Speaker 1: I miss a green, for example, I'm already upset. When
Speaker 1: I find my ball in the bunker, I'm really upset.
Speaker 2: And when I find my ball in a.
Speaker 3: Bride egg Frida egg, the dreaded Frida egg, Frida eggrid
Speaker 3: egg bride.
Speaker 1: Egg Lie, I'm about ready to run off the golf.
Speaker 3: Welcome to the Friday Egg Golf Podcast. I'm Garrett Morrison
Speaker 3: and the Ryder Cup starts tomorrow. So first up in
Speaker 3: this episode, we have some predictions. I called up some
Speaker 3: familiar voices and asked them to go out on a
Speaker 3: limb and say what they think will happen this week
Speaker 3: in Rome. First you'll hear from Andy Johnson, then from
Speaker 3: Brendan Porath, and finally from Joseph Lamanya. I'll talk to
Speaker 3: each of them for about ten minutes, so quick hits here,
Speaker 3: and after that I'll have a conversation with Shane Ryan
Speaker 3: about the history of the Ryder Cup, so a very
Speaker 3: different subject. Shane is the author of The Cup They
Speaker 3: Couldn't Lose, which is about the twenty twenty one Cup
Speaker 3: at Whistling Straits, but also about the general sweep of
Speaker 3: Ryder Cup history. So I thought this would be an
Speaker 3: interesting time to speak with Shane about how the twenty
Speaker 3: twenty three event fits into that history. All right, let's
Speaker 3: get to it after this break some quick predictions with
Speaker 3: Andy Brendan and Joseph and then Shane Ryan. Our next
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Speaker 3: All right, First up, Andy Johnson, Andy, you just got
Speaker 3: off a red Eye. How's it going?
Speaker 4: Huh? You know the red Eye was okay.
Speaker 5: The the two and a half hour uber from to
Speaker 5: go like forty miles was that was the tough part.
Speaker 4: So yeah, I've been better. I've been better.
Speaker 3: That's that's always punch in the gut. That's the unexpected part.
Speaker 3: Is the is the uber ride after, especially in like
Speaker 3: the big cities. I remember one at the US Open
Speaker 3: in LA that was just like unbelievable. So yeah, that's
Speaker 3: that's always the part that gets you. All right. So
Speaker 3: I've got a set of short questions for you meant
Speaker 3: to be answered briefly. So first up, who is going
Speaker 3: to win? And what do you think the final score
Speaker 3: is going to be.
Speaker 5: I feel I've felt good about Europe, and now that
Speaker 5: I just saw that, like the betting lines are now
Speaker 5: favoring Europe, it makes me like feel worse about Europe.
Speaker 5: But I'm still gonna go with Europe, and I'm gonna
Speaker 5: go sixteen twelve Europe.
Speaker 3: So sixteen twelve? Would you characterize that as like a
Speaker 3: close match? I think that's maybe the most interesting question.
Speaker 3: Is it going to be close or is it going
Speaker 3: to be like another blowout?
Speaker 4: I think this is going to be a close one.
Speaker 5: I think that if you I think the top end
Speaker 5: talent obviously is biased to the Europeans, but this is
Speaker 5: about depth. You got to play four matches a day
Speaker 5: during the team competition, so you know, it's great that
Speaker 5: Europe has like this unbelievable top three in Hoveland, Ram
Speaker 5: and Rory, But you know, you start to look down
Speaker 5: the sheet and in the US's depth is unbelievable, and
Speaker 5: so I think it's gonna be close. I you know,
Speaker 5: if I was gonna say one of my most interested
Speaker 5: in the golf course, about is. You know, Trevor Emmlman
Speaker 5: brought up a good point is like there is no
Speaker 5: European of when we talked earlier in the week, there
Speaker 5: is no real European style anymore because all the top
Speaker 5: Europeans play on the PGA Tour. I think that the
Speaker 5: home course advantage, even is recently Isle Golf Nationale, is
Speaker 5: less mitigated because the European team they're playing characteristics more
Speaker 5: resemble twenty twenty one at Whistling Straits the American team
Speaker 5: than that twenty twenty one European team. Like out with
Speaker 5: the old you got new guys in and they're big hitters,
Speaker 5: they are you know, they are kind of more American
Speaker 5: style players.
Speaker 3: Yeah, maybe Ian Poulter wouldn't have been on this team,
Speaker 3: but the fact that Ian Poulter has essentially been replaced
Speaker 3: by like Ludvig Gabers and makes the team more you
Speaker 3: know what you would traditionally consider American.
Speaker 5: Lee Westwoods, say, just replaced by Nikolai Hogart, Like that's
Speaker 5: a different type of player. And Westwood was a you know,
Speaker 5: an unbelievable ball striker, but you know, he wasn't the
Speaker 5: longest hitter out there. He was he was plenty long,
Speaker 5: but you know, hoguard Is is long, you know, and
Speaker 5: a little bit they're they're much more. I think, like,
Speaker 5: I think that that that idea of the European American
Speaker 5: style play within the modern era is just becoming the
Speaker 5: modern era style of play. And everybody, you know, it's
Speaker 5: that Xander quote is you know, just hit it far
Speaker 5: and go find out.
Speaker 3: Yeah exactly. Yeah, Yeah, I think that. I think that's
Speaker 3: a really interesting trend to track. I think that's really
Speaker 3: true that these styles are converging around the one that
Speaker 3: everybody's teaching now.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and so I think that this like setup talk,
Speaker 5: all the talk about set up American European, that's just
Speaker 5: going to get more and more diminished over the over
Speaker 5: the coming years.
Speaker 3: Yeah, there still might be a home field advantage in
Speaker 3: the sense of the crowd, but you.
Speaker 5: Know, I think the crowd and the familiarity, like the guys,
Speaker 5: like the Europeans have.
Speaker 4: Played this course more.
Speaker 5: Yes, they've played it under tournaments and regardless of what
Speaker 5: you say, like especially these guys have won there there
Speaker 5: are like good good feelings, you know, and I don't
Speaker 5: I don't have any analytics behind it. This is never
Speaker 5: good when you start with that, this is all just
Speaker 5: you know.
Speaker 3: I'm gonna have Joseph on here too, so he'll he'll
Speaker 3: bring the analytics presumably.
Speaker 5: But like if you play well a tournament, if you
Speaker 5: play well at a golf course and you've won there,
Speaker 5: it's really hard to play bad there later in your
Speaker 5: life because you go there and there's just this you know,
Speaker 5: golf is all about fighting back nervous and nervous energy.
Speaker 5: And if you're familiar, you've won, you've finished high at
Speaker 5: a place, you go back to those courses and that
Speaker 5: nervous energy doesn't exist as much because you're just comfortable there.
Speaker 5: And it's you know, especially in a Ryder Cup with
Speaker 5: the with the kind of added team pressure that you know,
Speaker 5: the pressure is not letting down eleven other guys. I
Speaker 5: feel like if you talk to any professional golfer, what
Speaker 5: what you know that played a lot of sports? If
Speaker 5: you ask them what drew you to this sport, they
Speaker 5: almost always say like, I didn't have to rely on
Speaker 5: anybody else. Like these are people that like chose a
Speaker 5: sport that they don't have teammates, and they like that
Speaker 5: aspect about it. When you have these team competitions it
Speaker 5: just like illuminates there's just more pressure. You feel worse
Speaker 5: like I It's why caddying is sometimes in a tournament,
Speaker 5: sometimes more nerve wracking than playing in a tournament. You
Speaker 5: don't want to mess something up for somebody else. You
Speaker 5: don't want to let somebody else down right.
Speaker 3: You're willing to take responsibility for your own effect on yourself,
Speaker 3: but when it's somebody else that it brings something else
Speaker 3: into play. All right, let's finish with some quick hitters here,
Speaker 3: most valuable player on either team.
Speaker 5: All right, I'm gonna ride. I'm gonna ride the hot hand.
Speaker 5: I'm gonna take Victor Hobland. I know he was very
Speaker 5: just I mean two years ago. With the way he's
Speaker 5: developed as a player, these aren't the same players, I think,
Speaker 5: Like that's one of the interesting things about the Europeans
Speaker 5: is Fitzpatrick and Hoveland are like completely different players than
Speaker 5: they were at Whistling Straits, like statistically different. So I'm
Speaker 5: gonna take Victor Hoblind there. I just think that this
Speaker 5: is a guy that is going to be an outstanding
Speaker 5: alternate shot player because of the consistency, the accuracy, and
Speaker 5: he's just playing such good golf.
Speaker 4: That I'm going to take him for most value.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it might be the hottest player in the world
Speaker 3: right now, all right, least valuable player again on either
Speaker 3: team least.
Speaker 4: I think it's Bob McIntyre. I don't want to uh,
Speaker 4: oh my god, you know it was.
Speaker 5: It was a cute photo with him and his onesie,
Speaker 5: his Ryder Cup European Tour onesie. But I think that
Speaker 5: he might not play very much. It looks like it
Speaker 5: looked like on the range he was quite frustrated with
Speaker 5: the driver and I could see maybe this is a
Speaker 5: two match session for for Bob McIntyre.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and potentially an O two and oh record that
Speaker 3: that that wouldn't be Nobody would be shocked by that.
Speaker 3: But you know, I think again, he won the Italian
Speaker 3: Open at this course, and so you know who's more
Speaker 3: comfortable here than than big shot up.
Speaker 5: I think that's the thing is if if you know
Speaker 5: a guy doesn't have it, you got to play him
Speaker 5: as little as possible.
Speaker 4: I know that captain are very.
Speaker 5: Resistant to not seeing them till signals, but maybe you
Speaker 5: just hide him into one of the best ball formats
Speaker 5: and hope that he makes five birdies when you know
Speaker 5: and you play him there and in one singles match.
Speaker 3: All right, let's get a DOP score for Marco Simone.
Speaker 4: I haven't been there. I can't get listen.
Speaker 3: I mean, I'm asking for a prediction here because we're
Speaker 3: gonna see this course all week. We're gonna watch it,
Speaker 3: and I think we're gonna get a sense for for
Speaker 3: you know, whether it's any good.
Speaker 5: I think the I think the thing about this golf course,
Speaker 5: and I think this is, you know, we're we're living
Speaker 5: in it in a world that's becoming more and more
Speaker 5: black and white, and but in reality, almost situation, every situation,
Speaker 5: there are multiple things that can be true. I think
Speaker 5: Marco Simone, from what I've seen I haven't been there,
Speaker 5: is not a very good golf course.
Speaker 4: But I do think it's.
Speaker 5: Got some things that are going to make it an
Speaker 5: exciting Ryder Cup course.
Speaker 4: It's the driveable four part five.
Speaker 5: The setup to me is going to be very interesting
Speaker 5: to see what they do, what the rough's like, and
Speaker 5: the way it you know, it can it can reward
Speaker 5: just accuracy, right, So like do I do I want
Speaker 5: to fly across the country or fly across the world
Speaker 5: the rome to play Marcos Simoni no. Do I want
Speaker 5: to fly across the world of Rome, Yes, but golf
Speaker 5: wouldn't be high on my list if I flew across
Speaker 5: the country to Rome or across the.
Speaker 4: World of Rome.
Speaker 5: So with that, I just I think that it could
Speaker 5: be an exciting golf course to watch, but not necessarily
Speaker 5: a good one.
Speaker 4: If that if that's possible, if that's allowed.
Speaker 3: I think that's allowed. And I think it's also probably
Speaker 3: going to be a very effective Ryder Cup venue in
Speaker 3: the sense of, you know, creating a crowd atmosphere. I
Speaker 3: wrote about this for Design Notebook and Club TFE this week.
Speaker 3: You know, I remember Los Angeles Country Club, great US
Speaker 3: Open course, but was it a good US Open venue?
Speaker 3: Considering it was kind of dead in a lot of
Speaker 3: parts of that course. That's something that Marco Simone is.
Speaker 4: They're not going to have.
Speaker 5: They should bring the first t atmosphere of LACC to
Speaker 5: the Ryder Cup exactly.
Speaker 3: Just have members and VIPs around around the Marco Simone.
Speaker 5: Now, a couple people out there, more than accession, maybe
Speaker 5: three or four people come out to club.
Speaker 3: That would be that would be something. All right, Andy,
Speaker 3: thank you for stopping by. Have a great week.
Speaker 4: Thanks Garrett.
Speaker 3: All right, Brendan Porath, you are in New York City
Speaker 3: with Andy Johnson right now. How are the accommodations?
