Weekend Wrap - Clean Up On Aisle Six Edition

With the Wednesday Game™ moved to the afternoon, we have time to ponder last weekend's excitement....  I mean, if you can stand it.

The Secret Sauce - I continue to believe that the Euros have perpetuated a multi-decade long con that has tied the Yanks up in knots, though I'll spare you that Usual Suspects reference.  But let's see what Luke has to offer up here:

After Europe’s Ryder Cup victory, Luke Donald revealed his secret

Plastics?  Rosebud?

After captaining Europe to a convincing win in Rome in 2023, Donald again pressed all the right buttons at Bethpage to become the fifth European captain to win on foreign soil. As the European celebration commenced, Donald’s team spoke about his attention to detail, which included changing the shampoo at the hotel, getting new bedding and covering cracks in the doors so his team could get better sleep and recover better.

“I really have committed myself to this job because I feel I owe it to the players and I owe it to the Ryder Cup, which has been so special to me. I’ve had so many incredible experiences,” Donald said on Sunday. “So yeah, I’ve had to kind of put my own game a little bit to the side, and every day I’m trying to think about things that could help us, come up with different things that might just give us a little edge.

“My job is literally to give these guys a better chance to win. It can be as simple as some very small things.” 

Hogan thought the secret was in the dirt, Luke seems to be going with the lavender shampoo....

That sound you hear is my eyeballs bugging out, though here Luke makes an argument that reminds me of the arguments for broken window policing:

Donald’s secret wasn’t in analytics or Le Labo shampoo, but in his understanding that his job as captain was to provide his world-class players with the belief that they could etch themselves into history. When you fuel the world’s best with unbridled confidence, the rest often takes care of itself.

“Well, our theme was we were trying to win for a fifth time away,” Donald said. “We talked about it at the beginning of the week. The practice shirts were based off the wins we had already had away: ’87, ’95, ’04, 2012. Everything we did was sort of centered around that, and to make the guys feel that we had done it quite often. In ten Ryder Cups since ’83, we had won four of them and we had come damn close three other times. This wasn’t an impossible task. We knew it was going to be difficult. We wanted to inspire them to know it could be done.

“My job, again, is to give them the reasons to make them believe that they can win.”

It appears that the only ones unconvinced that the Euros could win were the opposition....  Who played like it for two full days.

I'm quite confident that our Task Force will be all over the personal hygiene products for Adare Manor, with no need to revisit those pesky foursomes pairings....

This is an interesting take:

'The Badge and The Boys': Europe's Ryder Cup inspiration comes from within

Although hailing from different countries, the European's commitment to one another sets them apart

Over to JR:

The 45-year-old Rose was brilliant on the greens all week at Bethpage, leading all 24 players in strokes gained/putting, and my colleague Luke Kerr-Dineen asked him why. Rose shrugged and said he couldn’t explain it.

“I wish I knew,” he said, with a celebratory beer resting next to his microphone. “I wish I could be a bit more selfish and know that 25 weeks of the year. But do you know what I feel like the power of this [pointing at his teammates], the power of the group, who knows what it is, that ability to lock in, the ability to just want it that little bit more.”

Then he paused.

“But the answer to your question is I don't know, other than the badge and the boys, honestly. That's all that matters, honestly, the badge and the boys.”

Compare and contrast:

It struck me for the first time on Monday. Keegan Bradley led his U.S. team through the tunnel to

the first tee, without their clubs, to soak up a moment together. They listened to the national anthem performed incredibly by New York City firefighter Bryan Robinson, and heard the moving words of Chris Mascali, a fire lieutenant who lost his father on 9/11.

The only time you’ll hear the European anthem—”Ode To Joy”, before you ask—is at the opening ceremony. Ask the 12 players on Team Europe to name the anthem and I doubt the majority would know.

After watching Bradley and his team on the first tee that morning, I realized that the Americans were seeking to draw inspiration from the identity of their country. It may seem extremely obvious, but I think it’s prescient to what I would realize on Sunday night.

The U.S. team feels the need to represent their country while the European team seeks to draw inspiration only from those who have played before them. They don’t seem to be interested in playing for a country. They play for each other. They seem inwardly rather than outwardly motivated. As much as the Euros represent their continent, and wear their flag, they ultimately feel a responsibility to those who built Team Europe.

Every two years, everyone in golf attempts to quantify why the European team, underdogs on paper, seem to have success in this unique format of team golf. Rose, himself, was asked about it in Rome.

