Every so often, a small group of people within the world of professional golf will behave in a manner that makes you question why you spend so much time caring about the game.

They essentially view the sport as an accounting exercise, a series of profits and losses, and it is clear they spent very little time thinking about the people who drive those figures. There is an assumption, one that is rarely questioned, that market forces will always reward them, and that a backlash will never emerge.

On an intellectual level, I actually agree with Patrick Cantlay and Xander Schauffele (and even Phil Mickelson!) about the value of labor. People’s interest in golf does generate billions of dollars in revenue, and it’s perfectly fine to have occasional discussions about how that revenue should be distributed.

Having that discussion in the middle of a Ryder Cup, however, is enough to make you want to puke.

It would be wise for players to remind themselves of this reality: You have every right to care about how much money you make, but fans are not going to care. Virtually no one watches professional golf because they’re in awe of the purse sizes or appearance fees, as the ratings for LIV Golf over the last two years have clearly demonstrated.

By all means, fight for what you think you deserve. As Mickelson hinted at this week, he’s still making chess moves. But caveat emptor to anyone on that journey.

It’s easy to be a curmudgeon, of course, a trap I fall into from time to time. You can spend a lot of time grumbling about the stuff that annoys you, or you can choose to appreciate what brings you joy. It’s an exercise that got me thinking this week: What did I see in golf the last few months that made me grateful the sport is such a big part of my life?

Campos is, admittedly, not someone I was aware of before the Korn Ferry Tour Finals aired last week. To describe him as a PGA Tour journeyman would be generous. He has been a professional since 2011, but in that time, he’s made little more than a ripple in his career. He has bounced around golf’s minor leagues, grinding in virtual anonymity, occasionally getting status on the PGA Tour and then letting it slip from his fingers. There have been injuries and slumps and bogeys, and also just enough flashes of 

 to keep hope alive. In 2021, he led the Puerto Rico Open after 54 holes and finished 3rd. A month later, he finished 2nd to Joel Dahmen in the Corales Puntacana Resort and Club Championship, a stretch that was good enough to make him feel like he’d turned a corner. Every golfer has been there. You grab on to a certain swing thought — or feel — and convince yourself you’ve cracked the code, that you’re an artist with an iron in your hands. This is going to carry you to the promised land, you tell yourself, knowing deep down it’s a lie.

Whatever Campos found those two weeks wasn’t sustainable. It so rarely is for mortals. He missed 10 of his next 15 cuts. Now deep into his 30s, his body was riddled with constant pain. He went back to the Korn Ferry Tour, and made just five cuts in 19 starts. He was teetering on the verge of despair. Time, he understood, was running out.

He hired a trainer. A nutritionist. A chiropractor. He went all in on 2023. And for the first time in years, he was able to play a full season without injuries. He played solid throughout the Korn Ferry Tour season, compiling enough points to enter the Finals in 23rd place, seemingly in good position to earn his PGA Tour card (awarded to those who finish in the Top 30.) But over the course of the tournament, the dream started to slip away. A few wayward swings here and there, and he slid down the standings. The pressure was mounting.


He came to the very last hole needing to make a birdie to finish 30th. He knew it, too. Campos stood over an 8-foot putt for what felt like a century. He took one last look, then sent it — and all his hopes — trickling toward the hole.

He was 31st in the standings. Campos crouched down, put his elbows on his knees and looked like golf (in all its cruelty) had broken him.


I have never had a putt that meant even a fraction as much, that truly mattered beyond my own oafish pride, but I understood exactly how Campos felt in that moment. His nerves had dashed all his hopes down the stretch. Knowing you are mentally fragile, and being unable to do anything about it in the moment, might be golf’s most devilish trick.


“Horrible,” Campos said, when asked to describe how he felt after the miss. “Honestly, horrible.”

The story could have ended there. It probably should have, because it usually does. But an unlikely 2-stroke penalty by another player in the Korn Ferry Finals, Shad Tuten, offered a reprieve. Tuten had taken an improper drop on the 15th hole, a misunderstanding with no advantage gained, but a clear violation.

When all the accounting was done, Tuten was outside the Top 30. Campos was in.

