Midweek Musings - Impregnable Quadrilateral Edition

 There's essentially nothing to blog so, shall we dive in?

I Didn't Get It Anything - In case you were scratching your chin over that sub-head, Geoff has fired up the Wayback Maching:

Happy Belated 95th, Impregnable Quadrilateral

Ryder Cup weekend marked 95 years since Bobby Jones clinched the "Grand Slam" consisting of the U.S. Open, U.S. Amateur, The Open and The Amateur.

And he even works in a Denny's call-out:

As USA’s team fell seven points behind and Don Rea closed Saturday out by rap-karaokeing to poor souls who just wanted to watch college football in peace, an important anniversary was lost in the Ryder Cup hullabaloo.

Saturday, September 27, 2025, marked 95 years since the day Bobby Jones sealed the “impregnable quadrilateral” after winning the U.S. Amateur.

His fifth U.S. Amateur victory and second at Merion culminated the 1930 season, where Jones also captured The Amateur, The Open, and the United States Open. George Trevor, a New York Sun writer, invoked “quadrilateral “in describing the potential feat and again after Jones pulled off the impossible.

“Atlanta’s first citizen, like Napoleon before him, has stormed the supposedly impregnable ‘quadrilateral.’”

When Jones defeated Eugene Homans 8&7 at Merion’s 11th green, O.B. Keeler invoked a bridge term that gave the sports world a simpler label: “Grand Slam.” Tennis adopted the term around 1936. Baseball started using grand slam around 1940. And Denny’s began using grand slam in 1977 to describe a signature breakfast option.

Geoff has some literary citations (as well as newspaper front pages), though I would refer you to Mark Frost's treatment, called the far simpler Grand Slam.

Keeler also invoked Trevor’s creation to describe the feat: “This victory, the fourth major title in the same season and in the space of four months, had now and for all time entrenched Bobby Jones safely within the ‘Impregnable Quadrilateral of Golf,’ that granite fortress that he alone could take by escalade, and that others may attack in vain, forever.”

In one of Grantland Rice’s final pieces for Sports Illustrated, he used both phrases while writing about Jones’ final career highlights.

“Jones beat Espinosa in the play-off by more than 20 strokes. The next year he won the Grand Slam. In the wake of that putt he went on his way to one record that may never be equaled. For, as George Trevor put it, “he stormed the impregnable quadrilateral of golf.”

In honor of the impregnable quadrilateral’s birthday—and since we could also use a cleansing following this year’s Ryder Cup—I cracked open The Greatest of Them All (Davis, et. al), Bobby: The Life and Times of Bobby Jones (Matthew), and Golf is My Game (Jones), to soak up random anecdotes surrounding the greatest single year accomplishment in competitive golf history. Enjoy!

And those papers:

And, because we aim to inform, we include this AI-generated definition:

A diadem is a jeweled ornamental headband, or a small crown, worn as a symbol of royalty, power, and distinction. The word comes from the ancient Greek diadēma, which originally referred to a cloth band tied around the head to signify authority. It can also refer to the ornaments or jewels on a crown, or, figuratively, to empire and supreme power.

How do we think that guy would have reacted to the last few years in golf?  I can't see him being on board with Signature Events and the like....

Ryder Cup Detritus, Cont'd. - I've been reliably informed that there's no such thing as bad PR.  To which the PGA of America says, "Hold My Beer".  First, Mike Bamberger, in his conscience of the game persona:

The Bethpage Ryder Cup has lingered for all the wrong reasons

Which would be fine if they still had editors:

The best golf events linger in our minds for all the right reasons. Tom Watson at Turnberry in the hot summer of ’77, Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love” on car radios all over the world. Big Jack,

Augusta, ’86, as he turned back time. Faldo-Norman, a decade later, a study in sportsmanship. Tiger’s 15-shot win at the Open at St. Andrews, in 2000, a study in superiority. The Presidents Cup in South Africa in 2003, the one that ended in a tie at nightfall. Great Moments in Golf.

And then there is this most recent Ryder Cup: Bethpage ’25, lingering for all the wrong reasons.

Tom Watson, as a former American Ryder Cup player (four times) and captain (twice), feeling compelled to apologize to the Europeans, our guests, even though he had no direct connection to this year’s event. “I am ashamed of what happened,” Watson said.

Weird lede for sure.  Faldo-Norman had to be one of the most surreal days in our little game's history, not one I'd put on Mt. Rushmore.  More to the point, Tiger won by 15 at Pebble, not the Old Course, and that Prez Cup where they changed the rules at the last minute isn't exactly Nicklaus-Jacklin.

This is far from his best piece, but he touches on an aspect I only heard through our head professional:

The profane chants by American fans, on the first tee and through the course. A beer tossed (or knocked) in the direction of Rory McIlroy’s wife, Erica. The blanket of litter on this gorgeous public course, part of a vast state park, as litter bins were overloaded and then some. In that, the Ryder Cup brought to mind the New York City sanitation workers strike in 1968. I can recall the mountains of trash in front of my grandparents’ apartment building on the Upper West Side that winter.