“We are united by a culture and we are united by a generation of players that have come before us.” he told us on the back of a five-point European victory. “This is our time. Luke has been very clear on that message, this is our time to shine, not because this is our stage, we are just taking care of it because of the amazing role models that we've had before us that have shown us how to do it.”

There’s no reference to Europe or a shared sense of responsibility to represent a country or continent.

“There's a really strong culture on the European Team. A good pairing on the European Team doesn't mean playing with your best mate. You know, it means representing something bigger than yourself, and I feel like that's, for me, what being a European Ryder Cup player is all about.”

Well, yanno, they are from different countries, so it's going to be hard to mask that.  

But perhaps the differences are in leadership..... Because, there was this from that first linked piece:

Donald was not the initial European captain for the 2023 Ryder Cup in Rome. That was Henrik Stenson, who was stripped of his captaincy after leaving to join LIV Golf. The post went to Donald on short notice. He aced his first Cup and backed it up by leading Europe to a resounding victory on American soil. Perhaps the Europeans should send a gift basket to LIV Golf.

Do we think he wanted to step into that mess?  Do we thin Luke wanted to be the guy they turned to when no one else would take the gig?  I'm sure he was completely upset at having been passed over and thinking he'd never get a shot, but he sucked it up and did what was needed.

Contrast that with the U.S., who also lost an a*****e slotted for the captaincy when he selfishly took the easy money from LIV.  That put another guy, the hero of all American players, in the spotlight as the next man up.  His answer, as you might have gleaned, was quite different than Luke's, and would submit that that very difference tells us all we need to know about the U.S. Ryder Cup effort.

To make it blindingly obvious if you're not following.  Luke Donald was sweating bath soaps and thread counts, whereas Tiger was on his couch in Jupiter playing Call Of Duty.  Do we need to say anything more?

Resurrection - It's 2014 all over again, though with one rather large difference, that being the venue for their comeback.  Let's see how this feels:

Ryder Cup 2025: U.S. team broke itself with the Keegan Bradley debacle, but the fix is easier than it seems

Tom Watson in '27?  I mean, what could go wrong?

To me, the piece starts with a discrediting howler:

Following Europe's Ryder Cup 15-13 victory at Bethpage Black, there are people who will point

to the strong European play on Friday and Saturday as an explanation for how the U.S. was humbled on its own soil, ending the decade-long era of the home blowout. American captain Keegan Bradley is one of them. On Saturday night, facing the worst second-day deficit in modern Cup history, he lamented Europe's mind-boggling putting performance. It serves his interest to push that narrative, since any focus on their play distracts from the failures of his captaincy, but he's not wrong. Europe did play exceptionally well in tough circumstances, and Luke Donald's team deserves a mountain of credit.

Unfortunately, there is a glaring problem with relying on this explanation to the exclusion of the systems behind the performance. There is a reason Europe held a seven-point lead going into singles, just as there's a reason that when the captains' influence waned on Sunday, the tide reversed to such a shocking degree that it almost bailed Bradley out. (Ironically, coming up just short had the effect of accentuating his mistakes; more on that below.) It's not because the Europeans have better players than the Americans—statistics alone can tell you as much. There is luck and variance in such a brief format, but the fact is that the Europeans built an institutional advantage that gave them an edge in the pairs sessions before the first ball was even struck. On the occasions when America has succeeded in this century—just three times, in 2008, 2016 and 2021—it's because they successfully counteracted Europe on that institutional front, built a well-oiled organization and came prepared to execute an informed plan.

But after the Rome blowout of 2023, instead of viewing the result as an unlucky confluence of player illness, normal road woes and a red-hot opponent—in other words, a blip in an otherwise successful U.S. reboot beginning with the task force—they gave up the progress they had made and returned to the randomness and hope of the Ted Bishop/Tom Watson debacle. And just as in 2014, they faced a European team that, far from retreating to complacency after its spoils, stood on the shoulders of its own successful decades-long template to reach the next stage of evolution and crack the code of how to prepare a team for a road Ryder Cup.

That reboot crashed and burned in Paris and Rome, so the real strategic error seems to have been the over-interpreting of those home game wins.

Seriously, you cough up a home game at Medinah and get crushed on the road in 2014, so you tear it to the ground and rebuild based upon hot gas from Phil.  To me, there's an obvious test of the Task Force, and it wasn't about holding serve.  I cringed at the triumphalism at Hazeltine, and my challenge was to see which side could break through on the road.  We have our answer.

So, how did they get there?