Speaker 6: They're fine, They're great. That I have a beef with
Speaker 6: the coffee table not being within reach of the couch.
Speaker 6: This is a general, pervasive problem. I shouldn't have to
Speaker 6: move furniture. It's coffee table. I need to be able
Speaker 6: to reach my coffee from the couch. But other than that,
Speaker 6: the accommodations are great.
Speaker 3: Okay, okay, I mean that that would that does that?
Speaker 3: Does dock it?
Speaker 2: Though?
Speaker 3: That takes it from an A to a B. If
Speaker 3: it's an A, it's a basive problem given the coffee
Speaker 3: table situation. All right, let's dig into some Ryder Cup predictions.
Speaker 3: So first off, who do you think is going to win?
Speaker 3: And what will the final score be?
Speaker 6: I think the United States is going to win. I
Speaker 6: think they're going to win by it whatever adjective comfortable margin.
Speaker 6: I think maybe fifteen and a half to twelve and
Speaker 6: a half. Does that even add up? Yeah, fifteen, I
Speaker 6: think that's right. I think that the opportunity has never
Speaker 6: been clearer. I think that was the case in France.
Speaker 6: I think there were some incredibly unique circumstances in France,
Speaker 6: given the course setup, I don't think that carries over
Speaker 6: to this particular course setup, given the Tiger and Phil
Speaker 6: element that I don't think is is obviously no longer
Speaker 6: a part of this team. The organization's better, the process
Speaker 6: is better, The team is better than it has been
Speaker 6: in these thirty years. It's younger, as Jordan Speeth has
Speaker 6: been quite unequivocal about stating, they played no part in
Speaker 6: any of this thirty years of baggage, you know speed occasionally.
Speaker 6: He was there in twenty fourteen as a wide eyed
Speaker 6: sort of rookie. So it's just a different team, a
Speaker 6: different process. Is the task incredibly difficult, Yes, but I
Speaker 6: think you know, everything is lined up. The opportunity, the motivation,
Speaker 6: the stakes have never been higher, and the talent is
Speaker 6: there to match it.
Speaker 3: Very well. Said that, I'm almost persuaded. I've been kind
Speaker 3: of going with the trend right now, which seems to
Speaker 3: be favoring Europe right But then, I mean when you
Speaker 3: look at these teams, like clearly that sort of middle
Speaker 3: section of the US team is very, very strong, and
Speaker 3: there's been such a minimum of drama on the US
Speaker 3: Ryder Cup team over the past, you know, eight to
Speaker 3: ten years. Even it seems like this process is really
Speaker 3: like sort of clicking in.
Speaker 6: What's incredible about the Ryder Cup is the amount of
Speaker 6: energy we spend and we're doing that right now, and
Speaker 6: it's not wasted energy, but trying to suss out so
Speaker 6: many like intangible things like who is more motivated, is
Speaker 6: the pressure higher or greater on this team or this person,
Speaker 6: and these are critical parts of the competition. It's just
Speaker 6: it's hard to measure and hard to quantify it, hard
Speaker 6: to discuss it in very precise terms. For a three
Speaker 6: day event, right, it's twenty eight points. It's the perfect
Speaker 6: and that's why. Honestly, this is part of the charm
Speaker 6: of it too. I'm not suggesting this is a negative thing.
Speaker 6: This is why it's becomes this perfect event. We spend
Speaker 6: so much time in golf, at least professional golf, I
Speaker 6: should say, talking about the how things need to be
Speaker 6: changed or fixed or elevated, whether it's the points or
Speaker 6: the PGA Tour schedule, or there's so many few sundays
Speaker 6: where we're not looking for something betweaked or modified for
Speaker 6: the better. And the Ryder Cup, by and large has
Speaker 6: it perfect this format, even after a run of blowouts.
Speaker 6: Quite honest, we haven't had a close one since twenty twelve,
Speaker 6: but we still love it and are charmed by it
Speaker 6: so much. For kind of the exercise we're going through
Speaker 6: so much through right now. Is this trying to quantify,
Speaker 6: trying to understand this such a unique setting where it's
Speaker 6: match play and the best in the world are kind
Speaker 6: of putting a different environment.
Speaker 3: Nobody tries to golf zur the Ryder Cup. That never happens.
Speaker 3: Whenever you try to golf z our professional golf, the
Speaker 3: assumption is always we're keeping the Ryder Cup exactly as
Speaker 3: it is because that is working. We're keeping the Masters
Speaker 3: exactly as it is. We're keeping the Open exactly as
Speaker 3: it is. There are these things that work, and the
Speaker 3: Ryder Cup is one of those things and you just
Speaker 3: have to appreciate it all right, most valuable player on
Speaker 3: either team, this doesn't have to be US and Europe,
Speaker 3: just across all the players who are involved.
Speaker 6: Across all the players who are involved. This is an
Speaker 6: interesting line.
Speaker 2: I'm struck.
Speaker 6: Obviously, the European side is incredibly straw at the top. Right,
Speaker 6: We've heard this several times. The top three players on.
Speaker 4: The US side.
Speaker 6: I'm struggling to find someone I'm incredibly skeptical of. It's
Speaker 6: it's more about choosing from a lot of great options
Speaker 6: who could be the MVP.
Speaker 2: I think I.
Speaker 6: Think I'm gonna go slightly off the board with Max Homa.
Speaker 6: I don't know how far off the board that is.
Speaker 6: He's not the very top rated player on either team.
Speaker 6: We saw him succeed in the President's Cup. We've seen
Speaker 6: him sort of succeed when he's in contention, when these
Speaker 6: stakes are high, when the opportunity is right in front
Speaker 6: of him, and match play.
Speaker 4: That is obviously there.
Speaker 6: It's a fifty to fifty proposition, right, minus a few
Speaker 6: percentage points for ties, and so you start the week
Speaker 6: with the at that fifty to fifty deal, you start
Speaker 6: the match with that fifty to fifty deal, not one
Speaker 6: of one to fifty six. And we've seen him when
Speaker 6: those those opportunities are in front of him really go
Speaker 6: and grab it. And I think he's gonna get several,
Speaker 6: you know, play a lot of playing opportunities. I think
Speaker 6: he'll probably play maybe four matches, right, So I'm going
Speaker 6: to go with Maxhoma based on what we've seen from
Speaker 6: him the last few years.
Speaker 3: It's interesting this is his first Ryder Cup. Obviously, he
Speaker 3: was in the President's Cup as well and did great there.
Speaker 3: But it already seems like Max Homa is kind of
Speaker 3: like a leader of the US team. He's one of
Speaker 3: those guys where it feels like this is his third
Speaker 3: or fourth Ryder Cup. But he's really well integrated into
Speaker 3: the kind of social dynamics of the team, and it
Speaker 3: wouldn't be surprising to see him become like a great
Speaker 3: team match play player in this kind of second act
Speaker 3: of his career, all right, least valuable player.
Speaker 2: To be fair.
Speaker 6: I think you know, I was on the other side
Speaker 6: of the room. I heard Andy kind of already laid
Speaker 6: the wood to Bobby mack. I believe it looked like
Speaker 6: he was laying the wood.
Speaker 2: It sounded like he.
Speaker 3: Was being nice about it. But Bob, Bob McIntyre was his.
Speaker 6: Pick, all right, So he's in the cross hairs. I
Speaker 6: guess the one American I'm a little skeptical of is
Speaker 6: Wyndham Clark.
Speaker 4: Right, he is a rookie.
Speaker 6: He is being put in the blunder right now of
Speaker 6: having to say his words were taken out of context.
Speaker 6: The euro Press is like a dog with a bone
Speaker 6: right now, because he, you know, deigned to suggest he
Speaker 6: would would like to play the best players in the
Speaker 6: world and has confidence in his own abilities. I thought
Speaker 6: his quotes were taken a little too far. But since
Speaker 6: then he's talked about how they could be leaking oil
Speaker 6: because they're tired. I just haven't seen Wyndham Clark ever
Speaker 6: in this setting. I know he won a US Open,
Speaker 6: his form has been consistent and strong throughout the year,
Speaker 6: but he is put being put on his back.
Speaker 4: Foot right now.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 6: He's not one of these boisterous types he's I don't
Speaker 6: think he's full of this bravado, but he is being
Speaker 6: put on his back foot. It's a new, entirely new
Speaker 6: experience for him. Any kind of team play, right, Nothing
Speaker 6: home away, Presidents, anything like that. So I'm a little
Speaker 6: I guess I wouldn't be surprised if he succeeds, but
Speaker 6: I'm skeptical that he may get few opportunities and not
Speaker 6: be ready for the blender he's in.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's a good one. Marco Simone, do you have
Speaker 3: a hole to watch at Marcos somone like something something
Speaker 3: for people to focus on that might be slightly interesting
Speaker 3: about this golf course.
Speaker 6: I mean, I think we're all flying somewhat blind, and
Speaker 6: the courses regrettably become sort of this ancillary part of
Speaker 6: the Ryder Cup, right, It's just it fills in the gabs,
Speaker 6: which you know I'll always quibble with. Like both masters
Speaker 6: can be served. We're not naive to why they choose
Speaker 6: the places they choose. It's money, but like it's hard,
Speaker 6: but you could do it. You could serve both masters
Speaker 6: and pick a great venue and figure out the money
Speaker 6: and figure out like you could. It's just harder, and
Speaker 6: so you know, we understand why they pick the venues
Speaker 6: they pick. For me, what I've seen from Afar is
Speaker 6: sixteen looks intriguing. It looks like a reachable We were
Speaker 6: watching Victor shan Zach had a nice video of Victor Holind'
Speaker 6: striping at three. What I've seen several others lovewig really
Speaker 6: stick it close. It's an eagle opportunity it which hold it?
Speaker 7: Who?
Speaker 3: Andy's saying something in the background, now, who who?
Speaker 4: Novak Djokovic apparently drove a hole in the Novak Joker
Speaker 4: celebrity celebrity.
Speaker 3: Joseph Lamania must be absolutely glowing right now.
Speaker 4: Apparently Joker drove you know, a big Novak fan, he
Speaker 4: drove a hole today.
Speaker 6: So yeah, I think sixteen looks like that kind of opportunity.
Speaker 6: It could be at the death, at the last bit
Speaker 6: of a match, So we'll go with sixteen. It's a
Speaker 6: really quirky course, right, I mean there's like a bunch
Speaker 6: of these par fours that are five hundred plus yards
Speaker 6: and then a bunch that are reachable, and there's not
Speaker 6: a lot of in between. So yeah, I'll go with sixteen.
Speaker 3: That you're you're right there are and that the difficulty
Speaker 3: of the holes varies so widely on this course. It's
Speaker 3: like if if it's not an eagle hole, then it's
Speaker 3: like you're grinding for a par if you're if you're
Speaker 3: a pro, and so it's, uh, yeah, it's a it's
Speaker 3: a curious, curious little but I think sixteen is probably
Speaker 3: the one that's going to get a lot of attention.
Speaker 3: It might be the last hole of a lot of matches,
Speaker 3: and so you're going to get this high stakes thing.
Speaker 3: And then also there's an arena around it, right, it's
Speaker 3: in that kind of central valley that they tried to
Speaker 3: use a lot of in the routings so that the
Speaker 3: gallery could be up above and sixteen is very much
Speaker 3: part of that that portion of the property, so it
Speaker 3: should be kind of cool. All right. One last question,
Speaker 3: kind of a wild card here, but which player and
Speaker 3: I guess this is just relevant to the American team,
Speaker 3: but which player do you think is going to raise
Speaker 3: the ire of the British press the most?
Speaker 6: It's sometimes the ones we least expect. Right, It's weird
Speaker 6: that Wyndham Clark is now all of a sudden, this
Speaker 6: this sort of pinata they're going forward.
Speaker 3: I guess the answer is already Wyndam Clark. Like it's
Speaker 3: almost like this is not even a prediction.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it could be I mean there's the target could
Speaker 3: go on anybody next.
Speaker 6: Yeah, it could be maybe Max Homa. I mean I
Speaker 6: think he can run a little intense and hot and
Speaker 6: not in an unsporting way, but a way that might
Speaker 6: be perceived as as unsupported or worth you know, being
Speaker 6: you know, attacked or questioned by the British press. I
Speaker 6: think it could be Homa. I hate to go back
Speaker 6: to Homa. JT feels like the easy answer. I don't
Speaker 6: think he's going to be doing shotgunning beers and the
Speaker 6: you know all that deal that he did at Whistling Straits.