None of this would have ended up on my radar if Campos hadn’t agreed to an interview with Chantel McCabe of Golf Channel. The interview — 

which you should watch here, because reading the quotes could never convey them properly

 — was like watching a middling professional golfer perform a masterful version of Hamlet. You can watch Campos wrestling with joy and anguish and love and bewilderment. He is on the verge of tears the entire time. His family had come to Indiana to support him. He’d felt like he’d put them through a lot to chase this dream. Now he was trying to wrap his brain around the idea that it was okay to celebrate with them.

“God, it’s tough,” he says. “I’m tired. It’s been a long year. A lot of thoughts, positive and negative. I just kept on thinking about the work I put in this year. God, I put in so much work. I’m really happy it paid off.”

It was, for me, a reminder of how tormenting golf can be, how much heartache it can cause, how embarrassing it is to feel like you’re going to throw up in the middle of your backswing.


And yet there are the rare times when the sun shines on you and you get an unlikely reprieve.

Luke Donald was a little surprised by the question.

The Ryder Cup victory press conference was in full swing, celebratory beers had already been poured, and the European party was just on the other side of the doors. Shane Lowry and Tyrrell Hatton looked, mentally, like they were already there. The mood of the room was jubilant.

But then Donald, the European captain, fielded a question from a perceptive journalist that gave him pause: 

Have your parents been on your mind at all today? If they were alive, what would they think about their son in this moment?

I was sitting maybe 20 feet from Donald as he turned this question over in his mind. It was obvious he was genuinely contemplating it, and he was moved by the thought. Donald’s father, Colin, died unexpectedly 12 years ago, at a time when Donald was the No. 1 ranked player in the world. His mother, Ann, passed away more recently. As he was speaking, Lowry reached over and put a hand on Donald’s shoulder.

“I miss them, of course,” Donald said. “I would have loved to share this moment with them.”


One of my favorite things about golf is the way it stitches together generations, not just of parents and their children, but also of the people who taught you the game or put a club in your hands for the first time and turned you loose. Donald understands this better than most. It’s why he surprised his team on the eve of the Ryder Cup with individual 2-minute videos he’d commissioned for each player. In the clips, family members and loved ones spoke directly to each European Ryder Cup member, saying how proud they were.


By the time it was over, most of the players on the receiving end were in tears. I thought about those videos throughout the week when I watched Jon Rahm, after his matches were over, dart around the course as a fan, bouncing from tee box to green to offer fist pumps of encouragement for every teammate he could find.


“It's really, really important to not just play for each other but play for those that mean the most to you,” Donald said. “I think that's super powerful.”

Golf wasn’t everything to Donald’s parents. He offered that up as a reminder. They wanted him to lead not just a balanced life, but an honorable one. In the weeks following the Ryder Cup, I kept returning to the idea that the perfect man to lead the team had not been Europe’s first choice, how that distinction had gone instead to Henrik Stenson.

Stenson had lost the job when he couldn’t resist the allure of a lucrative guaranteed contract with LIV Golf. He made a decision that was the right one for himself. Donald stepped in and not only rescued the European Tour from embarrassment, but he did such an impressive job, that there were already calls for him to keep the gig for another spin in 2025. They would have appreciated the win, he said, but they would have been even more proud of how he conducted himself as captain.


“I think that's why we always play this game,” Donald said. “It's not just for ourselves. That's what makes the Ryder Cup so special –  is we play it for the people that mean so much to us. Certainly, my parents meant a lot to me. Yeah, they would be very proud.”

Two weeks away from your kids can feel like an eternity when they’re growing up.

A trip to Rome to cover the Ryder Cup, then a buddies golf trip to Forest Dunes right after, sounded like an enviable adventure when I booked it. But by the end of the fortnight, I was short on sleep, my feet were on fire, and I was missing my family. When my flight touched down at BWI, I was ready to put golf on the backburner for a bit.

Time doesn’t stand still, however, just because you’re exhausted.


No one — no matter how much they love you — wants to hear that you might need a vacation to recover from your vacation. And time certainly doesn’t stand still when you’re an 11-year-old girl who loves golf and you want to show your dad all the progress you’ve made in your game since he flew across the Atlantic Ocean. So the day after I returned from my golfing sojourn, I climbed in the car with my daughter and headed (once again) to the golf course. She was slated to play a match in her weekly league, this one against two high school boys.


