Weekend Wrap

Hope everyone enjoyed the beautiful Fall weekend....Perhaps you were even smart enough to not ruin it with any golf.

Holding Serve - I got to watch quite a bit of the event, so thank God for DVRs and team match play.  Shack has some thoughts:

Another cup, another classic. Unless you were one of the thousands trying to catch a shuttle.

The 2024 Solheim Cup delivered the glorious range of dramatics that we’ve become accustomed to spoiled-by in team events: brilliant shots under the gun, weird decisions (by the losing Captain), embarrassing four-ball pace of play, a cringeworthy caddie display (not their fault), a former President adding to the first tee buzz, an LPGA display of logistics ineptitude for the ages leading to Friday morning’s funereal first tee, and, after a struggle to get stories straight about what went wrong, an apology from the LPGA Tour Commissioner.

Did I mention there was incredible golf in between all the madness?

In spite of all the weirdness, the United States team Captained by Stacy Lewis arrived at Robert Trent Jones Golf Club only a year removed from a heartbreaking loss in Spain and this time dominated the first two days, before watching Europe close with a strong singles performance to tighten up the final score, 15½-12½.

The three-point difference gave America its first Solheim Cup victory in seven years and the first Cup win by either team of more than two points since 2017. 

We'll get to that Friday fiasco in a sec, but first more from Geoff:

Sunday’s thrilling last-minute run by Europe started with Charley Hull’s shocking 6&4 drubbing of Nelly Korda despite the match starting with the duo all square through five holes. And the late tightening of matches to make the final four duels important served to highlight the least-appreciated element of biennial professional matches: 28-points.

The system’s ingeniousness works so well in so many ways. It makes a pre-Sunday singles clinching win nearly impossible. And even with a commanding lead—think Brookline!—usually gives a sense that a few matches can flip the entire thing in that weird way cup matches can turn with a slight shift in scoreboard color. It gives us different mediums for the artists to paint and requires different mentalities in a condensed, ultra-intense three days. It rewards stamina and smarts. So, in other words, obvious it’s not a format devised by the same people behind the 12-or-so iterations of the FedExCup.

Sunday saw America needing just 4½ points out of 12 up for grabs to regain the Cup in what is traditionally USA’s best format. (You know, the whole nation-of-golf-narcissists factor.) Yet even with everything working against the Europeans, including amazing crowds with brilliant spirit and by all accounts a wholesomeness that will be missing in Long Island next fall if the PGA of America insists on selling booze at 7 a.m., the USA’s Solheim victory was not solidified until the fourth-to-last match out. That’s when Lilia Vu earned the win with a brilliant approach shot and tap-in to solidify the key half-point.

This one had a slightly different feel in that the U.S. always had it kinda sorta under control, though they did struggle to come up with the final daggers.  But still wildly entertaining, as it puts players under a different kind of pressure, where closing out matches can be excruciatingly difficult.  Geoff does a deep dive into the 28-point system in use, cribbed from the Ryder Cup, that you can sort through on your won.

As for the dark underbelly?

The 2024 Solheim Cup delivered the glorious range of dramatics that we’ve become accustomed to spoiled-by in team events: brilliant shots under the gun, weird decisions (by the losing Captain), embarrassing four-ball pace of play, a cringeworthy caddie display (not their fault), a former President adding to the first tee buzz, an LPGA display of logistics ineptitude for the ages leading to Friday morning’s funereal first tee, and, after a struggle to get stories straight about what went wrong, an apology from the LPGA Tour Commissioner.

But how is it that, with years to plan the event's logistics, they do this to their fans:

Emily Donohue and Maureen Conway flew in from Ireland earlier this week to watch the Solheim Cup, the crown jewel of the LPGA. They arrived at the Jiffy Lube Live parking lot at 6:45 a.m., keen to spend the morning on a raucous first tee at the Robert Trent Jones Golf Club. Unfortunately, they didn’t make it through the gates until 9:15 a.m. The father and daughter who were standing in line in front of them left after waiting for 30 minutes. An untold number of fans turned around, never to return, after hearing that wait times for the shuttle buses were two to three hours.