I understand that there was garbage everywhere, making Farmingdale look like a third-world country.  Remember our discussion of Occam's Razor?  never assign to malice what can more readily be explained by incompetence. The PGA of America and the State Park Authority were all over all day beer sales, they just seem to not have made it to the sanitation portion of their To-Do list.

“As a native New Yorker, I feel like I should apologize for what you endured,” I told Rory McIlroy Sunday night. I was actually relieved the Europeans won. The stunning American reversal in Sunday’s singles turned what could have been a European blowout win to a bugs-on-your-skin nailbiter and a 15-13 final tally. The right team won. An American victory would have been a reward for boorish American behavior. It would have encouraged more of the same.

“That’s OK — it’s all good,” McIlroy said. His white team shirt was soaked with sprayed Champagne. I first met McIlroy when he was 19. You’re tempted to say you knew then that he was destined for this big life but a career in golf guarantees nothing. “Anyway,” McIlroy said, “you live in Philadelphia now.”

Because, you know, nothing like this could ever happen in Philadelphia.

The PGA of America is coming to Philadelphia in nine months for its next international golf event, the 2026 PGA Championship at Aronimink, a stately club on Philadelphia’s Main Line (and 10 miles from a new Tiger Woods learning center at Cobbs Creek, a public course in the city limits). This here-before-you-know-it PGA Championship will provide the PGA of America with a chance to trot out all manner of new-and-improved.

A very different event with a very different vibe or, perhaps more accurately, no vibe whatsoever.  There will be no issues in a stroke play event, so I really don't know what he's nattering on about here.

Mike throws out some nuggets of interest, but seems not to appreciate the totality:

Ryder Cups are always intense, in their build-up, in their play, in their aftermaths. In a pre-event press conference, Collin Morikawa, a mild-mannered Californian, said this: “I’ll be honest, I think it’s kind of tame so far. I hope Friday is just absolute chaos. I’m all for it. I think it feeds into who we are, as American players and the American team. We want it. We want to use that to our advantage.”

No. No, no, no, no, no.

Morikawa is a bright young man who knows that words matter. You could say that golf does chaos well, inside the ropes on Sunday afternoons when leaderboards are tight and mistakes kill. Most players are freaking. The greatness of Jack Nicklaus and Tiger Woods was how still and focused they became when things were going haywire for the other guys. Heightened fan interest stems from this tingly intensity, this particular inside-the-ropes chaos.

Does Collin know that words matter?  Fair play, so when he tells us that he owes us nothing, we should take him at his word?

At Bethpage, all 12 American players and their caddies, the captain and his five assistants, plus other team personnel in uniform, could have done way more to silence the hooligans. You raise your arms. You point to the troublemakers. You have a policy by which they are thrown out after their first offense, not just escorted elsewhere. The PGA of America could have had many more crowd-control officers among the fans. It could offer some kind of pep talk on the way in, Austin Powers reciting “Oh, be-have” on an endless reel, something like that.

The PGA of America and the American team got exactly what they wanted.  They just didn't want us to understand that this is what they wanted....

They tell us it's the greatest event in golf, but can't be bothered with any proactive crowd control or even having the garbage properly carted away.  I'm sorry, why would we expect them to be better at putting together foursomes pairings or even the golf thing.

Good news, kids, we have Eamon Lynch on the case as well:

Lynch: The Ryder Cup needs a new vision in the U.S., and new owners

 I expect there to be an impressive body count.

There are two places in golf where confidence often outpaces competence. One is the U.S. Ryder Cup team room, where the gospel of American exceptionalism is preached until the very last moment before it is drowned out by the chants of European fans hailing another victory. The other is the headquarters of the PGA of America, long a wellspring of self-assured guff by a preening officer class, and which was so rudely exposed by the antics of the imbecilic slapnuts at Bethpage Black.

Postmortems on the 45th Ryder Cup will focus on the cadaver of Keegan Bradley’s squad. There’ll be revisionist criticism of his appointment as captain, second-guessing of his decisions in the field, head-shaking about the performance of his top players, belly-aching about the "envelope rule" that has been part of the captain’s contract since the ‘70s (now apparently an inappropriate gentlemen’s agreement in an era when gentlemen no longer agree).

As Eamon notes, we can't judge whether the event was a success until we know their objectives:

But the finger-pointing at the U.S. team should wait. More urgent criticism should be squarely

directed at the PGA of America for its shoddy mishandling of the event.

If the metric for a successful Ryder Cup is solely commercial, then Bethpage was cause for celebration at PGA headquarters since there were more sponsors than you’d see on a car doing laps at Talladega. Shy of selling access to premium portajohns, every dollar was expertly extracted from the week. If another standard of success is that it be a worthy shop window for the sport, or that competitors and spectators be safe and respected, then Bethpage was an ignominious embarrassment.