Speaker 4: But JT's the easy answer.
Speaker 6: But I think I'm going to go with another one
Speaker 6: that that Homa getting kind of caught up emotionally invested
Speaker 6: in these matches, doesn't, I don't know, raises their eyebrows.
Speaker 3: So all right, some things to watch out for. Thank
Speaker 3: you Brendan for coming on the pod. Have a good
Speaker 3: rest of the week.
Speaker 2: All right, thanks so much, Garrett.
Speaker 3: All Right, Joseph Lamania our last check in for this
Speaker 3: first segment of the pod. Joseph, how are things going.
Speaker 7: I'm pumped, Scarrett.
Speaker 8: This is gonna be such a fun week for so
Speaker 8: many reasons, like the over analyzing.
Speaker 7: Course, the historical implications. I'm pumped.
Speaker 3: Yep. Yeah. So you know, the thing about the Ryder
Speaker 3: Cup is that it's at least as fun to overanalyze
Speaker 3: it as it is to watch it. That's sort of
Speaker 3: like the magic of it. We spend we spend all
Speaker 3: this time doing it, and it's like this is this
Speaker 3: is really the good stuff right here? All right? So
Speaker 3: first question right off the bat, who is going to win?
Speaker 3: And what will the final score.
Speaker 8: Be I almost can't believe I'm saying this, but I'm
Speaker 8: taking the Americans in a narrow win.
Speaker 7: I'll go fifteen thirteen USA.
Speaker 8: I was getting Europe vibes and I thought they were
Speaker 8: kind of undervalued. For the past six months, I've kind
Speaker 8: of gone back a little bit the other direction. I
Speaker 8: think the tide has turned a little bit too much
Speaker 8: in favor of Europe, and I know that they've had
Speaker 8: trouble winning over there, but I think this could be
Speaker 8: the year.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and I've said this before in the other segments
Speaker 3: with Andy and Brendan, but I think an equally interesting
Speaker 3: question is whether this is going to be another blowout
Speaker 3: or whether we're going to get a close Ryder Cup,
Speaker 3: you know, and so part of the prediction here that
Speaker 3: you're making is that this would be a close one,
Speaker 3: fifteen to thirteen, Like it's almost as close as it gets.
Speaker 3: So that would be very exciting no matter which direction
Speaker 3: it goes.
Speaker 8: Yeah, I don't think there's going to be a blowout.
Speaker 8: I mean there could be, Frank, I think it's more
Speaker 8: likely that Team USA would blow out Team Europe than
Speaker 8: Team Europe would blow out tam USA. But I also liked.
Speaker 8: I liked Team USA in Paris. I think I've learned
Speaker 8: quite a bit since then to where I wouldn't make
Speaker 8: that same prediction if they.
Speaker 7: Were to run that one back.
Speaker 8: But in this particular case, I think the depth of
Speaker 8: Team USA will be a pretty big factor, especially late.
Speaker 3: Okay, all right, most valuable player on either team, So
Speaker 3: this is out of the twenty four players, most valuable.
Speaker 8: I'm going Scotti Scheffler A big caveat that we may
Speaker 8: get to in a second, but I think this golf
Speaker 8: course is perfect for Scotti Scheffler and would be very
Speaker 8: surprised if he doesn't perform extremely well. So I'll say
Speaker 8: he's the most valuable player.
Speaker 3: Do you have any takes on his putting. I don't
Speaker 3: know if you've been following the latest news out of
Speaker 3: the Scotty Scheffler putting narrative, but he's been working with
Speaker 3: Phil Kenyon, I guess, and all that stuff. Do you
Speaker 3: have any thoughts about that.
Speaker 8: I don't have a strong thought on what those lessons
Speaker 8: mean and when.
Speaker 3: The technique means. I couldn't say, you know, I've looked
Speaker 3: at some before and afters and it's like, okay, yeah,
Speaker 3: the setup looks different, but who knows.
Speaker 8: Right, Yeah, I don't think he can put much worse
Speaker 8: than he has been putting, and I think even with
Speaker 8: poor putting factor, he's going to be fine here. I
Speaker 8: think this whole notion that putting is going to be
Speaker 8: important is completely overblown. And I mean Tommy Fleetwood and
Speaker 8: Francesco Molinari aren't great putters, and look what they did
Speaker 8: in Paris. I think it's going to be a hardcore
Speaker 8: get to the Green contest Tita Green, and the putting
Speaker 8: is just kind of overblown in general. So I think
Speaker 8: this sets up very well for Scotty Scheffler. And if
Speaker 8: a player makes all their money with putter, I could
Speaker 8: see this being a week where they struggle.
Speaker 3: Okay, that's an interesting insight about the course. All right,
Speaker 3: least valuable player again out of the twenty four in Rome.
Speaker 8: Well, this is a natural segue, and this is exactly
Speaker 8: where I wanted to go with this. I think it's
Speaker 8: Sam Burns, and I think that for a couple of reasons. One,
Speaker 8: I don't think he sets up very well for this
Speaker 8: golf course. Not a great long iron player. He's the
Speaker 8: player who tends to get his make his money with
Speaker 8: wedgend putter, and that's not really something you're gonna have
Speaker 8: the opportunity to do a bunch. And the main reason
Speaker 8: I think he could be the least valuable player is
Speaker 8: there's a good chance he's paired with Scotty Scheffler, who
Speaker 8: fits this golf course extremely well. And if Sam Burns
Speaker 8: ends up holding back one of the best players in
Speaker 8: the field, I think that could be a pretty big
Speaker 8: issue for Team USA.
Speaker 3: All Right, so switching to talking a little bit about
Speaker 3: the course here, do you have a hole that you
Speaker 3: think is going to be particularly interesting at this venue?
Speaker 3: Most interesting hole?
Speaker 8: I'll go with whole five, because that whole can play
Speaker 8: differently based on conditions, based on tea box, pin location, firmness.
Speaker 8: It's a short part four over water, and you know,
Speaker 8: just depending on the day and the conditions, you may
Speaker 8: get some teams laying up, you may get some teams
Speaker 8: going for it. I think it'll be really interesting to
Speaker 8: watch which players decide to do. You know, which strategies
Speaker 8: they take on different days, but also which teams take
Speaker 8: the more aggressive versus the more conservative strategies. And it'll
Speaker 8: be really interesting to see if you know, on a
Speaker 8: particular setup. Team Europe has their team doing the exact
Speaker 8: same thing with all of their groups versus Team USA
Speaker 8: that is probably not as and in tune to the
Speaker 8: best core management. So that'll be a really interesting one
Speaker 8: to watch.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Whole five, it's one of the few holes at
Speaker 3: Marco Simone that's kind of flat. You know, again, I
Speaker 3: haven't been on the property. This is just judging from
Speaker 3: videos and photos that I've seen of the course, but
Speaker 3: relatively flat compared to other holes. And you have that
Speaker 3: big pond essentially, and it looks to me like the
Speaker 3: pond is a major factor for layups, just as it
Speaker 3: is for going for the green if it's drivable on
Speaker 3: a particular day, which I'm sure it will be. There
Speaker 3: like three different holes at Marcos Simone that can and
Speaker 3: may be driveable at this event. But Whole five, that
Speaker 3: layup just looks tricky. I guess there's plenty of room
Speaker 3: to do it, but it almost seems like a lot
Speaker 3: of players are going to say, you know what, I
Speaker 3: might dump this layup in the water. Why not just
Speaker 3: be aggressive here? Do you have that sense too?
Speaker 7: Yeah?
Speaker 8: And I think it will really depend on the conditions.
Speaker 8: I mean, if you're if it's super firm. Let's say
Speaker 8: you're pins back and best case your drive not best
Speaker 8: case but a pretty likely outcome. You're hitting drive, you're
Speaker 8: taking on a lot of risk of not carrying the water,
Speaker 8: and best case it bounces over the back and you're
Speaker 8: short sided. Like that's that's also not a great situation
Speaker 8: where you're hitting driver either, So it just depends on
Speaker 8: the conditions, how soft things are, what the wind's doing,
Speaker 8: where the pin is. I mean, I've seen guys like
Speaker 8: Matt Fitzpatrick, who is pretty has pretty smart course management,
Speaker 8: take both tacts based on the pin location and conditions,
Speaker 8: So I think you're gonna see both.
Speaker 3: Okay, final question, who do you think is the most
Speaker 3: likely to complain about the fan behavior in Rome?
Speaker 8: I'm kind of punting on this one, Garrett, and my
Speaker 8: answer is that I think we're finally out of stage
Speaker 8: where the golfers who are participating in this don't complain
Speaker 8: about that kind of stuff. I think we've got guys
Speaker 8: on both sides who are down for the atmosphere, who
Speaker 8: are excited about it, and who won't complain. So I
Speaker 8: don't think anyone's going to Maybe the obvious answer here
Speaker 8: is probably somebody on the American side. But I think
Speaker 8: if anyone complains about something fan interaction wise, it could
Speaker 8: be John Rom. He's he's kind of been feisty about
Speaker 8: some of this stuff recently. I don't think there's gonna
Speaker 8: be so many European fans that I don't think he's
Speaker 8: gonna get like heckled. But small disturbances seem to bother
Speaker 8: John Ram about as much as anybody on either team,
Speaker 8: So it wouldn't surprise me if he has some kind
Speaker 8: of outburst. But I don't expect anybody to. It should
Speaker 8: be a fun, good environment where everyone's kind of about
Speaker 8: the spirit.
Speaker 3: Small disturbances seem to bother John Ram's caddy too. I've
Speaker 3: I've noticed that, mister Hayes, but it seems like cameras
Speaker 3: are sort of Rom's main pet peeve. But yeah, he does.
Speaker 3: He and his caddie both interact with the fans and
Speaker 3: and and not always in the most you know, friendly
Speaker 3: friendly term, So so that would be that would be interesting.
Speaker 3: I always, I always think it's funny when like a
Speaker 3: player's spouse gets in gets into the mix with talking
Speaker 3: about the crowd. I think Sergio Garcia's wife did at
Speaker 3: one point, maybe it was at Hazel Team, and so
Speaker 3: that that's always a fun of all the families come
Speaker 3: to the Ryder Cup and they're on the scene too,
Speaker 3: they're sort of like part of the action, and so
Speaker 3: that's that's always a little side storyline that I love tracking.
Speaker 8: Yeah, well, the Garcias won't be naming their next kid
Speaker 8: Marcos Simone.
Speaker 3: That would be that'd be a pretty good name for
Speaker 3: a Sergio Garcia child. Honestly, Marco Simone Garcia. I mean
Speaker 3: that that is if you want your kid to be
Speaker 3: a great golfer, Like I think that's a great golfer name.
Speaker 3: That's like the new Stavi Biasteros.
Speaker 7: Azalea fire Thorn and Marcos Simone.
Speaker 3: All right, Joseph, I hope you have a great week
Speaker 3: and we'll talk again soon. Probably talk again to to
Speaker 3: wrap up the Ryder Cup if if you have some
Speaker 3: time afterwards, So right after this music that you're hearing
Speaker 3: right now, you will hear from Shane Ryan about the
Speaker 3: history of the Writer Cup. Shane Ryan, welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 2: How you doing, Welcome to you. I'm good, thank you.
Speaker 3: I'm being welcomed down to your show.
Speaker 2: That's the most awkward way I can start Welcome right back, Arre.
Speaker 3: I can tell that you are a podcasting professional by
Speaker 3: by how you handled that you just know this guy,
Speaker 3: this guy is the real deal. Well, you are definitely
Speaker 3: a professional writer. Do you notice how I did that segue?
Speaker 3: By the very good, very Because you have an excellent
Speaker 3: book called The Cup They Couldn't Lose, which is really
Speaker 3: relevant right now with the Ryder Cup coming up, and
Speaker 3: I want to talk about basically everything you researched for
Speaker 3: that book, and it's some of the history you dug into.
Speaker 3: The book is about the twenty twenty one Writer Cup,
Speaker 3: but it's also about the history of the Writer Cup.
Speaker 3: So I want to start you with like a high
Speaker 3: school history class prompt. Okay, all right, So the situation
Speaker 3: is this Europe is still kind of the pre eminent
Speaker 3: team in the Writer Cup, right The Europeans have still
Speaker 3: won seven of the ten Ryder Cups in this century
Speaker 3: or something like that. The US still hasn't won a
Speaker 3: Writer Cup on European soil in thirty years or so.