On the rare occasions when I write about my daughter’s golf game, I don’t want to deceive you into thinking she’s some kind of prodigy. She is not. When Lexi Thompson was 12 years old, she played in the U.S. Women’s Open; six months from now, my daughter will be that same age, and I’ll be grateful just to buy a ticket for us. (Breaking 100 in tournament conditions from the junior tees is about where we’re at right now, which is still a thrill.)

It’s a trip, however, to monitor a young golfer’s progress at this age. While I was overseas, Keegan’s other set of parents sent me a series of videos of her most recent swings. (Youth sports are often the shared love language between divorced families, if you’re not aware.) I could already tell from the grainy footage the ball was jumping off her clubface with more speed, but to see it in person — like when she smoked a 3 wood onto the final green when I was on the verge of telling her to lay up — felt like witnessing a magic trick.

One second, the magician throws a sheet over a young girl and waves his arms around as a distraction. The next minute a young woman emerges. The magician is time, and you can’t quite piece together how he does it.

In a match against two high school boys, my daughter was firing at tucked pins, rolling in birdies, taking deep breaths and refusing to back down. As hard as they tried, they couldn’t beat her. The word pride felt like an insufficient descriptor.

At the Ryder Cup on Saturday, I watched Rory McIlroy hit one of the best shots I’ve ever seen someone hit, a majestic 3 wood into the 16th green that carried 300 yards and tumbled out of the sky like a raindrop. An entire amphitheater of people went bonkers. You could feel the ground shake. My friend Kyle Porter and I were still talking about it a week later. It was the best 3 wood I’ve ever seen in person.

It was also the second-best 3 wood I saw this month.

There is no shortage of joy in the game, even as money threatens to consume so many parts of it.


You just have to be open to it and remind yourself where to look.

The Prevailing Magic of Golf

Sitting on the interview dais with a Peroni and reflecting on what could very well be his final Ryder Cup, Justin Rose helped it click for me.


When asked what unites the European Ryder Cup team, Rose thought for a moment and gave an answer about “team culture” worthy of the Harvard Business School.


, but the upshot (with insightful additions from Rory McIlroy and Jon Rahm) was this: To a European player, the Ryder Cup is about history. More specifically, it’s about your chance to add to that history. It’s about playing a small role in a collective story that has been going on for decades. The entire privilege of the week is having the chance to help write the next chapter.


During the ranging answer, Rose, Rahm and McIlroy rattled off the names of the players responsible for making them love the Ryder Cup. Seve Ballesteros, of course. Jose Maria Olazabal and others.

“We're caretakers of this European jersey right now,” McIlroy said. “And we're hopefully going to pass it on in the future in a better spot than where we found it.”

“It's the ability to walk through those gates and those doors and forget about who you are outside of this week. What you have done or what you may do afterwards, really truly doesn't matter.”

There’s a trope that gets thrown around far too often about the Ryder Cup: The Europeans win the biennial event because they have more fun in the team room. They sing songs and give each other shit and they just look like they’re closer than the Americans. It’s an absurdly oversimplified way to look at things and it discounts both the immense talent on the European side and the two previous home blowouts in the United States.

But let’s be clear: The Europeans have now won eight of the last 11. They’ve won three in the United States since the last time the U.S. won on the road.

The team room stuff is not totally untrue; in my opinion, it’s just a bit incomplete. Listen to the players and they’ll tell you that the Europeans win more Ryder Cups partially because of the culture, but mostly because it’s been there for more than 40 years.


They meticulously plan everything, not with the expectation of winning every single one, but to make sure that the close ones break their way. They have continually made their players comfortable and confident to show up and play their best. Every one of those winning teams ends up feeling like it’s so much more than the sum of its parts.

Mine is armchair analysis, of course, but so often the Americans, by comparison, end up looking desperate to Not Lose. Soly said it well 

 “All the things Europe does culture-wise look like they lead to confidence… Everything the U.S. does on their side looks like it leads to pressure.”