Last week, the PGA of America finally reaped what it sowed over 12 years since announcing Bethpage as the venue. This Ryder Cup was continuously marketed as the biggest, loudest, rowdiest ever, always carefully couched in language about the "energy" of the New York crowd. The organizers knew exactly what Bethpage "energy" is, and how ugly it can get. They saw it at the 2019 PGA Championship, and at the ’02 and ’09 U.S. Opens (the latter was tamer only because heavy rain doused the douches). Yet the messaging tacitly encouraged boorishness, in effect green-lighting the debacle we saw unfold.

Dousing the douches?  So good, although if e had read Mike's piece above, he might have gone with "Dousing the Dicks".

When fans predictably hurled invective (and beer) at players and their families, the PGA of America was slow to respond and impotent when they did. Security planning and enforcement were exposed as woefully inadequate. That put Europeans in the crosshairs and forced U.S. team members to police the gallery in a noble but futile effort to ensure fair play. By the time the first tee emcee was shown the door for leading a vulgar chant of “F—- you, Rory!”, it was painfully apparent that the Ryder Cup has far outgrown the PGA of America’s core competencies.

And what core competencies might those be?  Though I disagree slightly, in that they got exactly what they wanted, so isn't that actually a demonstration of a certain kind of competency?

The organization is interested in the Ryder Cup’s revenues but not in its responsibilities. The task force formed after the rancorous U.S. loss in 2014 was all about deferring to the players any matters that could involve public blowback, like choosing skippers, making captain’s picks, and actually winning the Cup. The appointment of Bradley was a change in direction — the buddy system borne of the task force didn’t deliver — but it was a 360-degree change, and returned the team back from whence it began.

The U.S. team still operates as it always has: prone to choosing "savior" captains who can rally the troops; reliant on performative theatrics, as though flag-waving and fist-pumping compensate for the absence of a battle plan; lacking the backroom support apparatus that has propelled Europe’s success for the past 30 years; and willfully negligent in applying learnings of what has and hasn’t worked into a proven playbook that’s portable from team to team.

Did someone mention a savior captain?  But I completely agree with Eamon that this all the through-line from 2014:

Bethpage ’25 was a sharp reminder for the slow learners of Gleneagles ’14.

Even the liquored boors at Bethpage could write the script for what will now follow — calls for Tiger Woods to lead the team to Ireland in two years, because who has more stature to turn things around? But the U.S. has had plenty of accomplished captains who commanded respect. What it needs is one with a vision for success and the chops to insist it be properly resourced. It needs its Tony Jacklin. If Bradley had a vision, he hasn’t articulated it. More importantly, the PGA of America never asked for it. He was offered the job without a single conversation about how he would execute it.

You'll anticipate where he's headed from his, errrr, header:

Last week laid bare the institutional weaknesses in how the Ryder Cup is administered on this shore of the Atlantic. One of golf’s prime assets was devalued by a garish spectacle of drunken abuse, and more of the same awaits if the PGA Championship goes back to Bethpage in 2033 as scheduled. It’s time the PGA of America forged a revenue-sharing deal with a partner better equipped to realize the potential of its championships, and use the generational wealth from that to fund its core trade association mission of supporting members.

Only two entities in golf have the cash reserves to make such an arrangement viable: the PGA Tour and LIV. Only one of them has a measure of organizational competence. The Tour’s new CEO, Brian Rolapp, is a deal maker and has billions of investment dollars to spend, but even he would struggle to dislodge the legions of snouts burrowed deep into the PGA of America’s trough. And such an acquisition would force an awkward reckoning for Rolapp on the Presidents Cup, the existence of which does nothing to aid the U.S. Ryder Cup effort, and could be credibly argued to undermine it.

The Ryder Cup is a shop window for the sport, and this one left a lousy impression for prospective customers. The best thing for its long-term future is to hang a sign: “Under New Management.”

The PGA of America has members?   Do they know?

Obviously the 1960's divorce that left the wrong PGA owning the professional events is hard to understand today.  That said, given the PGA Tour's initiatives the last few years, do we think they'd run a better event?

As unrealistic as it is, I'm just going to enjoy the immense pleasure at the thought of Don Rea marketing the Ryder Cup and PGA Championship to the Saudis.  Good times!

Did Someone Mention The Saudis? - I've had an unused Tour Confidential open for some three weeks now, and it'll work nicely with another Eamon Lynch piece.  Shall we?

Greg Norman officially announced his departure from LIV Golf, bringing an end to a four-year relationship (three as CEO) in which Norman helped the breakaway league come to life. What will Norman’s LIV legacy be?

Melton: He’ll be known for his steadfast commitment to getting the league off the ground. Was he the best CEO? Probably not. But he did an admirable job shepherding the league through its infancy, which counts for something.

Bastable: LIV didn’t only need billions of dollars to get off the ground — it also needed a brand-name pitchman to bring credibility to the league and sell the vision. When Jack and Tiger passed, Norman answered the bell. He never felt like a long-term solution for commish or CEO, but he deserves much credit for helping bring across the finish line many of LIV’s first wave of signees.