Speaker 3: So basically the prompt is this, if you were to
Speaker 3: tell the story of how Team Europe got itself into
Speaker 3: this position, where would you start in history. What would
Speaker 3: be the earliest you would.
Speaker 9: Go, that's a great question. Yeah, And you know, I
Speaker 9: think I would just qualify what you said. It is
Speaker 9: sort of like Britain at the end of like the
Speaker 9: colonial Empire, where you're like, there's still technically have all
Speaker 9: these countries, but it's not going well, right It's like
Speaker 9: they're kind of coasting on their history a little bit
Speaker 9: right now.
Speaker 2: I kind of feel that way about Europe.
Speaker 9: I think in like two weeks we maybe like America
Speaker 9: is now the predominant team this maybe just before this,
Speaker 9: maybe just before Yorktown in the American Revolution. It's like,
Speaker 9: you do still America is still your colony, but we
Speaker 9: don't think it's gonna last much longer.
Speaker 2: No, So yeah, go how did Europe achieve dominance? Great question?
Speaker 7: You know.
Speaker 9: The background, of course is that this Ryder Cup started
Speaker 9: in nineteen twenty seven, which was already post World War One,
Speaker 9: when America was had had pretty much firmly established itself
Speaker 9: as the pre eminent golfing power, which would only get
Speaker 9: worse right after World War Two, and you know, they
Speaker 9: would just keep getting better and better. So as you
Speaker 9: might expect, they were just playing the UK at the
Speaker 9: time they weren't playing all of Europe. The Americans dominated
Speaker 9: this event completely for fifty years, about almost perfectly fifty years, right.
Speaker 9: That takes us to nineteen seventy seven, which was the
Speaker 9: last year that the Ryder Cup was only the UK
Speaker 9: and Ireland. Starting in nineteen seventy nine it went to
Speaker 9: Team Europe. The US crushed them two more times in
Speaker 9: seventy nine and eighty one, and then we get to
Speaker 9: the answer to your question, which is nineteen eighty three.
Speaker 9: When Tony Jacqueline took over as captain of the European team.
Speaker 9: It was unexpected for him. He was somebody who had
Speaker 9: played all these Ryder Cups. He had the famous concession
Speaker 9: moment with Jack Nicholas in sixty nine. That was the
Speaker 9: only one that was a tie, but technically America retained
Speaker 9: it because they had won before. That was the only
Speaker 9: time he got closed. I think he played seven Ryder
Speaker 9: Cups and was demolished in the others by the Americans.
Speaker 9: He was very upset at the Ryder Cup team for
Speaker 9: not including him the year before. There's a lot of
Speaker 9: drama there. He hated them. He kind of thought they
Speaker 9: hated him, and so nineteen eighty three comes and it's
Speaker 9: just this months before the Ryder Cup starts, right, so
Speaker 9: now you have your captain basically two years in advance.
Speaker 9: Months before they didn't have a captain. They barely had sponsors.
Speaker 9: Their main sponsor on the European side had dipped out,
Speaker 9: being like, I don't know. It was a big bank
Speaker 9: of some kind, and they're like, I don't know why
Speaker 9: we're doing this. You know, you get your butts kicked
Speaker 9: out every single time. We're not sponsoring you anymore. They
Speaker 9: couldn't find a sponsor for the longest time until they
Speaker 9: visited some whiskey company called Bells in Scotland, so they
Speaker 9: barely got a sponsor in time the Ryder Cup was
Speaker 9: almost dead. And then they went to Tony Jacqueline after
Speaker 9: this long debate that Jacqueline didn't know what was happening,
Speaker 9: Like Bernard Langer was, you know, debating the old guys,
Speaker 9: and they were like, the captaincy should be a lifetime
Speaker 9: achievement award, and Langer was like, no, we need somebody
Speaker 9: who's like more there, right, we need somebody who's kind
Speaker 9: of like of our generation at least a little bit,
Speaker 9: who can understand us. We need to take this seriously,
Speaker 9: and they eventually listened to him because they wanted, you know,
Speaker 9: the European Tour, the fledgling, the European Tour in the
Speaker 9: British PGA. They wanted this thing to keep going. So
Speaker 9: they approached Tony Jacqueline, who immediately was like, fine, if
Speaker 9: you meet all my demands, I want to travel on
Speaker 9: the Concorde. I want nicer clothing. Tony Jacqueline at one
Speaker 9: point in his Ryder Cup career the shoes that they
Speaker 9: gave him had fallen apart during the Ryder Cup, and
Speaker 9: this is like foremost in his mind, Like this shoe
Speaker 9: incident sticks in his head.
Speaker 2: He's like, I want.
Speaker 9: Nicer shoes, I want nicer clothes. I want a lot
Speaker 9: locker room. You're like an actual team room, not just
Speaker 9: some musty old locker room where we can give a speech.
Speaker 9: But I want, like, I want all this stuff. And
Speaker 9: they said yes to everything, and they had to hustle
Speaker 9: to get some of it. So it's like with the Conquered.
Speaker 9: They had to finance it by promising, you know, fifty
Speaker 9: megafans that if you pay money for this, you can
Speaker 9: fly over with us. Right, they had to kind of
Speaker 9: be creative, but they said yes to everything, and then
Speaker 9: Tony Jaqueline's last demand was, I want Sevi Biasteros on
Speaker 9: the team. And you know, Sevi bi Asteros had been
Speaker 9: demanding appearance rights on the European Tour, which he had
Speaker 9: every right to demand, right. The European Tour had a
Speaker 9: policy of we're not doing appearance fees unless Americans come
Speaker 9: over that we want to see and then we'll do
Speaker 9: appearance fees, and Semi bia Steros is like, screw that, right,
Speaker 9: So Sevii Biasteros was persona on Grotty. He was left
Speaker 9: off the eighty one team. Tony Jaquelin said, I need
Speaker 9: Seve like he's one of the best players in the world.
Speaker 9: We absolutely need him. And this guy named oh my god,
Speaker 9: I'm gonna forget his name, but he was a cousin
Speaker 9: to Queen Elizabeth.
Speaker 3: Are you talking about Lord Darby?
Speaker 2: Lord Darby?
Speaker 9: Yes, yeah, Derby who cussing the Queen Elizabeth and would
Speaker 9: not deign to ask Tony Jacqueline to take the captaincy himself.
Speaker 9: You know, he sent his underlings, but once Jacqueline said yes,
Speaker 9: he met with him and Jacqueline was like, well, what
Speaker 9: about Sevey, and Darby was like, well, he's your problem now.
Speaker 9: That's by the way, that's not what I think. He
Speaker 9: talked like, that's an exact impression. That's exactly correct.
Speaker 3: That's actually a really good impression of like, yeah English accent. Yeah,
Speaker 3: there's like a very particular royal English accent. That's actually
Speaker 3: very good. Chain.
Speaker 9: I feel like if I kept doing it, we get
Speaker 9: more like I didn't cow.
Speaker 2: So yeah.
Speaker 9: So Tony Jacqueline met with Sevi Biasteros at the Prince
Speaker 9: of Wales Hotel that summer.
Speaker 2: I got him on.
Speaker 9: Board with the team, and then they went to Florida
Speaker 9: and for the first time they had this team spirit.
Speaker 9: They kind of felt like they weren't second class citizens
Speaker 9: to the Americans like they'd always felt. And they went
Speaker 9: and they shocked them, and they came so close to
Speaker 9: beating them in Florida. On the last there's a funny
Speaker 9: moment where everything was very competitive and you know, Tony Jacqueline,
Speaker 9: they went out to exchange their singles lineups, and the
Speaker 9: idea was that you would always put your stars at
Speaker 9: the end. This was just sort of practice, this is custom.
Speaker 9: And Jack Nicholas did that and Sevie heard sorry Tony.
Speaker 9: Jacqueline gave him his lineup and all the stars were
Speaker 9: in the front because he knew he had to do
Speaker 9: something dramatic to win this thing, and Jack Nicholas actually said.
Speaker 2: Like, you can't do that. He was so shocked.
Speaker 9: It was like a sitcom, We're like or a cartoon
Speaker 9: where his like jaw fell on the floor and his
Speaker 9: tongue rolled out. So anyway, yeah, so they came to that
Speaker 9: last day. It was a classic match. The US did
Speaker 9: hang on. Lanny Watkins hit a big shot at the
Speaker 9: end to win. I think it was a fourteen and
Speaker 9: a half to thirteen and a half score, and afterward
Speaker 9: in the locker room, the Europeans were distraught and Stevie
Speaker 9: by Asteros was basically like stood up, paced up and down,
Speaker 9: tears coming from his eyes, and is like, this is
Speaker 9: a great triumph.
Speaker 2: We're gonna beat them next time.
Speaker 9: Nobody feel down, Nobody feel bad, and he kind of
Speaker 9: lifted them all up, and you know, to make a
Speaker 9: long story short, they won the next time at the Belfry.
Speaker 9: In eighty seven, they went to Mierfield Village and won
Speaker 9: in America for the first time ever. They have sixty
Speaker 9: years of the Ryder Cup, they'd never done that. They
Speaker 9: beat the Americans and just strategically, you know, spiritually, almost
Speaker 9: in a million different ways. They became this tight knit unit.
Speaker 9: And of course they had better players, right, they had
Speaker 9: all of Europe now and people like you know, Faldo
Speaker 9: and Langer and all these great players were coming up,
Speaker 9: and so they had a better team, and they just
Speaker 9: started beating the Americans with consistency in a lot of
Speaker 9: close matches, to be fair. And then in the two
Speaker 9: thousands they became not close matches anymore. They started beating
Speaker 9: them like eighteen and a half to nineteen and a half,
Speaker 9: and this kind of period of dominance where America seemed
Speaker 9: to win like one out of every four, right, never
Speaker 9: in Europe, and then one out of every two.
Speaker 2: They lose at home.
Speaker 9: This continued for a long time until we went to
Speaker 9: Glenny Eagles and Tom Watson got humiliated by Paul McGinley.
Speaker 2: It was like the.
Speaker 9: Archetypical, like Europe just having all their shit together in
Speaker 9: America just being funded clueless. Uh. And after that the
Speaker 9: Task Force started, which everybody made fun of in America.
Speaker 9: But the Task Force has been very, very good and
Speaker 9: so the task force has been good. You know, they
Speaker 9: wont it Hazel Team, they dominated it Whistling Straights, they
Speaker 9: got shocked in Paris and beat up. But there are
Speaker 9: a lot of weird little things that went into that.
Speaker 9: So it all comes to now where it's like, I
Speaker 9: think America is the better team, but they have to
Speaker 9: win in Europe to prove it. Before they win in Europe,
Speaker 9: you don't. You can't say to the better team. I
Speaker 9: think they might this year, but it's looking like it's
Speaker 9: going to be a really great Ryder Cup. Yeah, so
Speaker 9: there's like, there's your you asked me a very simple question.
Speaker 9: I gave you the overview of the entire Ryder Cup.
Speaker 3: But that's that's the survey. That's well that yeah, and
Speaker 3: if this that's the answer to the high school history
Speaker 3: class prompt, that's a that's a very broad answer to
Speaker 3: it that we can then go back into and pick
Speaker 3: out some you know, individual threads. There's a lot of
Speaker 3: wonderful detail in your book that you that you found
Speaker 3: out through interviews with Tony Jacqueline and Paul McGinley and others.
Speaker 3: Now going back to you know, the nineteen eighties, there's
Speaker 3: this great set of European players. So one thing that
Speaker 3: Team Europe had going for it is that it had
Speaker 3: Sevi Piasteros, who's unbelievable. It had Nick Faldo, who is unbelievable.
Speaker 3: So there was this great cohort of players that could
Speaker 3: stand up to the quality of the American players overall.
Speaker 3: And then in addition to that, they seemed to have
Speaker 3: better leadership from Tony Jacquline, you know, some more creative leadership,
Speaker 3: doing some things with the lineups and things like that.