The first tee at the Solheim Cup on Friday morning, which seats 2,000 this year, was a shell of what it has been for decades. It’s arguably the best place to be in women’s golf all season. But not this time. The fans who’d waited for months, even years, to be part of what’s been billed as the biggest Solheim Cup ever, were left stranded in the parking lot.

To make matters worse, the porta potties in the parking lot were locked. And they paid for parking – $30. On top of the tickets, airfare, lodging and time away from work.

“People with disabilities, people with small children, it’s not fair on them,” said Donohue. “You want a big crowd here. I don’t know how they didn’t anticipate this.”

 And then the go to ground:

Transparency and accountability are paramount for a failure of this magnitude. LPGA commissioner Mollie Marcoux-Samaan should’ve met with the media on Friday and answered questions. She should’ve gone out to the parking lot and talked to fans, with water bottles and trinkets in hand. Maybe even shuttled a few back herself.

But the world requires leadership, so see how you think this putative leader performed:

LPGA commissioner Mollie Marcoux Samaan met with the media on Saturday morning and owned the transportation disaster that took place on opening day of the 19th Solheim Cup. Fans were stuck in the Jiffy Lube Live parking lot for hours on Friday, missing the first-tee experience and most of the morning foursomes session at Robert Trent Jones Golf Club.

“I don’t want to get into exactly who, the details of the responsibility,” she said when asked who was in charge. “At the end of the day, I’m the leader of the organization and I have to own it. We have a tournament team that runs all of this, but I’m sitting up here in front of you as the leader of the LPGA, and I need to own that.”

When pressed for specifics on how many buses were in circulation on Friday morning and how many were added for later in the day and Saturday, Marcoux Samaan said that was a “complicated question.”

So, if I understand you, you're only prepared to deal with easy questions?  Quite the admission against interest, although you have to love her parroting the therapeutic culture that tells her to "own it," of course only if there are no consequences.

Shall we3 check in with the Tour Confidential Gang?  Yeah, that was actually rhetorical....

The Americans reclaimed the Solheim Cup for the first time since 2017, beating Europe 15.5-12.5 on Sunday at Robert Trent Jones Golf Club in Virginia. What was the difference for the U.S. this time around?

Josh Berhow: The stars showed up. Back in 2019, Lexi and Danielle Kang (two of their top-three players) combined for 2 points. In 2021, that duo combined for 2.5 points. Last year, Rose Zhang only secured a half point, and Lilia Vu, who won two majors last season, earned just a point. This season? Zhang was 4-0! Lauren Coughlin, the hottest U.S. player entering the week, didn’t slow down, finishing 3–0–1 to secure 3.5 points. Throw in three points from Nelly Korda, whose only loss was to a dialed-in Charley Hull on Sunday, and that’s how you win on home soil.

Sean Zak: Sometimes, it’s as simple as what Josh says above. The best players on the U.S. showed up. An even more strict reading is that they simply held serve. They were the favorite, they have the best players, and they were playing at home. It’s never that simple, but the better team won. That’s not always the case.

Jonathan Wall: I concur with my colleagues. The big names showed up and put points on the board in bunches. The odds increase greatly in your favor when the big guns are firing on all cylinders. Thankfully for the Americans, it all came together this week.

You are supposed to be able to win your home games, so we shouldn't be all that shocked.

Who takes home MVP honors for each team?

Berhow: It’s easy to just pick the top point-earner… but I’m going to pick the top point-earner, especially since Rose Zhang went from earning just a half point last year to 4 this year. And Rose didn’t just win this week, she dominated — 3 and 2, 5 and 4, 6 and 4, and 6 and 4. She never played the final two holes this week, and three of her four matches didn’t make it past the 14th! I’ll give Hull the European MVP. She earned 3 points but, more importantly, took down Nelly Korda in the leadoff match of Sunday singles. If Europe was going to mount a comeback, that had to happen.

Zak: I’ll lean in Megan Khang’s direction for the American honors. She’s the lifeblood of the squad. She gets the best golf out of her bestie, Nelly Korda. She thumped Emily Pedersen in her singles match. And Berhow nailed the European honors. Charley Hull, playing five matches, did everything she could to squeeze out points for the team in blue. Man, she’s fun to watch play golf.