Dethier: I know he’s been in the background for a while now but I still can’t quite wrap my brain around the idea that Norman and LIV are just — done. In my mind LIV is Greg Norman. The league took on his personality; its players took the chip from his shoulder and put it on theirs. Again, I know this has been in the works for a very long time, but the idea of a Norman-less LIV is very, very strange. The league’s legacy will double as his. It’s not clear when that’ll be cemented.

Trying to get my arms around Dylan Dethier's answer, which couldn't be more at odds with my own perceptions.  To me Norman was never more than a lightning rod, never a factor on his own.  he did what his Saudi masters instructed, and he was a bit of a clown every time he opened his mouth.

As for his assurance that the LIVsters would get World Ranking points?  I'm still laughing over the concept of anyone believing the man.  Where have they been the last twenty-five years?

But such a subject demands the skillset of Eamon Lynch:

Lynch: Bless his heart! Greg Norman demands thanks for $5 billion bonfire of his vanity

Only $5 billion?  Those are rookie numbers....

A man with a messiah complex will always hoist himself upon the cross when faced with abject failure, so there are no surprises in published excerpts of Greg Norman’s non mea culpa interview

with Australian Golf Digest, which showcased his familiar brand of self-serving drivel that could have been scripted in advance by any toddler with ChatGPT access.

“It was hard. It was very draining on me. I was working 100-hour weeks,” he moaned about his tenure as CEO of LIV Golf, just in case anyone assumed torching billions of dollars is a part-time job.

The interview shows Norman warming to his favorite topic – himself, and wrongs perpetrated against him: “What hurt me the most was the lack of understanding of why people would judge me and give the abuse they did. That was the thing that bothered me the most, because I’m the type of guy who will happily sit down and talk about things. And if I’m wrong, I’ll admit I’m wrong. But don’t judge me. Don’t judge what LIV was truly all about.”

OK, Greggie, I'll bite, what was it all about?  seems it was about $5 billion large, though that's a moving target.

If you're wondering about that five bil:

LIV’s financials have again been laid bare in a report that detailed filings by the U.K.-based LIV Golf, Ltd, which runs the league’s activities outside the U.S. In 2024, it lost $590 million, bringing total losses for the entity to $1.4 billion in three years. That figure does not include losses incurred by LIV’s operations in the U.S. – home to half of its events and most of its high-cost hangers-on – or money set alight in 2025. Conservative estimates suggest the league has burned through well over $5 billion since 2022, and still shows no meaningful revenue or audience traction.

But Norman's self absorption is legendary:

“Mission accomplished,” Norman declared to his interviewer.

It’s like watching the embers of the Hindenburg tumble to earth while its designer loudly demands praise for having gotten it airborne and striking a match.

With a fourth, fruitless season behind it, LIV Golf is doing what it does this time every year: figuring out what players can be signed from the ranks of little-known rookies or the chronically injured; foraging for stops on its ’26 schedule, which often means poaching venues from the DP World Tour in an effort to bully that circuit into a partnership; fanning rumors about imminent announcements that either never materialize or don’t have any positive impact on its business; and negotiating with soon-to-expire talent it needs to keep on board to maintain the illusion of doubling down when it is merely buying time. All against a backdrop of staggering losses that are only accelerating.

Couldn't happen to a nice bunch of fellows, no?

I'll finish with this:

The sole face-saving hope that exists for LIV is a deal with the PGA Tour, which appears unlikely, or flipping the European circuit out of its strategic alliance with Ponte Vedra. The pressure must be mounting on LIV’s only benefactor, Yasir Al-Rumayyan. Even he must answer for expenditures that increasingly appear like lunacy. But in the fevered world of (past and present) LIV executives and their sycophantic scroungers, believing is seeing. Reality is what one wishes it to be.

But it's the Saudis that have reportedly walked away from the face-saving exit strategy, so what does Yasir do with this pig?  But, unlike Eamon, I don't blame his Great White Pilot Fish for the mess, because I never even considered that he mattered.

That'll be it for today and the week.  Have a great weekend as Fall finally arrives.

Weekend Wrap - Ryder Cup Detritus Edition

If you think we're slow to move on, consider the options.  There's no actual golf news to cover and we certainly won't be discussing baseball right now....

Leftovers - It so happens I'm not the only one slow to let go, as the Tour Confidential panel seems fixated as well:

In the days after Europe’s Ryder Cup victory at Bethpage Black, much of the conversation has focused on the fans, the heckling and the reaction to it, by players, golf legends, organizers and more. Is the Ryder Cup experience out of control? Or is some of this overblown?

Yes, next question. 

Jessica Marksbury: Loud and partisan crowds are what makes the Ryder Cup fun, but it sounds like this year things went over the top. The kind of vitriol that was reported is against the spirit of

the event — and the sport itself — and that’s a shame, because rowdy atmospheres can and should still be respectful. It’s what makes tournaments like the WM Phoenix Open so beloved. But there’s obviously a fine line there.