Speaker 3: So there were certain dynamics emerging with Team Europe that
Speaker 3: would give them more of an ability to compete with
Speaker 3: the Americans. But a lot of it had to be
Speaker 3: these were great players, all time great golfers on the
Speaker 3: European team. But then at some point it seems like
Speaker 3: Team Europe found a distinct advantage organizationally, leadership wise that
Speaker 3: led them and that that caused this this era where
Speaker 3: they they were coming to the matches with players who
Speaker 3: were widely regarded as not as good as the American
Speaker 3: players and absolutely destroying the Americans. So could you tell
Speaker 3: me a little bit about how Team Europe found those
Speaker 3: kind of hidden advantages in leadership and organization to you know,
Speaker 3: achieve what they achieved in the twenty first century.
Speaker 9: Yeah, and your first point is absolutely right that without
Speaker 9: the players, none of the stuff matters, right, Like you know,
Speaker 9: pre pre European UK team like Reginald mc mcshireville, Like
Speaker 9: he's like, right, like somebody's cousin who can't break eighty five.
Speaker 3: That's an exaggeration, but you know, essentially you're playing with
Speaker 3: Darby's cousin.
Speaker 9: Yeah, Lord, Darby's entire family was the whole Ryder Cup
Speaker 9: team before then. No, but you like, you can strategize
Speaker 9: your pants off, right, but you're just not gonna You're
Speaker 9: not gonna win under these circumstances.
Speaker 2: So you got to have a few players.
Speaker 9: But as you kind of hinted, the Americans have almost always,
Speaker 9: not universally, but almost always had the better team, sometimes
Speaker 9: by far, and sometimes they still lost when they had
Speaker 9: the better team by far.
Speaker 2: So yeah, what the question is what did Europe do right?
Speaker 9: And this is always kind of like it's the fundamental
Speaker 9: aspect of the Ryder Cup that interests me because it's
Speaker 9: so easy to look at the Ryder Cup and go
Speaker 9: it's three days with people playing an individual sport. It's
Speaker 9: just you know, people playing golf, it's about who plays
Speaker 9: better on the day, and I think Americans thought that
Speaker 9: for a long time and it's why they kept losing.
Speaker 9: And so as to what they did, a lot of
Speaker 9: it can be explained by they just did the smart
Speaker 9: things earlier than the US. So we're talking about captain's picks, right,
Speaker 9: being able to put your guys out there. They were
Speaker 9: on that much sooner than the Americans were. Course set
Speaker 9: up like Tony Jacqueline by the belfry, which slowing the
Speaker 9: greens down, you know, making it basically taking the ruff
Speaker 9: from around the greens, because he thought the Americans are
Speaker 9: such good chippers that he wanted to make it impossible
Speaker 9: to chip little things like that that the Americans, you know.
Speaker 9: I read Paul Aisinger's book, and Paul Aisier, when he
Speaker 9: was captain in two thousand and eight, said that when
Speaker 9: he wanted to manipulate the course, they told him he
Speaker 9: was the.
Speaker 2: First person who had ever asked that.
Speaker 9: Now that's twenty three years after Tony Jacquelin did it
Speaker 9: in Europe. So it just shows you that immense gap, right,
Speaker 9: that this was like something that it took a long
Speaker 9: time for the US to catch on Dudo. Probably a
Speaker 9: little bit of arrogance, a little bit of complacency, right,
Speaker 9: They hadn't want They've been winning this thing forever. They
Speaker 9: knew they had the best players in the world. It
Speaker 9: you can imagine it took a lot more for them
Speaker 9: to say, we need to strategize and we need to
Speaker 9: figure out what's going wrong, because they want to just believe. Well,
Speaker 9: it's kind of it's got to be a fluke, right
Speaker 9: that these guys are beating They're not as good as us,
Speaker 9: It's got to be a fluke. Whereas if you're Europe
Speaker 9: and you know the Americans are better than you, you're
Speaker 9: you know, necessity being the mother of invention, You're far
Speaker 9: more likely to find the little edge here and there
Speaker 9: where you can, so you know, it goes into stuff.
Speaker 9: Those are the big ones, right. You know, the European
Speaker 9: fans were more passionate in partisan long before the Americans
Speaker 9: caught on. There's a great story in eighty seven, the
Speaker 9: first year that the Europeans won in America, where they're
Speaker 9: just coming off eighty five having won at the Belfry,
Speaker 9: and the fans were rabid and crazy, and the Americans
Speaker 9: like hated, like how Sutton was so mad and they
Speaker 9: couldn't believe what had happened there. You know, this is
Speaker 9: basically dealing with, like, you know, a golf course equivalent
Speaker 9: of a soccer crowd, and golfers aren't used to that.
Speaker 9: So they go back to eighty seven very much wanting
Speaker 9: their fans to do the same thing. And at Mirifield Village,
Speaker 9: the fans have no idea that they're supposed to be
Speaker 9: doing this. They don't really understand what the Ryder Cup is,
Speaker 9: and they're just like politely, oh ooh, sepie Biasteros this year. Yeah,
Speaker 9: it's what a pleasure to see him. They're not partisan
Speaker 9: at all. And Jack Nicholas at one point goes out
Speaker 9: and buys like a million little American flags American you know,
Speaker 9: and he hands them out to all the fans. They're all,
Speaker 9: you know, politely waving their flags but still cheering for everybody.
Speaker 9: They're not partisan, and the Americans are so frustrated because
Speaker 9: it's like these guys like they're killing us over in Europe,
Speaker 9: Like they're screaming at us, they're spitting on our wives,
Speaker 9: you know.
Speaker 2: Like that was that was what it like.
Speaker 9: Literally, these people are too nice over here and you know,
Speaker 9: Hal Sutton's trying to pump them up to no avail
Speaker 9: and they lose. And it's not till ninety one that
Speaker 9: Dave Stockton makes it his business to sort of be
Speaker 9: like this is how a ryder Cup should be, and
Speaker 9: the War by the Shore gets so insane, Like the
Speaker 9: Americans finally catch on. And the reason they catch on
Speaker 9: is probably because it starts to be on TV more
Speaker 9: right before then, and so there's things that they're seeing
Speaker 9: and knowing, and you know, the Iraq War was at
Speaker 9: that time, so there's this patriotic fervor. It's it just
Speaker 9: becomes more of what it is today, where a living
Speaker 9: efing nightmare if you're on the road, no matter what
Speaker 9: team you are, right, it's like every I guarantee you
Speaker 9: it happens every time in American and I guarantee you
Speaker 9: there'll be something that happens in Italy where the US
Speaker 9: will be like, this is just pathetic that they're treating
Speaker 9: us this way. It'll happen in Beth guarantee you it'll
Speaker 9: happen in Beth Page.
Speaker 3: Oh God, Beth.
Speaker 2: Page will be someone will be murdered.
Speaker 3: I want to see Sergio Garcia come back for Team
Speaker 3: Europe at that page. Yeah no, not not all of
Speaker 3: Team Europe is gonna survive, Beth Page. There's gonna be
Speaker 3: there's gonna be at least one death, and that's that's
Speaker 3: just what you have to accept. No, uh yeah, So
Speaker 3: it's you know that just like the little advantages they
Speaker 3: picked at and picked out of course course setup, having captains, picks,
Speaker 3: little team chemistry stuff. You know, it's just all kind
Speaker 3: of and they were more suited to it, I think
Speaker 3: naturally because of their underdog status and beating America meant
Speaker 3: an awful lot to them, where beating Europe was sort
Speaker 3: of unimportant.
Speaker 9: To the Americans. And the one quick thing I would
Speaker 9: add there is that you are now seeing a generation
Speaker 9: of players on the American team who grew up watching
Speaker 9: their team get their asses kicked right by the Europeans.
Speaker 9: And the amount that they care like people like Justin Thomas,
Speaker 9: all of them, the unity they have at these Ryder Cups.
Speaker 2: They're not all best friends, right, but.
Speaker 9: The unity they have and the passion they have is
Speaker 9: a direct result of having watched that. Before them, that
Speaker 9: generation didn't exist because they grew up watching the US
Speaker 9: win or the Ryder Cup wasn't that important. So that's
Speaker 9: like a huge change.
Speaker 3: Now, Yeah, yeah, that's that's really interesting all of a sudden.
Speaker 3: The Americans have a little bit of that underdog mentality,
Speaker 3: which might be overrated as a motivational thing, but maybe
Speaker 3: underrated as a team unifier, you know, the sense that
Speaker 3: you know, we are against the odds here, and that
Speaker 3: tends to bring teams together. All right, So switching to
Speaker 3: the American side, fully, the US team did seem to
Speaker 3: figure some things out in two thousand and eight when
Speaker 3: Paul Aisinger was captain. Obviously, Asinger system is very well
Speaker 3: known at this point, frequently discussed, but I don't know
Speaker 3: if people really are familiar with the details of it.
Speaker 3: They just say pod system and don't explain it. So
Speaker 3: could you explain it? What was the pod system and
Speaker 3: how did it work? And what were some of the
Speaker 3: other things that Asinger did that were smart in two
Speaker 3: thousand and eight.
Speaker 9: Yeah, the pod system came about because Paul Easinger was
Speaker 9: watching a guitar documentary or something. He's kind of a
Speaker 9: big music guy and he was just laying there on
Speaker 9: the couch and the next thing that came on, the
Speaker 9: history Channel or whatever it was was a documentary about the.
Speaker 2: Navy Seals and the Navy when they trained.
Speaker 9: They have I think teams of six or it may
Speaker 9: even be smaller, but they have these little teams and
Speaker 9: the philosophy is, you know, you need to count on
Speaker 9: these people for your life, and so you get really
Speaker 9: close to them and you have your own little unit there.
Speaker 9: And that really appealed to him, and he kind of,
Speaker 9: you know, he was always thinking about the Ryder Cup.
Speaker 2: This was like a very passionate thing for him.
Speaker 9: He loved it, and where he took that was, Okay,
Speaker 9: what if we do this in the Ryder Cup, have
Speaker 9: these smaller groups together, And that really appealed to him
Speaker 9: because you know, he had come of age at a
Speaker 9: time when every time the Ryder Cup came around, the
Speaker 9: American philosophy was twelve people as one unit. You know,
Speaker 9: we're kumbaya, we're a team together. And he always found
Speaker 9: that kind of silly because the sport itself is so
Speaker 9: selfish and so isolationist that you can't just flip a
Speaker 9: switch right in the rider. You can't just say yeah,
Speaker 9: we're a team now, where you know, like it's not
Speaker 9: like you're the Chicago Bulls all of a sudden or whatever.
Speaker 9: And so he always found that hard. And his kind
Speaker 9: of thing was, Okay, if we do this Navy Seals thing,
Speaker 9: instead of asking twelve people to be at unity, I
Speaker 9: can divide people into groups of four and I can
Speaker 9: ask them to be a unit together.
Speaker 2: And that gets a little easier.
Speaker 9: Because people are friends or people have similar cultural backgrounds, right,
Speaker 9: Like the Redneck group he had, which was like three rednecks,
Speaker 9: and then Jim.
Speaker 2: Furick because he just he just needed like a fourth guy.
Speaker 3: So like was in the Rednecks group's the most patient guy.
Speaker 9: Yeah, yeah, you can go get along with the Rednecks.
Speaker 9: It's fine, but yeah, and so you know, he did
Speaker 9: personality tests. I mean, he was really smart in how
Speaker 9: he kind of arranged these four groups of people. Like
Speaker 9: Phil Mickelson was of the Anthony camp. Right, they're both
Speaker 9: kind of California, you know, gunslingers. You have like Boo
Speaker 9: Weekly and Jabie Holmes together with the red Neck group,
Speaker 9: and I forget the other with Kenny Perry, right, and
Speaker 9: so then there was another group of other people. So
Speaker 9: they just kind of he had these little groups together,
Speaker 9: and the idea was you're gonna get to know each other,
Speaker 9: your practice together. The people who were on the team,
Speaker 9: he consulted them about captain's picks. He said, you know,
Speaker 9: who do you like? And he actually did a pretty
Speaker 9: revolutionary thing that he didn't publicize until after, which he
Speaker 9: let the Pods of three pick their fourth player.
Speaker 2: So he didn't even pick the fourth player.
Speaker 9: He basically, you know, within reason, right, he said, here's
Speaker 9: your list, take who you want out of here, and
Speaker 9: he took Steve Stricker, but the other three pods got
Speaker 9: to pick their own guy. And so like these little
Speaker 9: things that just kind of brought the team in, gave
Speaker 9: them ownership of it, and he felt that was by
Speaker 9: far the most important thing. And then team spirit kind
Speaker 9: of stuff, like they had a Pepperley in Louisville the
Speaker 9: night before, you know, just kind of getting everybody on board.