Wall: It has to be Rose Zhang. She continues to live up to the hype on the biggest stages. Team USA was always going to need their stars to step up when it mattered to break the Solheim Cup drought — and Zhang did so when it mattered most. She kept the possibility of an all-time Sunday comeback on ice.

Zhang or Khang for sure.  I thought the former was somewhat low-key (although I saw far more foursomes than fourball), but Khang's play Sunday with Nelly getting crushed in the match before hers seemed pretty important.

Whose performance were you most surprised by?

Berhow: Surprised might not be the right word, but Lauren Coughlin had a tough assignment this week. She won in each of the past two months and was playing what was essentially a home game, which only added pressure on top of lofty expectations. She delivered, and that’s not easy to do.

Zak: I think Esther Henseleit is the name to watch for 2025. She didn’t go undefeated and didn’t play five matches, but it felt like every time I saw her hit an approach, it was flagged. She never seemed to shy away from the moment, which you love to see from a rookie (and someone who was outside the top 100 in the world at the beginning of 2024). Add it to her silver medal from August, and this could be the summer that really launched a career.

Wall: I’ll go with the event organizers. With an event of this magnitude, you’d think every logistical scenario would have been discussed and analyzed before the opening tee shot on Friday. It was one of the biggest blunders I’ve ever seen.

I guess Jonathan Wall didn't get the memo that buses are complicated.  So judgmental!

Could European captain Suzann Pettersen have done anything differently? What changes or tweaks might you have made?

Berhow: I don’t think Leona Maguire was thrilled to play just twice after she was a key member of the last two Solheim Cups, but she also wasn’t great in an afternoon four-ball matchup on Friday, which led to her missing all of Saturday. Hard to second-guess too much here. Like I said before, the Americans’ best players did their jobs. And, as Rory McIlroy has told us, it’s really hard to win these team events on the road.

Zak: It’s funny. The majority of this European team was at last year’s Solheim Cup, where they won. So we’ve changed location and we’ve changed a few players and earned a slightly different result. What gives? Not much is the answer. I’m not sure she needed to do anything different. The Euros won 1.5 fewer points this year. That can come down to randomness.

Wall: I hate second-guessing the captains in the aftermath of defeat. They’re trying to make the best decisions at the moment, even if they seem like the wrong ones after the fact. As Josh mentioned, only trotting out Leona Maguire twice in three days is an odd one. She was a key cog in the last triumph for the Europeans and could’ve helped stop the bleeding when things went sideways during team play. Her comments on social media confirmed she wasn’t happy with the decision. I don’t blame her.

I didn't see that Friday afternoon fourball, but benching a player made for this event is more than a little strange.  Pettersen laid it on Leona's form, but the player got the last word:

Form is temporary, class is permanent
💪🏼🇪🇺 🦁 https://t.co/xRAYLx15mW

— Leona Maguire (@leona_maguire) September 15, 2024

And on busgate:

Friday’s first day was marred by transportation issues, which left hundreds of fans stranded for hours in the parking lot and forced them to miss the opening tee shots. What’s your take on the snafu and the LPGA’s reaction to it?

Berhow: We covered this extensively here, but it sounds like the weekend was much better. How this happens on the first tournament day of the LPGA’s biggest event of the year is still a head-scratcher, but I’m glad things were fixed for Saturday and Sunday and it wasn’t a storyline.

Zak: It’s really unfortunate. It made me really sad to see photos and videos stream across social media of thousands of people who wanted to watch women’s golf but couldn’t. Clearly, the LPGA made appropriate changes over the weekend, but you simply cannot make a mistake that big and kill one of the greatest vibes in all of golf: Friday morning on the 1st tee.

Wall: Before last week, the worst transportation debacle I ever witnessed was the 2012 PGA Championship at Kiawah Island. It took over two hours to go 10 miles on a media shuttle. Some tournament-goers got so frustrated, they decided to walk to their cars. The Solheim Cup debacle was on another level. How the LPGA allowed things to go from bad to worse on Friday is baffling. I feel bad for everyone who showed up and waited in line for hours, only to watch the opening tee shots on their phone. That should never happen at an event of this magnitude.