Any person with any power who believes that this result can be explained exclusively by what happened on the course—"the Europeans just played/putted better"—is unconsciously perpetuating a broken ideology, and extending the time it will take to mop up an unholy mess.

In the summer of 2024, Bradley was selected as the next captain of the American Ryder Cup team. It had been a decade since he played in a Ryder Cup, he had never served as a vice captain and there was every chance that he could qualify as a player ... or, worse, he could be a borderline captain's pick and have to decide whether to take himself. In a post debating whether this was a smart decision or not, I pointed out these red flags and further wondered how such an important decision could be made with such seeming randomness in a single phone call, based mostly on sympathy engendered from segments in “Full Swing,” and so far outside the considered philosophy they had tried to build after Gleneagles. In other words, how were we going rogue again, just a decade after the Watson debacle? I don't consider myself especially prescient to have noticed these potential pitfalls—they were obvious. And they all came true.

Bradley seems like a smart person. He seems to have taken the job seriously, and he certainly cares deeply. He seems to be liked by his players. He made a noble sacrifice by not picking himself for the team, even though that scenario—that the only way he could fail to make the team was by being thrust into the position of captain—was an absurdity born of a sequence of poor decisions.

And, yet, CTRL-F: Tiger yields zero results.

Shane Ryan is spot on, the PGA of America had no bench and no plan after Tiger spurned them, but I'm dying for someone to ask Justin Thomas the most obvious of questions.  If the fortunes of the Euro team can be affected by the aroma of the bath soap, what is the effect of America's alpha dog needing the wash his hair the week of the Ryder Cup?

The problem with Bradley is that he was put into a position to fail. He was not ready for this job. He could have been a tremendous captain in a decade, but with Donald returning with nearly his entire team from Rome, it's evident in hindsight that he had no chance. Even in his famous locker room speech after last year’s Presidents Cup, when he guaranteed victory and declared that "they're gonna doubt me ... I've been doubted my whole f---ing life ... that's when I do my best work," you could see him operating on the wrong theoretical principles. He thought winning the Ryder Cup was about his own will, his own energy, and not about the complex network that success requires. He was the mythical John Henry, if John Henry was unaware of the machine. Compare that to Donald's cool, almost corporate approach, it was volatile behavior, and you have to pity Bradley for his ignorance. Looking back, he was a determined, eager zealot, running headfirst into a brick wall.

He was put in a position to fail. In turn, once the Cup began, he put his players in a position to fail. He managed to find the statistically worst possible U.S. foursomes pairing, put them out in the opening session, and then, when they were blown out, he committed the unthinkable blunder of sending them out again a day later, to similar results. He had teams like Henley and Scheffler teeing off on the wrong holes, which he had to correct a day later. He sat some of his best players Friday morning because they were rookies, inadvertently putting them under even greater pressure when they had to play their first match trailing 3-1.

These may all sound like small problems, but they are tip-of-the-iceberg warnings that hint at darker trouble beneath. If you'll tolerate an analogy, you've probably heard the story of big musical acts that include strange items deep in the pages of their rider—the list of requirements from the venue—with the quintessential example being something like "a glass bowl full of only yellow M&Ms." This seems like diva behavior on the surface, but the reality is that it's a test of how well a venue's staff has prepared for their show—how good is their attention to detail? If they walk in and see a glass bowl of yellow M&Ms, they can feel assured that the more important things have been properly attended to.

I have been unable to confirm the color of the Euros M&Ms, but does Shane think the pairings were any better in Paris or Rome?

But Shane is smoking something here, and I can only hope he brought enough to share:

But then I remembered a conversation I had with Davis Love III after Whistling Straits, when the Americans defeated the Europeans by the historic margin of 19-9. Love had been one of the architects of the task force and the American rebirth and was directly responsible for the 2016 win at Hazeltine as captain, and as vice captain five years later. When we spoke a few months later, he mentioned how they were trying to keep getting better on an organizational level. How, I wondered, was that even possible after such a massive victory? Here's what I wrote then:

His response incorporated elements like food and transportation that were so granular they'd be too boring to recount here—at one point, it got down to what kind of water Dustin Johnson drinks—but that have a big impact on the players' experience and will be improved in the future. Susan Martin, a manager at the PGA of America who works closely with all the captains and teams, has already sent out a questionnaire to everyone involved with the Ryder Cup to identify other areas of improvement. If they've come so far as managers and planners that they're thinking in great depth about the food and the cars, it seems clear that absolutely no stone is being left unturned. And coupled with the quality of the players, it's a disheartening prospect for their enemies; it's America unleashed.