Speaker 9: Interesting that year that Tiger didn't show up, which I
Speaker 9: probably think had a sneaky unifying effect a little bit,
Speaker 9: you know, your top dog's not there. Europe comes in
Speaker 9: having dominated the Ryder Cup. One of the few times
Speaker 9: we're on paper Europe has the by far the better team, uh.
Speaker 9: And it also so happens that they have one of
Speaker 9: the worst captains that's ever that's ever donned this letter.
Speaker 2: In Nick Faldough.
Speaker 9: So you know, it comes in and Paul Easinger's plan
Speaker 9: works to perfection, and yeah, I mean it just in
Speaker 9: that that kind of thing was like the seeds of
Speaker 9: a lot of evolution were in that. And then it
Speaker 9: gets lost because it's America, they get it gets lost.
Speaker 9: In twenty ten, nobody consults Asinger, nobody asks them any questions.
Speaker 9: Twenty twelve, Davis, you know, brings a lot of the
Speaker 9: same stuff back, has this unbelievably fluky Sunday at Medina
Speaker 9: where that leads to Ted Bishop, the next president of
Speaker 9: the PGA, going, let's get a maverick in there, right, like,
Speaker 9: let's get Tom Watson in there. This is a good
Speaker 9: idea which leads to a complete freaking disaster at Glenn Eagles.
Speaker 9: And after that, then the task force comes and looks
Speaker 9: at what's happened and all these ideas that Asinger had,
Speaker 9: ideas that the Europeans have had everything that they've had,
Speaker 9: you know, they start to get their act together in
Speaker 9: a big way, to the point that now, I mean,
Speaker 9: it's just it's an unbelievably well oiled Machine, team Rider.
Speaker 9: You know, Team USA's Ryder Cup thing, and they're following
Speaker 9: a template and they're every bit as organized and smart
Speaker 9: as the Europeans.
Speaker 2: But it took a long long time to get there.
Speaker 3: So take me through what went wrong for the American
Speaker 3: team at the twenty fourteen Ryder Cup. What's the basic diagnosis.
Speaker 3: I know a lot went wrong, but what's the core
Speaker 3: of it?
Speaker 9: Yeah, I mean it's just you know, you brought in
Speaker 9: a captain, and Tom Watson, who is far far older
Speaker 9: than the team he was captaining, didn't make a ton
Speaker 9: of effort to get to know them. You know, he
Speaker 9: always been a private guy, Watson Wash. Even when he
Speaker 9: captained in ninety three, which is the last time the
Speaker 9: US won in Europe, he was a private guy.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 9: When he reaches out, he reaches out in ways that
Speaker 9: he's the leader. You know, he's kind of gruff. He
Speaker 9: goes by his gut and things like you know, when
Speaker 9: he when he took a captain's pick of Web Simpson,
Speaker 9: that was something that you know, was based on a
Speaker 9: text message Web had sent.
Speaker 2: Him the night before.
Speaker 9: There's little things that are just there's not a coherent
Speaker 9: plan in place, and he happened to run into a
Speaker 9: guy in Paul McGinley, who you know, wasn't a tenth
Speaker 9: of the player Tom Watson was, or wasn't a tenth
Speaker 9: of the player of most captains that have ever existed, right,
Speaker 9: he maybe the worst player that's ever been a captain,
Speaker 9: But that doesn't matter. It's like in baseball there's the
Speaker 9: thing of like backup catchers make the best managers, and
Speaker 9: here you had the same phenomenon where he's a really
Speaker 9: good people person. He planned like you know, he was
Speaker 9: a CEO essentially, he planned unbelievably really smart about how
Speaker 9: to deal with people, went so far as to set
Speaker 9: the pairings on the European Tour for the year prior
Speaker 9: so that he could see without telling anyone, so that
Speaker 9: he could see how people played together.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 9: Again, I write about this more in detail in the book,
Speaker 9: but the planning is so intricate that it goes right
Speaker 9: down to the granular level of why am I playing
Speaker 9: this guy first on Sunday? And why am I playing
Speaker 9: this guy twelve? And everything folds together neatly into this
Speaker 9: puzzle and you're playing against the guy who's basically like
Speaker 9: a you know, a drunken character in a Western shooting
Speaker 9: his gun at the ceiling. And with all respect to
Speaker 9: Tom Watson, you know it's hilarious to say that after
Speaker 9: describing him that way, but no, he just went off
Speaker 9: his gut. He didn't know any better, and you know,
Speaker 9: he ended up like you know, he ended up turning
Speaker 9: the team against him in big ways. A great example
Speaker 9: was on session one. His deal was, Okay, we're gonna
Speaker 9: get We got our four teams for session one. Session
Speaker 9: two were getting the rest of the people out there
Speaker 9: in two teams, and the other two teams are gonna
Speaker 9: be based on how we play in session one. Well,
Speaker 9: Jordan Speed and Patrick Reed went and were amazing, and
Speaker 9: he kept them out without a really good reason. He
Speaker 9: never really explained it, and and Jordan and Patrick Reid
Speaker 9: were kind of pissed off about it. It was it
Speaker 9: was not okay with them. And then he kept pill
Speaker 9: Mickelson out, which you know, Michelson later had the big
Speaker 9: rebellion at the end of it, like he pissed off
Speaker 9: his his spiritual leader.
Speaker 2: It just was like everything was.
Speaker 9: In shambles by by the time Sunday came around, and
Speaker 9: mcginley's plan was just like working like clock or boom
Speaker 9: boom boom, boom boom. They killed in the foursomes like
Speaker 9: they always do. And yeah, it was over very early
Speaker 9: on Sunday. So that's just kind of a little taste
Speaker 9: of what went wrong. But it was essentially two fundamental
Speaker 9: differences in captain philosophies, one of which you know, was
Speaker 9: so bad that it's now lost to history. It was
Speaker 9: the last time we'll probably ever see that. And the
Speaker 9: other one of which is you know, basically you're part
Speaker 9: of a continuous company here, and the company is Ryder
Speaker 9: Cup Team Europe, and you're gonna build off what's come before.
Speaker 9: And now USA has the same thing on the other side.
Speaker 3: And you know, in the wake of twenty fourteen, the
Speaker 3: task Force on the American side was formed. You know,
Speaker 3: maybe Phil Mickelson's comments at the press conference after the
Speaker 3: twenty fourteen Ryder Cup helped this along, but there was
Speaker 3: a response from the American side and it took the
Speaker 3: form of this task force, which was initially the subject
Speaker 3: of some mockery, including by our mutual friend Lee Westwood,
Speaker 3: who you know, has had some really bad takes that
Speaker 3: he hasn't necessarily owned up to. All the time, but
Speaker 3: this is one of them. The task force has been
Speaker 3: pretty successful. What do you think this this body has
Speaker 3: ended up accomplishing Basically, it's.
Speaker 9: Funny when you look back at Lee Westwood making fun
Speaker 9: of it, that should have been your first clue that
Speaker 9: they're on the right track, Like Lee west would thinks
Speaker 9: it's terrible. Good job, guys, you're doing the right thing. No,
Speaker 9: you know they you know again, it goes back to
Speaker 9: a lot of things we talk about. We have to
Speaker 9: take accountability for you know, course setup, how do we
Speaker 9: how do we deal with our you know, how do
Speaker 9: we form partnerships, how do we form pairings? And they
Speaker 9: don't always adhere to an exact like pod system, right,
Speaker 9: but they do loosely adhere to a pod system. I mean,
Speaker 9: you know, they have stats outfit called Scouts Consulting, which
Speaker 9: I'm really high on. I think they're really brilliant guys
Speaker 9: and they help with everything from pairings to the setup
Speaker 9: to you know, every like granular little details of like
Speaker 9: this is a guy you want team off on this
Speaker 9: whole and here's what we should do to the rough
Speaker 9: because their forces team always hits in the rough here
Speaker 9: and our guys are here you know, little things like
Speaker 9: that to logistical planning operations. Where's the team gym gonna be?
Speaker 9: Where are we going to have our team meetings? How
Speaker 9: are we going to make sure that guys aren't sitting
Speaker 9: around forever at gala dinners like before the event. Like
Speaker 9: every little thing they can think of to make life
Speaker 9: good for their players, they do it. And it's you know,
Speaker 9: there was a point at which I was talking to
Speaker 9: Davis Love and after whistling straits, and you know, he said,
Speaker 9: we're still looking at what we did wrong, and like,
Speaker 9: you won nineteen to eleven.
Speaker 2: You did absolutely nothing wrong. What could you possibly be
Speaker 2: talking about?
Speaker 9: And he was like, well the food delivery started talking
Speaker 9: about food delivery, and You're like, wow, these guys are
Speaker 9: considering things down to the littlest detail. Really impressive, I think.
Speaker 9: I mean, it's and I'm sure Europe is doing the
Speaker 9: same thing. Luke Donald's going to be a really really
Speaker 9: good captain. But yeah, so there's just nothing, no stone
Speaker 9: left unturned. The very simple broadway to describe it is
Speaker 9: that they stopped treating the Ryder Cup casually. I mean,
Speaker 9: they started treating it like a serious business. And that's
Speaker 9: kind of what you have to do to win.
Speaker 3: Now, Steve Stricker maybe is an example of a lot
Speaker 3: of this, or at least his captaincy is. But the
Speaker 3: way that he ran things I think is a great
Speaker 3: representation of what the task force is trying to accomplish
Speaker 3: in many ways. Not the most charismatic guy, not somebody
Speaker 3: who likes talking right, which you would think would be
Speaker 3: an important quality in a captain. So why was he
Speaker 3: such an effective captain in twenty twenty one at Whistling Straits?
Speaker 9: Hyper organized, right, hyper hyper organized and amazing attention to detail.
Speaker 9: His whole philosophy was I'm gonna outprepare povering Harrington and
Speaker 9: he did. I mean, who knows how much he had
Speaker 9: to like that was, but I mean he completely left
Speaker 9: no stone unturned. Like you said, he couldn't give a
Speaker 9: speech if his life depended on it, motivational speech. He
Speaker 9: wasn't that kind of guy. But the Americans don't need that, right.
Speaker 9: It's this is the kind of thing where we go
Speaker 9: back to these old tropes of like how is he
Speaker 9: gonna motivate them? It's like they don't need motivation, they
Speaker 9: just need to be comfortable. They're plenty motivated, which is
Speaker 9: you know, maybe again maybe a little different than previous generations.
Speaker 9: These guys again grew up watching Europe win and so
Speaker 9: they're very motivated to win. But what's more important than
Speaker 9: Stricker realized this, and America knows this, all their captains
Speaker 9: know this now, is that let them adhere to their
Speaker 9: routine as closely as possible, because golfers are creatures of
Speaker 9: habit and we need to make sure, like you know,
Speaker 9: if you take a nap at this time of day,
Speaker 9: or if you work out at this time of day,
Speaker 9: you can still do it. And that's actually way more
Speaker 9: valuable than some raw, raw speech or a hype video
Speaker 9: or something like that, which, by the way, the Europeans
Speaker 9: have always responded to more than the Americans. Like that's
Speaker 9: kind of a European thing, like let's have a hype video,
Speaker 9: let's have all our cap you know those montages where
Speaker 9: it's like Sam torns and been.
Speaker 2: Like you will go get them. It's like seventy guys.
Speaker 3: And they the public there every year too. When whenever
Speaker 3: people see these videos, it's like, oh, Europe by a million, yeah.
Speaker 9: Exactly, Yeah, Like it's like that's that's good for them
Speaker 9: that they like that but it's ultimately like I remember
Speaker 9: when Parry Carrington as his team go out in cheeseheads
Speaker 9: at whistling straight like the Packers cheeseheads, and everybody's like, oh,
Speaker 9: what a coup, and You're like, this doesn't matter at all,
Speaker 9: Like it doesn't like the Americans are still gonna like
Speaker 9: throw things at them on Friday, you know what I mean.
Speaker 9: Like you're still gonna get hit in the head by
Speaker 9: a rock by these fans. You're not winning them over
Speaker 9: because you wore a cheesehead in Packers Country. So anyway, yeah,
Speaker 9: so what was the question again?
Speaker 2: Where were we?
Speaker 3: Why would strict or such an effective and you've described
Speaker 3: that pretty well.
Speaker 9: Yeah, yeah, exactly. So he was just he nuts and
Speaker 9: Bolt's guy. That's all you need. And he has the respect.