Unfortunately, clicking through that link in Josh Berhow's answer above will just confirm that the LPGA is run by clowns:

Dethier: So — what on Earth happened? Was there some unexpected twist that organizers couldn’t have seen coming? Or was this just a big-time miscalculation?

Melton: It seems as though it was a pretty huge fumble on the part of the organizers — but the snafu isn’t a surprise for many who have been here throughout the week. After the opening ceremony yesterday there were similar troubles for folks trying to get back to their cars. If this were a course hosting a big-time event for the first time, it’d be a little easier to show some grace. But RTJ Golf Club has hosted events like this plenty of times (four Presidents Cups and one PGA Tour event). The playbook for success was there, it seems as though they just didn’t utilize it.

Are you shocked that there's gabling in Casablanca?  I would pair this with Jay Monahan's performance at that 2020 Players Championship, where he kept mumbling about how golf is played outdoors over 200 acres,  ignoring that fact that his fans are packed like sardines on buses and in grandstands.  There's a contempt obvious for the paying customers, it's just that the one tour can get away with far more than the other.

But my bottom line takeaway is that it's so awfully complicated.... I just don't see how we could have expected Mollie to think of buses.... 

Stop Me If You've Head This One Before - The only downside to the Solheim Cup is that it pushed the Irish Open onto Peacock, not a problem except for it being held at iconic Royal County Down.  I caught some early week coverage, but missed this rousing coda, which includes a delightful new idiom:

A cat amongst the pigeons. It’s a British idiom that just feels vivid. A person or thing brought in

and causing commotion or havoc. A menacing cat, the poor pigeons.

It was the phrase the Sky Sports broadcast invoked continuously Sunday afternoon as various players mounted a charge at Rory McIlroy, the Northern Irishman leading the Irish Open about an hour from where he was raised. There were a handful of cats — Daniel Brown, Matteo Manassero, Grant Forest, Bob MacInture — and thousands upon thousands of pigeons — the Irish faithful tracking their man.

McIlroy seemed to hold control of the tournament for the entirety of the weekend. When he birdied the first two holes Sunday, he created a three-shot lead. Shortly after making the turn, it was a two-shot lead. As the group of cats leveled off at six under par, it felt like it was only up to McIlroy to close it out in orderly fashion. But as can happen on the final day of golf tournaments, we were all focused on the wrong cats. No one seemed to be tracking Rasmus Hojgaard, playing two groups ahead of McIlroy.

It seems the error was more forgetting which pigeon was involved....

And, drumroll please, here was the defining moment:

McIlroy had matched Hojgaard with a birdie on the 16th, but three-putted from just 26 feet on the 17th. You could hear the groans from across the Atlantic, an all too familiar feeling for McIlroy fans, the putter letting down the rest of his game. After being in control of the tournament, he suddenly needed eagle on the par-5 18th just to make a playoff.

The three-putt is hard to ignore, evoking all sorts of memories from Pinehurst.  Although, given my frequent comments, perhaps this is actually the more critical bit:

With the majority of the tournament looking his way, McIlroy hit a 342-yard drive and a 190-yard 7-iron to just 10 feet — which he later called the two best shots of his week. Keen McIlroy fans will remember the epic drive and iron shot he played into the 17th green at the Old Course in the 2022 Open Championship. It came on the most famous hole at St. Andrews, the Road Hole, when he needed birdie the most. Those two shots were among the best of his week, given the moment. They, too, led to a very makeable putt when he needed it most. But like the 17th hole in 2022, McIlroy’s putt on 18 Sunday slid by the hole, leaving him and his caddie confused by the lack of break.

Obviously grammar is a low priority at Golf Magazine these days, but remind me who that unnamed caddie might be....   Are we supposed to be shocked that the childhood best friend, the one with no experience in golf until he landed this cushy gig, misread a putt?  He's there to keep Rory comfortable, not because he has any qualifications that would allow him to improve the player.  It's how Rory rolls, and those three-putts are just something that they'll have a laugh over in the bar later.

And we can eagerly anticipate which events Rory will cough up in 2025.....  Good times.

There's talk that Jon Rahm won something over the weekend, but do we really care?  Blogging schedule is to be determined, so check back early and often.  Most importantly, have a good week.