It's incredible to read how optimistic that sounds, to remember how competent the Love and Stricker captaincies were, and to remind ourselves that it wasn't that long ago. At that point, the Americans had responded brilliantly to the European dominance of the early aughts by learning from their opponents, building on the lessons of Azinger's revolutionary captaincy in '08, forming a task force that identified the key problems and solutions of their failures, and creating a system that could function as the bedrock of successful teams.

Shane, you ignorant slut!

Shane is capturing the zeitgeist perfectly, though not to his credit.  Shane, given that those "competent Love and Stricker" captaincies were followed by disastrous Furyk and Johnson captaincies, perhaps it was more illusory than you're considering.  Perhaps one can get away with things at home games, especially home games where Europe fields a weak team.  

And now his rousing coda:

But America as a Ryder Cup power is not dead. They had found the answer—more accurately, they had found the path—but they wandered off when they responded to a setback abroad by abandoning what they'd built. They courted disaster this cycle by naming a green captain and giving him too much power too soon, and disaster, ever dutiful, answered the call. Now they live in the days of humiliation.

And yet, America doesn't have to be a beaten dog. The answer is right there, in the recent past, and the men who can bear that message forward are ambassadors like Love, Stricker, and Furyk, and the next generation who served as vice captains this year and endured the failure. There is no dearth of talent in the U.S.—it's still the greatest golfing power on the planet—but the lesson of Bethpage is that a team sport like the Ryder Cup requires a coherent system, and not the vicissitudes of a lone operator. Bradley, unmoored, was destined to fail. Those who come next are not bound to the same fate.

Shane, when was the last time the U.S. was competitive on the road?  It's been a long time, the further issue being that in their recent road losses, when the going got tough, the U.S. players turned on each other.  

Let's wait to declare victory until they win or at least make a good showing at an away game.  Let's face it, the next one will be lit.  Not only do the Yanks need to show something, but that guy from Jupiter will expect to be a hero captain.  We'll see how that one plays out....

Grades - Everyone and anyone is offering grades, beginning with Shack's Champions:

Europe Just Gets It, Again. Ryder Cup fans are reminded every two years how the Europeans devote incredible amounts of time, money and resources to bind their team around a single cause, to position them to succeed, and use social media capture every move in a world where players thrive off of a certain kind of attend that only the European Tour Group can create. Win or lose, Europe rarely never gets much wrong—other than their highest-bidder venue embarrassment sticking the matches at way too many converted farm fields. The Euros learn from the past but always move forward by passing along or building upon a shared wisdom. They’ve made the Ryder Cup into the ultimate career milestone for millions of golfers. They wear dress shoes to gala dinners. And in making their efforts on and off the course so consistently good, they’re now all too regularly beating the United States. Then again, they’ve got a 400 million population advantage, a multi-century head start, and golf started on their continent, so they should be beating the United States.

In the matter of Luke Donald v. Tiger Woods, it's the Badge and the Boys in a rout.

I did figure this guy would matter:

Shane Lowry. While 1-0-2 hardly screams “MVP” status, the moody one and his streamlined physique relished pushing back at hecklers who launched horrible stuff his way, including Ozempic jokes despite his fitness driven weight loss. More remarkable was Lowry’s work with Rory McIlroy in four-balls and the Sunday Singles the capper: a birdie at the last to tie Russell Henley and secure retention of the Cup as Europe looked to be sinking under the weight of a USA surge. Lowry pulled off the halve all while scoreboard watching and obsessing over the Ryder Cup coming down to his match. Lesser men might have folded. “It was, yeah, like the worst two hours of my life. It was horrible. It was. But I said to my caddie walking down 18, ‘I’ve got an opportunity to do the greatest thing I’ve ever done today,’ and I did it. And I’m very proud of myself.”

And who would you rather have a beer with, Lowry or Cantlay?

He didn't actually play all that well,  but he did seem to get the one important thing:

Justin Thomas. No American demonstrated true sportsmanship or used his stature better than

Thomas while still competing against McIlroy. Even as his Captain went with all both-sideism on the fan rudeness issue and was rarely seen admonishing the crude attempts at interfering with play, Thomas attempted to manage crowd noise during Saturday afternoon’s four-ball match. Thomas showed visible disdain when repeatedly having to ask for quiet but he likely prevented Saturday’s harassment from veering into a NATO situation. Thomas demonstrated what genuine “veteran” status and match play experience means in a Ryder Cup. Even better: he lost none of his competitive edge battling McIlroy and Lowry to a huge halve before dramatically stopping Fleetwood in Sunday singles.