Speaker 2: Of the players. That's also important. Yeah, so he already
Speaker 2: had the respect. He didn't have to be anything.
Speaker 9: He tried to give one speech when they did their
Speaker 9: pre Ryder Cup visit a couple weeks earlier, and he
Speaker 9: made it like five words before he broke down crying.
Speaker 2: He was like, don't give speech to Steve. It's fine.
Speaker 2: So you don't need that, you don't need that.
Speaker 9: You just need a comfortable atmosphere and somebody who can
Speaker 9: command respect and who plans like nobody plans, you know,
Speaker 9: Like that's the big thing.
Speaker 3: So a big issue this year and every year when
Speaker 3: it comes to the Ryder Cup captaincy, his Captain's picks.
Speaker 3: They were very hotly discussed this year. During Stricker's tenure,
Speaker 3: his big accomplishment with the captain's picks was selecting Scotti Scheffler. Yeah,
Speaker 3: figuring that out. And so I wonder if you could
Speaker 3: talk about that Scotty Scheffler pick, what was behind it,
Speaker 3: how it represents this new US approach, and whether you
Speaker 3: think that has carried through to the way Zach Johnson
Speaker 3: approached his own picks this year.
Speaker 9: Yeah, yeah, it's I mean, you know, they knew and
Speaker 9: the stats had indicated that Scotty Scheffler was a stud
Speaker 9: and he just hadn't won yet, and obviously he was
Speaker 9: on the verge of winning quite a lot, right, but
Speaker 9: he you know, he had been in the finals of
Speaker 9: the match play that year and he had beaten Polter,
Speaker 9: and he had beaten Ram, you know, like like he
Speaker 9: would again beat Ram in the Ryder Cup. So I
Speaker 9: think you know that not only do they know that
Speaker 9: the guy statistically fit with the profile of the course,
Speaker 9: which the stats, I mean, the stats can show that completely.
Speaker 9: But he was also you know, somebody who was an
Speaker 9: elite player that nobody.
Speaker 2: Kind of recognized quite yet it's an elite player.
Speaker 9: And so yeah, you take that guy, right, you take
Speaker 9: that guy because you say, not only does he fit
Speaker 9: the course, but this partnership in this case with Deshamba
Speaker 9: is gonna work really well.
Speaker 2: The stats guys give it the green light.
Speaker 9: And it's kind of an annual tradition for me to
Speaker 9: complain about captain's picks and be completely wrong, like I
Speaker 9: did it in Paris with Thomas Bjorn's picks. I was like,
Speaker 9: why isn't he picking? Like why is he picking all
Speaker 9: these off form veterans and they all went undefeated? And
Speaker 9: then I was like, you know, Kisner, what a max
Speaker 9: played dog he is. He should have probably been picked
Speaker 9: for this team. And Scheffler was, you know, unbelievable and
Speaker 9: much better than Kisner would have been. And this time
Speaker 9: my complaint was that, you know, moronk I think should
Speaker 9: have made the team over Lowry, although this time I
Speaker 9: think I'm thinking a little more statistically. But but again,
Speaker 9: Lowry's like so close with some members of a team,
Speaker 9: and team chemistry matters, so I'm probably wrong again, But yeah,
Speaker 9: that that captain's pick of Schffler was really good, right,
Speaker 9: and all his he had a ton of rookies, a
Speaker 9: lot of them were captain's picks.
Speaker 2: They all played extremely well.
Speaker 9: It's just everything worked out because basically it was by
Speaker 9: the book statistical stuff with an I also on chemistry.
Speaker 9: So this year is Zach Johnson. You know, maybe his
Speaker 9: like Justin Thomas, was the controversial pick, if you believe.
Speaker 9: I think it was like the most obvious pick in
Speaker 9: the world to make. There's no plan on which I
Speaker 9: think j T shouldn't have been picked. Some people do,
Speaker 9: but you know, they're idiots. It became political, it became
Speaker 9: all this stuff. But no, JT was like, JT is
Speaker 9: one of the best match play golfers that's ever lived
Speaker 9: on the American side in these team matchplay events, and
Speaker 9: so I thought that pick was a no brainer. I
Speaker 9: thought the real, the real controversy was between maybe Cam
Speaker 9: Young and Sam Burns, and there I think you see,
Speaker 9: you know, Sam Burns is close with Scheffler. He's probably
Speaker 9: culturally more aligned with a lot of the guys. He's
Speaker 9: a Southern Christian, right, Like, he's more than Cam Young
Speaker 9: from the mean streets of the Bronx type thing, but
Speaker 9: really like he's more kind of like team chemistry wise,
Speaker 9: he probably fits in just a little better and that
Speaker 9: probably made the decision for them at the end. He's
Speaker 9: also a really good putter, and Cam Young's a really
Speaker 9: good ball striker, so there's different strengths that they might
Speaker 9: have looked at. But yeah, like Keith and Bradley not
Speaker 9: being on the team, you know, there's just a lot
Speaker 9: of little things where these guys are gonna go with
Speaker 9: who they think should go there. And that's why captain's
Speaker 9: picks exist for them and they're you know, the people
Speaker 9: need to get used to the idea of if you
Speaker 9: don't make the top six automatic qualifiers, that's all. That's all,
Speaker 9: that's all it wrote for you. You don't have to
Speaker 9: be picked like just because you won number seven, you
Speaker 9: don't deserve it. You deserve it if you may number six,
Speaker 9: right Like, that's the thing. After that, they're going to
Speaker 9: pick the best people they think for the course, and
Speaker 9: that takes I think a fundamental mind shift that we're
Speaker 9: not quite ready for yet like people saying this guy
Speaker 9: deserve to be on the team. No, you deserve it
Speaker 9: if you make the team period. After that, they're going
Speaker 9: to take who they like. And that's what we saw
Speaker 9: this year on both teams.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And I think that part of why people struggle
Speaker 3: with these picks and this process is that it's a
Speaker 3: combination of two really different things. I think one is
Speaker 3: this statistical approach that is somewhat mysterious. People don't really
Speaker 3: know the details of it, but supposedly it is based
Speaker 3: on hard science.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 3: On the other hand, there's the Aisinger influence of the
Speaker 3: pod system of making players feel comfortable as though they're
Speaker 3: around people who are friends and making sure that the
Speaker 3: team chemistry is right. And that's not hard science, and
Speaker 3: it can be accused of being a kind of buddy system.
Speaker 3: But I think that when you look at these picks JT,
Speaker 3: Sam Burns, these are guys who are you know that
Speaker 3: the statistics would support. In the case of Sam Burns,
Speaker 3: with JT, you've got a career of being a great golfer.
Speaker 3: But I think, maybe most importantly, I bet that these
Speaker 3: two picks in particular are players that the players who
Speaker 3: were already on the team, said this guy needs to
Speaker 3: be on the team. He's the best player. I want
Speaker 3: to play with him.
Speaker 2: Yeah, one hundred percent.
Speaker 9: I mean Shane Lowry is actually the best example of
Speaker 9: the buddy system this year, right, Like, probably statistically he
Speaker 9: probably didn't belong on that team, right, But yeah, no,
Speaker 9: I mean, the thing is the Buddy system. The buddy
Speaker 9: system is used as a pejorative, but team chemistry really
Speaker 9: matters in the Ryder Cup, and so if you have
Speaker 9: somebody like nobody likes, it doesn't make sense to put
Speaker 9: them on the team because whatever value they bring is
Speaker 9: going to be probably a net negative to whatever, you know,
Speaker 9: awkwardness or whatever they bring to the team room. And
Speaker 9: that does create weird situations where you're like, well, yeah,
Speaker 9: I guess it is kind of there is an element
Speaker 9: of the buddy system there, but I don't know competitively
Speaker 9: if that's a bad thing. Now, the more captain's picks
Speaker 9: you add, the more the buddy system can come into place.
Speaker 7: Right.
Speaker 9: If we said tomorrow there's just twelve captains picks, there's
Speaker 9: no qualifying for the Ryder Cup, then you're like, well,
Speaker 9: maybe Brian Harmon wouldn't make the team. Maybe Wyndam Clark
Speaker 9: wouldn't have made the team. You just kind of don't know.
Speaker 2: So it's good.
Speaker 9: I think it's good that they're automatic qualifying spots. I
Speaker 9: think they've found a nice balance now and I hope
Speaker 9: they don't tip it anymore in the other direction. But
Speaker 9: I think I think this allows a certain freedom. But
Speaker 9: what that freedom is is the freedom to create, either
Speaker 9: statistically or chemistry the team that you like. And so yeah,
Speaker 9: it's gonna make it more and more likely that JT.
Speaker 2: You know, does somebody all.
Speaker 9: I think the stats and the chemistry support they want
Speaker 9: them on a team, The players want them on a team.
Speaker 9: They probably want Sam Burns on the team, right Obviously
Speaker 9: the Europeans like Roy Macroy, want Shane Lowry on the
Speaker 9: team badly. And that stuff matters. I mean, that stuff
Speaker 9: comes into plane. It's it's called the human element, and
Speaker 9: that's just going to always be.
Speaker 2: Part of it. And it's been, by the way, it
Speaker 2: was part of it long before they had cap you know,
Speaker 2: it's always been a part of it, all right.
Speaker 3: So we've got a pretty good sense for the current
Speaker 3: state of the American team. How would you evaluate where
Speaker 3: Team Europe is right now? At this particular point in
Speaker 3: its history.
Speaker 9: Well in their history there. I think subtly they're on
Speaker 9: the EBB. But you have to kind of take a
Speaker 9: leap of faith to believe that because they still haven't
Speaker 9: lost at home. Right, Once they lose at home, then
Speaker 9: my theory will be proved correct. Right if they lost
Speaker 9: in Italy, then you'd say, okay, what we saw, what
Speaker 9: we thought where the general trends are now happening. Even
Speaker 9: if it's a close Ryder Cup, you could maybe and
Speaker 9: you let's say they won fifteen to thirteen or fourteen
Speaker 9: and a half to thirteen and a half, you could say, well,
Speaker 9: that's different too, because we've had four home blowouts coming
Speaker 9: before this and now we see our first Ryder Cup
Speaker 9: since you know Medina. But I think at the same time,
Speaker 9: you know, they look a lot better right now than
Speaker 9: they looked a year ago. I mean, everybody's on form.
Speaker 9: Like you saw it happened at the BMWPGA. You saw
Speaker 9: how well the guys, some of the guys played in
Speaker 9: the playoffs. They're all on form. They have like a
Speaker 9: top line of great players. They're weaker down the ranks,
Speaker 9: you know than the Americans, but even their weaker players
Speaker 9: seem like they're doing pretty well, and you know, a
Speaker 9: pick like Aberg is really just so smart and potentially
Speaker 9: could pay off in such a big way for Luke Donald,
Speaker 9: and that that's outside the box.
Speaker 2: I mean that may not have.
Speaker 9: Happened even four years ago, and so it just shows
Speaker 9: you how things have changed and how analytics and stuff
Speaker 9: like that makes a big difference.
Speaker 2: So I still think I may end up.
Speaker 9: I still haven't decided, but I may end up when
Speaker 9: I write my prediction piece picking the Americans to win.
Speaker 9: But right now, it's like gun to your head. You're like, man,
Speaker 9: the home field advantage is so big. I kind of
Speaker 9: think Europe might still do it. It's just really toss
Speaker 9: up in my head. So I give you a cry
Speaker 9: because a while a guy, like a year ago, it
Speaker 9: seemed like, oh boy, these guys are really they're gonna
Speaker 9: get blown off. I don't care where they're playing, they're
Speaker 9: gonna be blown off the course. Now I don't. I
Speaker 9: don't think so at all.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And I think that you know that the disadvantage
Speaker 3: for Europe still seems to be in those middle ranks
Speaker 3: of players. When you compare the middle of each team,
Speaker 3: the Americans look a lot stronger with guys like Chofle
Speaker 3: and can't Ley, you know who are you know, kind
Speaker 3: of in the middle ranks of the American team right now,
Speaker 3: but you know, frankly much better than the guys who
Speaker 3: are in similar positions on the European roster. But Europe
Speaker 3: has maybe three of the four best players in the
Speaker 3: world right now in Rory, Rahm and Hoveland. I mean,
Speaker 3: talk about a corps of leaders that is just great.