Sean Zak: Wouldn’t call it “out of control,” but rather “un-controlled.” Event organizers clearly did not have the proper protocols in place to manage for unrelenting verbal abuse. I think you saw that in their removing certain hecklers from certain pairings. I.e. it’s okay to take your absurd show to another part of the property, rather than expelling them period. I’m not going to act like it’s simple — but I think there wasn’t enough control, and we’d benefit to see more of it four years from now at Hazeltine.

Jack Hirsh: I think Rory McIlroy’s comments on Sunday night hit the nail on the head. Golf can hold itself to higher standard. The Ryder Cup and the Phoenix Open are the only tournaments of the year where you even hear boos on the course. How it could devolve so far for people to be calling McIlroy slurs and throwing things at his wife, not to mention people screaming while Euro players were over shots? There’s a clear and obvious line and it was crossed and fans who took part in that should be ashamed of themselves.

That uncontrolled bit is spot on, I think, though Sean goes easy.  My sense is that the PGA of America was quite content to play a dangerous game.  They of course knew what they were signing on for, and I can't help but feel that they were winking and nodding at the worst of them.

I also had a couple of opportunities to ask about planning at Met. Golf Writer outings to the Black.  I can tell you that, not only did the assembled State Park and PGA Of America officials demonstrated no intention to aggressively police the crowds, but they didn't even seem to understand why a fellow might be worried about it.

Schadenfreude is a bitch, but you'd have to be a better man than your humble blogger not to take pleasure in their comeuppance.  Not only did they take another massive reputational hit, but their strategy appeared to backfire on the home team.  Well played, PGA of America.

I'll copy-and-paste this, but more because it's easy than because it adds anything:

If something does need to be changed, what’s the move?

Zak: Better communication — including from the captain — better messaging by the emcee, better precedents set early in the week, etc. Oh, and when it seems to be brewing, get out ahead of it. On Saturday morning rather than Monday morning. Talking to fans waiting half-a-hole ahead of the groups receiving the worst of it. That wasn’t happening.

Marksbury: Blatantly disruptive behavior should not be tolerated, full stop. There needs to be enough staff members in place to identify instigators and remove them — not to a new spot on the course, but off the property.

Hirsh: These are both good, but I saw a tweet on Monday I agree with. Because the pricing of tickets at this Ryder Cup was so absurd, the only people who could afford had no fear of retribution of what they did. I think the PGA priced out the very people who would have appreciated the chance to watch the Ryder Cup.

Are you familiar with Occam's Razor?  It's a slightly more complicated philosophical construct, but it can be boiled down to avoid attributing to malice what can more logically be explained by incompetence.  So, were the crowds abusive by design or just from stupidity?  Well, in this case they're hardly mutually exclusive...

That last point by Jack Hirsh is, though, a bit of a howler.  In the run-up to the event, folks were concerned that the ticket prices might create a Super Bowl like crowd, one devoid of passion.   Yeah, I know, if only!

The next Ryder Cup is two years away at Adare Manor in Ireland, and now the conversation turns to who leads the two squads. Does Luke Donald come back for three in a row? And who leads the U.S.?

Zak: I’m guessing Luke will want to know who he’s up against, since captains are often remembered in respect to their competition. He won’t rush into that decision, and will have six months or so to settle into it. That said, I bet he does it again. He seems to enjoy it a lot.

For the Americans … hmph. The shortlist seems to be 5-deep. Keegan Bradley, Stewart Cink, Brandt Snedeker, Jim Furyk and Tiger Woods. The one I think will do the best job is … Furyk. But Bradley would do well, I think. Plenty of this year’s Cup was out of his control, as is often the case.

Marksbury: It sure sounded like Luke would strongly consider giving a three-peat a go. I’d actually like to see Keegan get one more shot, if he’d be up to it. It seemed like the U.S. players enjoyed his leadership and that’s saying something after a loss. Given the list of other names Sean floated, I’m not sure who the next pick would be.

Hirsh: Zak, I believe it was you who mentioned the next U.S. captain should have the captaincy until he loses. Donald hasn’t lost and seems to have everything covered. Even if he goes for three wins and loses, he will still go down as one of the best European Ryder Cup captains.

For the U.S., I don’t even know at this point. Tiger seems the obvious choice, but not sure if he could foster the team atmosphere that Europe has succeeded with. I say go back to Steve Stricker. Not even sure why he wasn’t the captain in Rome.

OK, I'm going to need a moment to stop laughing....  Jim "Alas, Poor" Furyk, Sean?  Did you not see Paris?  You want to talk about 2025 foursomes pairings?  I suggest you go back and see who Furyk through out in foursomes.... Anyone remember that Mickelson-Bubba Watson foursomes team?   

On the Yanks, I expected three responses that Tiger would lead them out of the wilderness, so color me surprised.  But none of the three followed that script, and Jack Hirsh's bit is more Tiger-skeptical than I ever expected to see in print.  I actually figured that every golf writer for a major publication, needing access, would assume Tiger to be the hero we need.