Listening to Rose, Rahm and McIlroy rattle off the hallowed names that built the European Ryder Cup culture, my American heart sank at the idea of the U.S. team trying to do the same. And it makes sense why. Even as a U.S. fan, the American moments that instinctively come to mind first for me are… Not Good.

Hunter Mahan, rain suits, Tom Watson, Hal Sutton. Tiger. Phil. Paris.

Even the good stuff involves a bunch of characters that the PGA Tour is currently trying to expunge from golf history. How can any of that become a rallying cry?

Which is why now has to be the time to restart the mindset. To get beaten down in Italy with that U.S. team is such a clear signal that something non-golf is going on here. And fixing it has to start now, while that feeling of getting beaten in Europe for the first time is still fresh in the minds of Scottie Scheffler, Max Homa, Xander Schauffle, Patrick Cantlay, Collin Morikawa and others.

McIlroy said in the press conference Sunday night that, because of all the home team advantages, winning a Ryder Cup on the road has become one of the most impressive feats in all of sports. If the American team wants to do it, it needs to start building an actual culture. The kind that takes more than a three-day scouting trip or a dinner party at Jack Nicklaus’ house to create.


When American fans talk about the camaraderie of the European team, the implication is very clear. If the U.S. team had a few chants and songs of their own, this 30-year European drought would have ended by now. But spend any time with the American team and you’ll learn quickly how different they are from their Euro counterparts. The worst idea, in my opinion, is to try to create some Kirkland Signature knock-off version of the European team culture.


It has to look and feel entirely different. And the few leaders the U.S. team possesses are the ones that are going to have to lead the charge.

Be honest about what happened this week.


Usually with European Ryder Cup losses there are plenty of outside forces to blame – a tricked up course set up or a captain that glitched out. That wasn’t the case in Italy.

You can squabble over a few of the pairings or invoke Lucas Glover or Keegan Bradley. Maybe they would have made a difference, but surely not enough to change the result.


What was far more interesting to me was the invasion of the body snatchers that happened across the first three sessions. From a golf perspective, that wasn’t actually Scottie Scheffler out there. Or Xander. Or Brooks Koepka. Or Sam Burns. Or Jordan Spieth. Or Rickie Fowler. Whoever those guys were, they were bad. The U.S. team can have all the data in the world, but it is entirely useless if different human beings show up to the first tee.

So what happened? Was it as simple as the moment, the situation and the opposing crowds being too big? Was it competitive rust from a long layoff? Was it illness? Was it jet lag? Overconfidence? Did you care too much? Did you care too little?


There may be a few outlier excuses from this week, but none of them would explain the last 30 years of Ryder Cups. They don’t explain why the same thing that happened at this event to Tiger Woods, Phil Mickelson, Jim Furyk and others is now happening to an entirely different crop of U.S. players.


It hasn’t been three decades of lucky bounces and unlikely holed putts for the Europeans. So what is it? Take some notes, get in a room and share your thoughts. Show some humility and honesty and fix it instead of showing up in 4 years assuming THIS NEXT group is different.

Things are not as far off as people think. Once they got comfortable, the U.S. split the final 20 points of this Ryder Cup on the road. If they could have gotten off to even a mediocre start, who knows how the final day shakes out? Instead, the thing was essentially over before it began.

The other thing they need to be honest about is whatever the hell is going on behind the scenes. The anonymous sources in 

 are easy to swat away. It’s a little different when 

Stefan Schauffle, Xander's dad and de facto agent, goes on the record

 with similar takes about paying players and not knowing if Xander was going to be on the team just weeks beforehand.


 Max Homa continually refuted reports that there was any division in the team and I take him at his word that these distractions didn’t make their way into the team room. But the amount of smoke that’s building around those two makes it clear that these guys are making somebody’s life more difficult behind the scenes. If those headaches make their way to the tournament organizers, the captain, or countless other people, it’s hard to think they don’t become an overall negative timesuck on the organization as a whole.


I’m not going to pretend like the Ryder Cup is some scrappy upstart non-profit. I totally get the cynicism of any player who wants to get paid for helping to build this marketing behemoth (even if this conversation is one you will never, ever, ever, ever win in the court of public opinion). The Europeans see a home Ryder Cup as a way to fund and sustain the DP World Tour, the tour they came up playing in their home countries. What connection does Xander Schuaffle or Patrick Cantlay feel to the PGA of America and its coffers?