With Cam Young, he also provided the high point for the Yanks with those dramatic swings on the final green.

This Golf Digest piece is obviously grading on the curve:

Tommy Fleetwood (4-1-0): A+

If this were only about the pairs sessions, you could add about 10 plus signs to his grad above,

and there aren't enough superlatives to crown him. Was he the best player by strokes gained, by far? Yes. Was he the only player who went 4-0 in pairs? Yes. Is he a golden Ryder Cup god who should have a statue of himself built in every town in England? Probably, yeah. But none of that gets at what it feels like to watch him, when he sticks almost every iron devastatingly close and buries long putts on the few occasions when he leaves himself more than five feet. Even the man's body language with his teammates is beyond reproach; he looks like the best guy in the world to pair with, and along with stellar play, he brings so much positive energy to the team. He's a superstar, and even the narrow loss to Justin Thomas on Sunday (and the missed chance to go 5-0), can't undo his place as the best player at Bethpage.

He had a great week,  but to me that 4-1 is really 2-1, giving him one-half point for each team win.  I don't think you can lose your singles match and get an A+. 

Amusingly, Tommy had that same record in Paris, winning all four team matches with Francisco Molinari, but losing Sunday.  This pattern has become ubiquitous, as the Euros ride their alpha dogs hard in the team sessions, but the risk is that they're gassed by Sunday.

Let's get to some more nuanced takes, including these mid-tier ranking from Geoff:

Bethpage Pink. The state-owned public course made history by becoming the seventh venue to host a U.S. Open, a PGA Championship, and a Ryder Cup. And from its (too?) healthy turfgrass, to the native roughs, to the trimmed trees, the property is looking swell. The Rees Jonesification of the Black’s bunkers remains ghastly to look at in all hours, particularly now that blinding country club sand added for the Ryder Cup produced an alarming number of fried eggs. The course started the week somewhat soft despite all the additional sunlight hitting the turf, thanks to tree trimming or losses since 2019. Rain then softened it up (even though Captain Bradley said it didn’t rain!?). It was staggering to see how pitifully short it played thanks to the change in driving distances and technology since the 2019 PGA. Several holes are complete pushovers with or without high rough. Unless equipment rules are more drastically altered for the professional game beyond the 2028 changes, they might just keep the Warning sign in storage. Good thing the PGA of America sees this and is strongly supporting the new 2028 testing rules.

Setup. When it was apparent the Europeans would bring more bombers to this Ryder Cup—how did the USA’s braintrust miss this?—the USA’s traditional light rough approach backfired. It was designed to reward its freeswingers, but the Europeans were the ones who seemed ecstatic and made some cocky comments about the rough being a better place to be than some fairways. After Sunday play, Keegan Bradley said he regretted the setup and suggested he should have listened a little bit more to his “intuition.” But Bradley never indicated what would have made a difference other than regretting the softness and speed of Bethpage’s greens that his players missed in some key moments with short irons and appeared to overread. The Europeans spent two long days getting to know them and made more key putts. “The Europeans played just incredible golf,” Bradley said. “Doesn’t matter how you set the course up when you play that well.”

It was always a strange choice by the PGA of America.  Not only was it in conflict with the articulated set-up strategy, combined with an unseemly embrace of the crowd misbehavior that we experienced.

But, Geoff, how did you not save this for your coming "Loser" category?

Captaincy Selection Committee. The “younger” mantra came up repeatedly during Keegan Bradley’s surprise unveiling after a unanimous decision. Oh, he Captained like a young man who’d played two Ryder Cups. Everything else about the rationale behind Bradley’s selection and the future looks pretty bleak. Tiger Woods could take the job before but does he want to report to the PGA of America’s smother brothers, Don Rea and Derek Sprague? No chance. The committee added Jordan Spieth and Justin Thomas before the Rome loss and were joined by former Captain Zach Johnson, then-PGA VP Rea, then-President John Lindert, and then-CEO Seth Waugh. “A lot of them were asking questions to me and Justin,” Spieth said at the time. “The cool part about it was the questions they asked of us, and we were blatantly honest, from clothes we were wearing to ceremonies to how many dinners we’re doing, what kind of recovery tools and methods we had and access to that. It was a good start.” Curious, did a basic understanding of what attributes work in foursomes happen to come up? Asking for a nation.