But that list from Sean Zak is plenty uninspiring, no?

But, to talk about the next U.S. Captain, I feel the conversation should start with the question of where Tiger was this week?  Not only should he quite obviously have been the U.S. captain, but his reasons for turning it down are (or, at least, should be) disqualifying, to wit, the involvement of J.P. McManus in the 2027 installment.  But I'd add his failure to even show up or be an Assistant Captain....  He's not a team player and he only does that which he perceives as being in his own interests, so doesn't he seem the perfect bespoke U.S. Captain?

As for Luke, I just can't think he'll do it again.  At the personal level, it seems to include no upside and quite a bit of downside, so can't see why he'd sign on.  More importantly, Europe has a backlog of guys that are in the wings, Bjorn and Noren, to name a couple.  Those guys have been loyal soldiers, and I can't imagine Luke wanting to stand in their way.

But we could use a man like Herbert Hoover again:

In the lead-up to Bethpage, Keegan Bradley had the opportunity to be a playing-captain, although he elected not to pick himself and, in hindsight, it could have hurt the Americans without having him as a player. Should the PGA of America avoid this situation in 2027 so Bradley has an opportunity to contribute as a player?

Zak: Eh, we shouldn’t count on a 41-year-old version of Keegan Bradley to be the best version of Keegan Bradley. Particularly with the many younger Americans who will certainly be better than 41-y.o. Keegs. It might make most sense to offer the job to Bradley tomorrow and say, “We’ll handle the playing-captain thing again if you happen to be crushing it in 18 months.”

Marksbury: Given the way Keegan has played these last two years, he may want to focus fully on getting on the team himself! I’m sure the stress of a captaincy is even more draining than it appears. So yes, if Keegan is the pick, I agree with Sean — they should lock him in ASAP.

Hirsh: I don’t think Keegan should be captain in 2027, so this isn’t an issue to me!

Hold your thoughts on Keegs until I get a chance to work in Geoff's reaction, but would he have made a difference this year as a player?  On Sunday morning I made the logical argument that, with the U.S. seven points down, that no one guy mattered.  Of course, that logic fell apart and it all felt different by mid-afternoon on Sunday.

The unfortunate thing is that it's easy to over-interpret, because Keegan could have been uniquely useful.  He's one of the best iron players out there which, combined with his fiery personality and unfinished Ryder Cup business, might have made him useful.  If I were the captain, he would have been one of my first captain's picks and he would have been in both foursomes sessions, but we can't know it would have changed anything.  The one thing we know is that it was a completely avoidable issue that the PGA of America walked into with it's eyes open.

Let's turn things over to Geoff at this juncture, with his typical Point Misser post.... although, such was his bounty, the Geoff couldn't fit it all into a single post.  Yup, it was that kind of bizarre week.  Let's dive into his first post, beginning with the captain:

Keegan Bradley. The stock post-USA loss disclaimer: the Captain does not hit the shots and has only so much power to save a sinking U.S.S. Club Car. The Captain has to deal with PGA of

America numskulls lurking around every corner, offering laceratingly dull stories and terrible lineup suggestions. But a Ryder Cup Captain also can put players in a position to succeed and is empowered to make lineup calls when someone is off their game. Early on, Bradley appeared to pull the right strings by getting his team to Napa so they’d remain sharp and get to know each other (a promised team trip to Bethpage did not happen). He appeared to create a positive spirit around the squad. There have been no stories of communication failures or unexplained pivots from the plan he publicly said was set long ago. (The catty comms gripes traditionally take a while to dribble out).

Bradley’s first massive blunder started wth not scheduling four-ball sessions to start, as is the home captain’s prerogative and traditionally is a better format for Americans. He then put together quite possibly the worst foursomes pairing since 2018 when Jim Furyk sent Bubba Watson and Phil Mickelson out in Paris and minus a team of whitecoat-wearing, Freudian-trained observers armed with strait jackets. I’m referring to Friday’s opening foursomes duo of Bryson DeChambeau and Justin Thomas (who anyone could make a four-ball case for). Then there was the even more heavily criticized duo of Collin Morikawa and Harris English because Data Golf said it was a bad idea. But the duo made sense from a temperament and style perspective—until they got walloped by McIlroy and Fleetwood and somehow were sent out again Saturday morning.

“You know, we’ve got a lot of faith in our players,” he said. “Collin Morikawa has won a couple majors.” Whoa. Those were in 2020 and 2021. But go on. “Harris has had a great year.I think in the past, sometimes we have panicked with the pairings and switched everything up, and it hasn’t worked out. We wanted to stick with the plan, and that’s what we did.” Oh, you did.

We speak a lot about captains putting their players in a position to succeed, but the PGA of America doesn't seem to have done that for Keegan.  Given the manner in which he got the gig, he was never going to be a strong captain.  And much of what he's being criticized for, course set-up and Shack's bit above, represent Task Force orthodoxy of limited value, but not to be changed by a weak captain.