Speaker 3: And then you've got some of these young guys who
Speaker 3: are rounding into their prime form at just the right moment,
Speaker 3: and so you have a combination that that very well
Speaker 3: could be a great, great team. Now, the interesting thing
Speaker 3: to me about the European team right now is the
Speaker 3: effect of Live right. It has removed Westwood, Garcia, Poulter,
Speaker 3: Casey from the equation and maybe, you know, taking out
Speaker 3: Lee Westwood is sort of a net benefit. Sorry, I
Speaker 3: don't know why I'm owning Lee Westwood so hard on this.
Speaker 2: Podcast, but.
Speaker 3: I just remember his performance at Hazel Tam Like, why
Speaker 3: would you ever want that? But Sergio Garcia maybe the
Speaker 3: best Ryder Cup player of all time. Ian Poulter certainly
Speaker 3: in that conversation as well. Ian Poulter said something to
Speaker 3: you for this book that was very resonant, where you
Speaker 3: asked him, you know, do you think that the Ryder
Speaker 3: Cup matters to the younger generation as much as it
Speaker 3: matters to you? And Poulter said something to the effect of,
Speaker 3: you know, don't worry about it. It's it's my fucking
Speaker 3: job to let them know. Now he's not kind of around, So, like,
Speaker 3: what do you think the effect of that will be
Speaker 3: taking some of these veterans off the board, who who
Speaker 3: may not have been good captains picks this time around,
Speaker 3: who may not have been great playing contributors to the team,
Speaker 3: but who certainly would have been vice captains or involved
Speaker 3: in some way. Do you think that has an effect
Speaker 3: on the European side more than say, taking DJ out
Speaker 3: on the American side.
Speaker 9: We'll have so on one hand, you can't underestimate the
Speaker 9: influence of losing guys like that, And maybe maybe none
Speaker 9: of them would have been players this year, but you
Speaker 9: would certainly want them around, right like Sergio and Polter
Speaker 9: and all those guys. But I will say this, europe
Speaker 9: historically always functions best when they have a chip on
Speaker 9: their shoulders. And if I were Paul McGinley or Luke Donald,
Speaker 9: what I'd be saying is, these guys abandon you. The
Speaker 9: Americans think they're king shit, and they think that nobody
Speaker 9: believes in you. You're the underdogs, Like this is this
Speaker 9: is our time to go out and be wolves, right, Like,
Speaker 9: I mean, just to be kind of just really like no,
Speaker 9: like nobody believes you. It's the ultimate bulletin board material.
Speaker 9: You lost all your best players, right, they're not around
Speaker 9: a bunch of young guys and all this stuff and
Speaker 9: it's not really true, right Like, they're as you said,
Speaker 9: they've got some amazing players on their team. They have
Speaker 9: a home crowd that's gonna be supporting them like crazy,
Speaker 9: and that is undeniably.
Speaker 2: Significant in these things. It's huge.
Speaker 9: But I would be playing that card like crazy. And
Speaker 9: if they can do it successfully, which pretty easy when
Speaker 9: you've got America, America is the ultimate juggernaut. They're the
Speaker 9: ultimate evil villain, the ultimate evil empire in sports for
Speaker 9: other people, not for us, but for for outsiders. Yeah,
Speaker 9: if you can do that, I mean, the motivation should
Speaker 9: just be incredible. I mean it's and these guys know
Speaker 9: what to do, like you don't think rom and Rory
Speaker 9: can motivate those guys like you don't think Luke Donald.
Speaker 9: Luke Donald's like kind of an underdog captain. He was
Speaker 9: a number one player in the world, but he never
Speaker 9: won a major, right, Like He's like, all of these
Speaker 9: guys should just be like raring to go. I just
Speaker 9: think you're gonna see so much passion from them that
Speaker 9: I think that's one of the most exciting things that
Speaker 9: America is gonna take a punch at some point, the Americans,
Speaker 9: if they win, they're gonna have to do it after they.
Speaker 2: Take a punch.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah. And Luke Donald, he's almost like a European
Speaker 3: version of a Steve Stricker captain. You know, different personality,
Speaker 3: but I think probably very organized, very very smart, and
Speaker 3: not somebody who brings a lot of like Tom Watson
Speaker 3: ish ego into the into the team room, and so
Speaker 3: he could be obviously extremely effective. I don't really know
Speaker 3: what to make of Zach Johnson at this point as
Speaker 3: a captain, but you can't judge a book by its
Speaker 3: cover with these kinds of things. Obviously a lot of
Speaker 3: people judged Steve Stricker's ability to be a great captain
Speaker 3: ahead of time, just based on personality, and that didn't
Speaker 3: turn out to be really a relevant consideration. Now, at
Speaker 3: the beginning of this conversation, you indicated that you think
Speaker 3: we're we're at a moment right now where there's a
Speaker 3: this is a historical juncture where the Americans are going
Speaker 3: to be stronger than Europe going forward, and that would
Speaker 3: be that would be a major change, right because that
Speaker 3: has not been the case for the past thirty years,
Speaker 3: And so you're making an argument that we're at that
Speaker 3: hinge moment right now. Now, I would just point out
Speaker 3: that American fans and American journalists tend to be tend
Speaker 3: to overreact a little bit to an American win in
Speaker 3: the Ryder Cup and say this is going to be
Speaker 3: the case forever now. But then all of a sudden
Speaker 3: we go back to a European venue and it's just like,
Speaker 3: why did we ever think that? So, what's your case
Speaker 3: for why it's different now than it was after Hazelteine
Speaker 3: that it's different now than it was after any of
Speaker 3: the Ryder Cups that America has won recently. Why is
Speaker 3: this the hinge moment? Do you think?
Speaker 9: So let me look at let me look at the
Speaker 9: thing to make sure, I've got this right. But one
Speaker 9: thing I would say is that, yeah, so I'm looking
Speaker 9: at the last time the US went back to back
Speaker 9: Ryder Cups at home was nineteen seventy.
Speaker 2: Nine and nineteen eighty three.
Speaker 9: They've done that now, right, that wasn't something they did
Speaker 9: and they won both of the convincingly. I have a
Speaker 9: really hard time imagining Europe winning a Ryder Cup in
Speaker 9: America in like the next decade. I think it'd be
Speaker 9: really very very difficult. It would take extraordinary circumstances for
Speaker 9: them to do that. I just think, yeah, I mean, look,
Speaker 9: you're absolutely right that there is a call it like
Speaker 9: the English soccer disease, where like they always think they're
Speaker 9: gonna win the World Cup and it's shocked when they don't. Yeah,
Speaker 9: it's always coming home and Americans are like that. I
Speaker 9: remember in Paris, you know, people going over there, like
Speaker 9: a lot of media people, you both know, being like
Speaker 9: this is absolutely going to be a destruction. Then you
Speaker 9: go you said, you go there and go, oh, yeah,
Speaker 9: they won the first session, but then it was four
Speaker 9: to oh in the afternoon to the Europeans and you're like.
Speaker 2: Oh, what happens?
Speaker 9: Like it's like a big shock every time that these
Speaker 9: these underdogs managed to be competitive. My argument for why
Speaker 9: I'm not falling to that same trap is that just
Speaker 9: I think I've seen evidence over since the task Force
Speaker 9: was initiated that we just keep learning from our successes
Speaker 9: and our failures. So Paris was it's the ultimate thing.
Speaker 9: It's the wrench in the works to my theory. Right,
Speaker 9: You're like, well, yeah, they're so good, why did they
Speaker 9: just go get their asses kicked again in Europe? And
Speaker 9: it's like, well, I think the reason is, of course,
Speaker 9: the course set up, the fact that nobody got out
Speaker 9: there to play beforehand, except like Justin Thomas, right he
Speaker 9: was I think he played the French Open that year.
Speaker 9: The fact that it's just bad luck with the captain's picks, right,
Speaker 9: like bad luck to have Bryson and Tiger and Phil
Speaker 9: they were all like, Tiger was tired, Phil was not
Speaker 9: in form. Bryson had just won these things, but he
Speaker 9: wasn't suited for the course at all. It was just
Speaker 9: this variety of X factors that every single one went
Speaker 9: against the US. And I think it's a sample sized thing.
Speaker 9: It's like if you run the Ryder Cup simulation, a
Speaker 9: thousand times. Sometimes even if you're really well prepared and
Speaker 9: have a good captain, you're gonna just run into these
Speaker 9: circumstances that you can't control. So I think, to me,
Speaker 9: that's an outlier. But if you look historically, it's not
Speaker 9: an outlier at all. They keep they haven't won in
Speaker 9: Europe for thirty years. It's the opposite of an outlier.
Speaker 9: It's the most predictable thing that could have happened. But
Speaker 9: I think they're ready to overturn that because of how
Speaker 9: much they keep learning. Because you've got again a good system,
Speaker 9: Captain Zach Johnson sane, sensible, captain's picks this time really
Speaker 9: a cute sense of what happened in Paris. So you're
Speaker 9: gonna be ready for that kind of thing. You know
Speaker 9: what the course is going to look like. Strategically, you're
Speaker 9: gonna be better off. I think like it's the big test,
Speaker 9: and so it's all theoretical for the next week and
Speaker 9: a half. It's till it's put to the practice and
Speaker 9: it's still a small sample size. It could the same
Speaker 9: thing could happen, but I think they're ready to do it.
Speaker 9: It's leap of faith stuff. It's a leap of faith.
Speaker 9: You don't know until it happens. But that's my that's
Speaker 9: my best guess.
Speaker 3: All right, So Shane, this podcast is gonna come out,
Speaker 3: you know, mid week Ryder Cup week. What are some
Speaker 3: of the things that you're doing in the in the
Speaker 3: run up to the Ryder Cup that people should check out?
Speaker 2: Oh God, digging up any story that seems vaguely, vaguely
Speaker 2: relevant or exciting. That's what I'll be doing next week.
Speaker 9: You get to Thursday and Wednesday and Thursday of the
Speaker 9: Ryder Cup week and you're like, oh my god, play
Speaker 9: some golf already. It's it's the longest week. It's like
Speaker 9: trying to stir like any any little It starts.
Speaker 3: On Friday too, Like with majors, at least, it starts
Speaker 3: on Thursday and gives you that, you know, extra day
Speaker 3: of like not having to spin your wheels.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 9: I could have gone in on Sunday this year, and
Speaker 9: I was like, now I'm going in Monday. We're gonna
Speaker 9: shorten this week a little bit. I'm gonna get there
Speaker 9: Monday check in and that won't hit the ground running
Speaker 9: until Tuesday because it's like, yeah, it's just not much
Speaker 9: happening and it's all hype. The British press will look
Speaker 9: for anything like little that the Americans say, you know,
Speaker 9: there's all these little.
Speaker 2: Things that happened.
Speaker 9: But everybody's also so cautious now, right, like nobody's gonna
Speaker 9: say anything stupid probably, But also they restrict media access
Speaker 9: to an insane degree at the behest of the players
Speaker 9: and captains they don't want, so it's like very limited
Speaker 9: what you can do. So you're you're like, they're in
Speaker 9: my opinion' they're like twiddling your thumbs. So anyway, the
Speaker 9: golf Die just coverage of Ryder Cup stuff has been awesome.
Speaker 9: There's like, you know, I just wrote a piece today
Speaker 9: about like what happened in ninety three the last time
Speaker 9: the Europeans won.
Speaker 2: What was that?
Speaker 9: Like what are the worst caps? I mean you just
Speaker 9: go on the site now, like the stuff is. I'm
Speaker 9: reading it all and digesting it. Luke Credenin's making videos, people,
Speaker 9: Joel Bill, everybody's writing these great things. So it's like
Speaker 9: a Ryder Cup nerds dream and right now is the
Speaker 9: great time to do it. And hopefully we're gonna keep
Speaker 9: doing stories like that because you really start getting to
Speaker 9: the bottom of the well, once you're at Thursday, you're
Speaker 9: like please, Like on Thursday, you're just praying please let
Speaker 9: them set the lineup so we have actual news to cover.
Speaker 9: But yeah, maybe I think there's gonna be a lot
Speaker 9: of local stuff, like Italian stuff we'll be looking at.
Speaker 9: We're definitely gonna be doing our Ryder Cup Radicals podcast,
Speaker 9: which has been really fun with me and Luke and Joel.
Speaker 2: So yeah, we'll have stuff for you. Absolutely, we'll have
Speaker 2: stuff for you.
Speaker 3: Perfect. All right, Well, thank you for coming on the pod.
Speaker 2: Yeah, thanks Garrett.
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