While personally I think this whole conversation is a massive distraction emblematic of the exact thing that has made large portions of the U.S. team so unlikable, it’s probably not something that’s going away soon considering the rest of the pro golf landscape. It needs to be figured out as quickly as possible by either: a) Re-allocating the 20 percent of revenues that gets paid to the PGA Tour as a licensing fee for using “its” players or b) Helping players see the light on all of the things the PGA of America does in order to make the game of golf better.

The longer that conversation is a thing, even among a few key players, the more obvious it is that winning is not the priority.


The Europeans’ identity is based on being a part of history. As discussed, the U.S. Ryder Cup history isn’t a great headspace in which to hang out. It feels like they need to focus on a very different rallying cry.

Every single American player’s career lives in the shadow of one player. He’s the guy that sucks up all the oxygen, the guy they all watched on TV. He’s the guy that inspired them to learn how to play, how to dress and how to club twirl. He’s the guy that got to 15 majors, an utterly psychedelic number that’s impossible to comprehend in modern golf.

But at Adare Manor in four years, the American players have a chance to work together to do something Tiger Woods wasn’t ever able to accomplish. Let that opportunity sink in and figure out how to use it.

Nobody on the American team is going to win 15 majors in their career. But together they do have this chance to be a part of what would become one of the biggest moments in American golf history.


With Tiger and Phil officially moved on, it feels like this group is the one to start fresh and begin their own story on the U.S. side. The Europeans are the team that plays to honor their childhood heroes? Then start over and focus on becoming the guys that Team USA is talking about 30 years from now.

Sell Tiger Woods on the next two captaincies.

It feels like there are two ways to go from here with the U.S. captaincy.


The first way is to continue the trajectory that the U.S. team is on: Using the role as some sort of weird lifetime achievement award for inoffensive forty-somethings.


Continuing down that road brings up a list of really nice guys that I frankly struggle to picture having any kind of motivational relevance within the American team. Stewart Cink. Matt Kuchar. Brandt Snedeker. Things of that nature.

Most of the other assistant captains that were put up this year have already been a captain (Steve Stricker, Jim Furyk, Davis Love III). Despite three successful Presidents Cups, Fred Couples has never led a Ryder Cup team. But I can’t imagine there’s some secret knowledge or system he’s yet to impart on all the teams with which he’s been an assistant.

Between the PGA Tour negotiations, launching TGL and becoming somewhat of a mentor for younger players, it’s clear that Tiger Woods’ injuries have helped him embrace more of a behind-the-scenes role. We know he’s going to be a captain eventually, as he was for the Presidents Cup in 2019, which he seemed to absolutely adore. Why not pitch him the captaincy in this way—as a four-year term singularly focused on first keeping the Europeans from breaking the stalemate at Bethpage and then figuring out how to crack the code for the U.S. at Adare Manor.

We all like to laugh at the Navy SEAL stuff. But Tiger is clearly interested in that sense of team structure. Imagine what it would look like if he turned his energy and his one-track mind toward the goal of building a culture from the ground up, learning how to be an effective leader and starting a new chapter of American golf. If he agreed, I think he would get started before the phone call ended.


Read Rahm’s quote again about forgetting what you’ve done before you walk in the team room. Tiger is the only guy with a presence and an aura big enough to drown out the U.S. team’s sense of individuality. But at this stage in his career, he seems sincerely more interested in passing his insights onto the next generation, rather than walling himself off to chase stroke play trophies.


What better way to scratch his competitive itch and keep himself inside the game than to tackle a problem like this with the best young players America has?

And if he’s not into it, please think outside the box. Find someone young enough to relate to the players who will treat the job of captaincy the same way Paul McGinley and Luke Donald did: As a job.

Continue The Process and build for the future.

By all accounts, the U.S. has made a big jump towards evening the playing field with the Europeans on the analytics side of things, which needs to continue. But it still seems like there is more to be done.