The Captain may not hit the shots but he does control narratives and perception. In his role as frontman, arbiter of dignity, leader, and in Bradley’s case as the “younger-and-touch-with-todays-players” guy, he forgot the first rule of the Ryder Cup or any team event: good sportsmanship and leaving everyone feeling better about a contest conducted with dignity.

Saturday’s disastrous press conference came after a long, brutal day but that still does not excuse some of the idiotic assertions Bradley made. He revealed that he’s living in 1995 when Europeans were playing slow greens and shocked by American agronomic standards. Mark James and Howard Clark were not this year’s opposition. Bradley seemed oblivious to what was going on or was not informed of it by his Vice Captain’s. He’s yet to apologize publicly to the guests from Europe, yet former Captain Tom Watson did…from his couch.

“I thought the fans were passionate,” Bradley said. “I mean, their home team is getting beat bad. You know, they are passionate fans. I wasn’t at Rome, but I heard a lot of stories that Rome was pretty violent as well.” Oh it’s been violent a time or two in Rome, just not this century and certainly not at the 2023 Ryder Cup. “The fans of New York, from what I have seen, have been pretty good. You’re always going to have a few people that cross the line, and that’s unfortunate.” Guess he hasn’t read any Samuel Ryder lately.

“I was happy to see our players trying to quiet down some people that were like that. Part of it is our fault. We are not playing up to the standards that they want to see, and they are angry, and they should be.”

He’s right. Part of it is was his team’s fault and fans were angry so they took it out on the visiting team in a bid to make the matches closer.

This isn't a good look:

Q. You said the way your players have played is maybe partly to blame for some of the fans crossing the line --

KEEGAN BRADLEY: I did not say that. That’s not what I said. I said the fans are probably upset that their home team is losing. I did not say that.

Q. But do you think maybe you bear some responsibility in terms of some of the words that you and your players used beforehand in terms of stoking up the fans to bring a hostile environment?

KEEGAN BRADLEY: What words were those?

Q. To bring chaos and just talking up the atmosphere here, Collin --

KEEGAN BRADLEY: Yeah, Ryder Cups are wild. I don’t appreciate those words that you just said. I know what you’re trying to do. The Ryder Cup is full of passionate fans. They’re full of passionate players. And that wasn’t right.

In a low point not seen but witnessed by the reporters present, Bradley wanted to confront the reporter afterwards for asking questions based entirely on what he said. Again, it’s a long day and his team took a rough beating, and there is only so much a Captain can control. But maintaining dignity and handing off the privilege of Captaining the USA team in a good place could have been within his control had he voiced stronger disdain for the bad apples. Instead, he came off as an out-of-touch Point Misser.

We all know that generals fight the last war:

Plans. Bradley’s mantra sounded a lot like past losing Captains and speaks to a longtime American culture of not having a cohesive culture that bruises no egos by adjusting on the fly. After becoming Captain, Bradley sounded like someone who might use his passion and knowledge of sports to take the data and find that elusive sweet spot between overreliance on analytics versus adjusting on the fly. The Europeans stick to plans because they are usually more thoughtfully conceived, they are honest with themselves about their weaknesses, and have built a culture where players can handle bad news when the Captain calls an audible. Bradley admitted that his plan had been made a while ago as a defense for sticking with Morikawa and English, an odd confirmation that he did not account for the state of certain players’ games, the course setup “surprise,” or how best to exploit the strengths of his team.

Where do I get one of those hats?

To me, Keegan sounds quite reasonable on that score, at least until you saw his teams play.  To me, the bit that I still don't get, is Saturday.  The U.S. got crushed on Friday, yet there wasn't any urgency in the team on Saturday.  And, while Geoff makes a point worth considering above, the U.S. was almost as bad in fourballs this year as they were in foursomes.  How do we feel about that in the context of giving Keegan a mulligan?

Who else does Geoff have it in for?

Vice Captains. As the European buggy brigade actively monitored matches and took on some of

the fan policing duties mismanaged by the PGA of America, America’s walkie-talkie chatters perfected the art of grim-faced, arm-crossing uselessness. There were rumblings they discussed “we need to speed the greens up” over the airwaves in what was an admission they did not know how advanced planning or agronomy works. Future Captains, they are not. The VC’s also should have been more involved in policing the jackwagons so players like Justin Thomas did not have to. It was also shocking how unaware Bradley seemed about stuff that took place when answering press softballs. Were the VC’s not telling him about anything about, say, the Hovland injury and long-established rules? Or about the slurs hurled by fans who might have backed off if sports-fan Bradley said, “cut it out”? Bradley even suggested Sunday night that it did not rain when discussing the soft conditions. Okay, maybe that weirdness is not on the VCs. But either way, nice custom-made A-J’s. Now, every time you put on your red-white-and-blue Jordans, you’ll be reminded of the Buffoonery At Bethpage.

