on the various world tour calendars?. And if we can just chill out and take some comfort from history, the day will come when we look forward to the Presidents Cup with the same anticipation we feel on Thursday night of Ryder Cup week.

If that sounds too crazy to believe, just imagine what a British player in 1947 might have thought if, while riding by train through the American prairies to play in a forgotten exhibition resurrected by an Oregon grocer after a crushing global war, he could have seen the spectacle of a modern Ryder Cup. Compared to that, what does a bit of patience cost us?


The biggest problem this event has is that it isn't the Ryder Cup, therefore comparing it to that other event is going to leave folks unsatisfied.  Where Shane errs, I think, is in not appreciating the role of the Euro Tour in the Ryder Cup, and the lack of similar coherence to the International team.  Playing for GB&I or Europe is quite a different thing than playing for the rest of the world.

The best thing we could possibly do is just chill and enjoy the event for what it is, team match play among elite players.  That's not to minimize the lopsided results, although the other guys have been very competitive the last two overseas installments.  

But I don't see any scenario in which this event becomes as competitive or as intense as the Ryder Cup, and therein lies the opportunity.  The LPGA has almost begged the Saudis to do a distaff LIV, and Jay has this event here that's problematic.  So, riddle me this Batman, why wouldn't you include the women in the future?  It's a lay-up, no?

But we're using the Ryder Cup as the benchmark for the Prez Cup, which to me begs the issue of whether the Ryder Cup itself is still the Ryder Cup.  The weakness of the Euro Tour, the seemingly increasing competitive balance, the perverse motivation of Euro stalwarts spitting on captaincy for 30 pieces of silver all lead me to think Marco Simone could be problematic.  And that doesn't even include the nightmare scenarios of what a judge might order each tour to do with the LIVsters....  Buckle in, it's gonna be a wild ride.

Schedule Update - I have no clue.  The bride and I are heading out to Montauk on Sunday to celebrate our 20th anniversary, and I haven't even considered whether the laptop is coming with us.  I might blog, but I also might not.  But let's hope Trevor's boys keep things from getting out of hand.  

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