And another category error that makes me curious what he's held back:

Americans And Foursomes. The analytics told Keegan Bradley that America holds a 16-8 foursomes record over the last three domestic Ryder Cups. So he kept alternate shot as the opening session format and swatted away questions from writers who remember some of America’s glummest faces occurring during a format our boys hate. As with all things match play and stats, the numbers apparently did not highlight another vulnerability: only one duo responsible for some of those 16 foursomes points could be reunited at Bethpage (Schauffele/Cantlay). Then there was no word of Bradley prepping the rookies in alternate shot work at the team combine in Napa. But I’m sure they had some dynamite Cabs. Last year’s Presidents Cup success in foursomes apparently inspired the first of Bradley’s poor decisions to open with alternate shot at Bethpage and wheel out Scottie Scheffler and Russell Henley twice. Luke Donald must have been over the moon when Bradley kept the foursomes-first order in place. You know, the same format that was vital to Europe conquering Rome…in 2023. Bradley apparently forgot what an awkward format it can be on a Ryder Cup stage where everything speeds up and routine-reliant world-class golfers can feel out of place. The USA would have been better off starting off with Four-balls to let eight of the rugged individualists play their own ball while giving the Captain a sense of who was in form. Last year’s Presidents Cup started with Four-ball on Thursday and again for Saturday’s two-session day. The USA started 5-0 under Jim Furyk, a 2025 Ryder Cup Vice Captain, then were swept by the Internationals in foursomes on Friday. The warning signs were there. Bradley whiffed.

If we're going to criticize foursomes pairing, how does Morikawa-English not get a call-out?  Henley is the third ranked player in the world, so it's hard to criticize Bradley for riding with him.  Riding with the 132nd ranked foursomes pairing on the other hand....

Eyeing the exit, this Golf.com grading piece had these to mull over:

The Captains

Keegan Bradley, Grade: C

Bradley poured his heart into this, but you don’t get A’s for effort. Give him credit for his energy and positivity — and for rallying his troops for a Sunday run — but some of his decisions will be picked apart for years to come, from the benign course setup to his stubborn insistence on sticking with pairings that showed no signs of life. Perversely, Bradley’s widely praised and selfless decision — opting not to put himself in the lineup — may wind up being recast in hindsight as a move that actually hurt the team.

Luke Donald, Grade: A

If he made any wrong moves, he hid them well. In his second consecutive turn as captain, Donald was a picture of poise and certitude, the outgrowths of confidence and painstaking preparation. At this point, he’s become like the brainiac in class you want to hate for getting everything right, except you can’t because he’s just too pleasant and respectful.

The Fans

Grade: D-

If you’re going to be loud and abusive, at least be creative, and pipe down when the guy steps up to the ball. It isn’t difficult to be an ardent fan without acting moronic. Too many at Bethpage failed to find that easy balance this week.

The Venue

Grade: B-

Bethpage Black is a beauty. It can also be a beast. But this week it was defanged, stripped of rough to 1) theoretically give the U.S. a competitive advantage while 2) producing excitement-sparking birdies. But birdies aren’t what make match-play exciting; pressure-packed moments are what make it so, which has nothing to do with scores relative to par. On a neutered course, the competition became more bomb-and-gouge than artful struggle, and less compelling than it could have been.

I actually wished they gave the PGA of America a grade, because all three of those failures happened on their watch.

I don't know how you give the fans a D- when they did exactly what the organizers wanted.  

That same Golf Digest piece that gave Tommy Lad an A+ seemed to be a little tougher on this guy:

Cameron Young (3-1-0): A

Man, did this guy deliver. Young fniished as one of only two Americans with three points, and he ended as the top American statistically too, gaining 5.06 strokes, second only to Tommy Fleetwood among all players. There was theoretically the most pressure on him, being the only native New Yorker on the team, but he rose to the occasion marvelously and more than rewarded Keegan Bradley's faith in him as a captain's pick. Even as the U.S. team went down in flames, he was the bright spot (read here for my full thoughts on Young's performance), and though a less-than-stellar Saturday afternoon session keeps him from an A+, overall he gets great marks in his rookie Ryder Cup.

So a so-so Saturday afternoon keeps him from that plus, but a so-so Sunday afternoon doesn't affect Tommy?

What a week for Cam, and one assumes he has effectively punched his ticket to Ireland.

That's it for today.  I'll probably take the rest of the week, though I promise to jump on Geoff's final grading post when it is available.  have a great weekend.