Data. You’re a dinosaur in 2025 if you don’t believe every question can be answered with quantifiable answers. The same ones that also feed sponsor activations, promote sports betting, and satisfy point-missers who think athletes are actually humanoids executing a “base reality” simulation for a pre-planned outcome. But another match play event has come and gone with a sizable number of folks in positions of responsibility point-missing the layers of match play. The mysteries, the vagaries, and the nuances of the format cannot be quantified. Both teams know this, so they attempt to blend stats with gut instincts. It turned out that in a biennial tradition unlike any other, one team’s braintrust managed art and science better than the other. Again.

Shack nailed it....None of those guys will rock our world as captains, will they?  Of course, the telling detail is the guy missing from the pic.  Yanno, the one playing Call of Duty down in Jupiter....

Guess who is in Geoff's crosshairs in Part 2:

PGA Of America. Ryder Cups run by the organization cannot be considered a safe place for parents to bring their kids. That’s how far the members-only, for-profit/non-profit has fallen. The purported game growers and nurturers running the org predictably oversold, overpriced, overserved, and under-etiquette policed the 45th matches at Bethpage. This set up a toxic brew that should stain the organization’s leadership for at least a decade. Or, until players force the PGA of America to sell the thing to the PGA Tour, whose private equity partners might be just as cravenly squeezing every penny out of the event (so be careful what you wish for Tour fanboys!). An organization that has been integral to the junior golf explosion through its role in the Drive, Chip and Putt, PGA Junior League, and its thousands of members who introduce people to the game, allowed the Ryder Cup to be sullied by a refusal to see what could happen. And worse, they did not shift course when it became clear things were not going well.

The inevitable debacle started with the $750 ticket price for each day of the three sessions. (Yes, you got boiled dogs and Grandma’s Cookies softer than the greens as long as you didn’t visit between sessions when they ran out of everything.), The PGA of America’s cynical Chief Commercial Officer and Long Island native, Jeff Price, defended the price and claimed a sell-out occurred within 48 hours. Yet for around $1250 each, a fan could buy a maximum of six venue-verified tickets on official partner SeatGeek’s site, even when the public sale max was only four. (Note to PGA: try to be more subtle next time.) So yes, it means these were batches of PGA of America tickets marked up to squeeze more money out of the people’s course. Governor Kathy Hochul refused to get involved in the price-gauging even though it’s a state-owned property. She was booed mercilessly at the opening ceremony. Things seemed even shadier when we found out her husband used to work for the consulting company that helped determine the obnoxious prices. Despite the PGA-Seatgeek partnership, prices dropped below face value for Saturday action and plummeted on Sunday. But the fees remained appallingly high.

The PGA of America then tried to place 55,000 people per day on a footprint that would have been straining at 35,000 because of the two-lane roads in and out of Bethpage. Throw in the Ryder Cup’s limited amount of action taking place at one time, and fans realized they’d been duped. Their team started losing. It was hot. As a result, horrible things were said, and spectators tried to interfere with the outcome.

Yeah, quite the mess they created.  More importantly, while their revenue maximizing efforts are obvious to us all, they seemed to miss some important details, no?  Those soft greens took them completely by surprise, no?  Something maybe they should have thought about ahead of time...

I guess Tim Waltz wasn't available?

Don Rea. The game has dealt with carnival barkers and military grade All-World shmendricks before. But Rea may be unlike anything golf has ever seen. The current volunteer leader of the PGA of America desperately wanted to be hired as the CEO (and still does, so wear that body armor to meetings, Derek!). Rea has been building toward an even more revealing week than his bizarro PGA Championship shenanigans in May. At the Ryder Cup and following the event, he exceeded all expectations, and as respectable publications have already written, he should resign.

On Sunday afternoon of the Ryder Cup, Rea spoke to BBC Northern Ireland’s Stephen Watson and was asked about the fan behavior. You can torture yourself watching it here. Each of these batty quotes deserves special attention.

• “Well, you’ve 50,000 people here that are really excited and, heck, you could go to a youth soccer game and get some people who say the wrong things.”

• “When there are American players who have to control the crowds that distracts them from playing.”

• “It happened when we were in Rome on the other side.”

• “Things like that are going to happen and I don’t know what was said. But all I know is golf the engine of good.”

Rea then played a silly part in the closing ceremony. PGA officers labor under the delusion that anyone wants to hear from them, and he had one job: to congratulate the winning team. While many were offended by his suggestion that Europe merely “retained” the cup, it is technically accurate and has been said many times before when a team wins the matches. (It was The Quad’s headline.) But Rea’s was laced with condescension:

“Me and Rosie [Justin Rose] looked at each other thinking the congratulations didn’t feel very heartfelt,” said Matthew Fitzpatrick, speaking at the Alfred Dunhill Links.

What a buffoon!  But, as is to be expected, one ready to play the victim card at the drop of a hat:

Hubris.  It really would be hard to think of an organization less focused on serving its members than the PGA of America.  Sure, the love to cite their 29,000 members.  But the organizations focus is never on them, not least with their massive Frisco, TX edifice complex.  Remind me what that does for those 29,000 members?

I will have to kiss you goodbye here.  Catch you late in the week.

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.