One of the best things I saw in Rome was the fact that Rasmus Højgaard, who spent two years trying to make the team and saw his brother Nicolai picked instead, was out at Marco Simone, driving golf carts for Team Europe. He was in uniform, he was grabbing waters and he was part of the team room. He was there to be a part of the week and help in any way he could.

If Keegan Bradley is as obsessed with the Ryder Cup as he says, why not invite him to do the same? Or better yet, Cameron Young, who will surely be on future teams? Or Will Zalatoris? Or Sahith Theegala? Eight of the American players on this team had never played a Ryder Cup in Europe before this week and many of them ended up looking absolutely shell-shocked and totally unprepared in the first few sessions. Getting more players exposed to that feeling before they actually step out of the tunnel and onto the first tee feels like such a no brainer if you’re serious about long term success.

I actually have incredible respect for Bubba Watson being seemingly the only person to say out loud how much he wanted to just be there when he served as a team assistant in 2016. None of these other guys are going to ask to do that. It’s going to be up to the leaders on the U.S. team to have some foresight and make them feel welcome.

And keep pushing it further. For the most part, these guys play the same PGA Tour events all year. If your stats team has highlighted a potential pairing, let them know! Make them play a practice round together. Better yet, make them get dinner together. Make this thing a constant in the back of the minds of your core players; an occasional treat amid the week-to-week grind of PGA Tour golf.


Keep going! Tron mentioned an idea on our Sunday podcast to schedule a scrimmage in the lead up against the U.S. Walker Cup team. Talk about building culture for the future. What a good way to start turning these U.S. players into lions in the minds of the future American stars. Let them see what Justin Thomas, Patrick Cantlay, Brooks Kopeka and Max Homa do up close in competition. Let them ask questions. Start to build a pathway and a system and make the next generation feel invested from the start.


The U.S. Ryder Cup team should be a Boys Club. That’s the whole point. The thing is that you just have to let a hell of a lot more people into the club.

Ryder Cup: Reviving the United States

For more content from our week on-site at the 2023 Ryder Cup, check out our

ROME — Rory McIlroy was still fuming late Saturday night.

He was a little embarrassed too, but he also felt his anger was justified. Video of him shouting expletives at Jim “Bones” McKay in the parking lot of Marco de Simone had gone viral a few hours earlier, but Bones wasn’t actually the target of his anger. Bones just happened to be the first American that McIlroy encountered outside the locker room when he was leaving the course, still pissed off about what happened at the end of his match that afternoon against Patrick Cantlay.

McIlroy and Cantlay are not friends, and at times there has been tension between them over the financial future of the PGA Tour, but on the course, there had always been mutual respect. Yet when Cantlay’s caddie Joe LaCava danced around the 18th green on Saturday night, waving his hat for nearly 30 seconds after Cantlay made a long birdie putt, McIlroy felt like one of golf’s admittedly quirky but also clear lines of etiquette had been crossed. You don’t interfere with a player when he’s lining up a putt in a match, and you sure as hell don't do it if you’re a caddie. McIlroy and Matt Fitzpatrick still had a pair of putts left and a chance to tie the hole. LaCava continued a heated exchange with Shane Lowry even as McIlroy crouched down to read his line.

“We talked about it as a team last night,” McIlroy said. “We felt like it was disrespectful, and it wasn't just disrespectful to Fitz and I. It was disrespectful to the whole team.”


He couldn’t let it go, especially after losing the match. “I felt like I played the match in the right spirit, and I don’t feel like that spirit was reciprocated to me,” McIlroy said.


When he saw Bones on his way to the car an hour later, his anger returned.

“It’s a fucking disgrace!” McIlroy shouted as his wife, Erica, and also Lowry, managed to stuff him into the back of a courtesy car. “It can’t fucking happen!” When he got to the team hotel, Lowry dragged him down to the cold tubs and told him to cool down, literally and figuratively. By the time he climbed into bed, he was exhausted, but still buzzing.

“Erica and I put on the Calm App and listened to a sleep story, and that actually helped me fall asleep,” he said.

When he woke, he was rested but still wasn’t sure he was ready to let the incident go. He reached for a copy of Marcus Aurelius’ “Meditations,” which he’d brought with him to Rome.

“I've studied Stoicism for a while and read a lot of those sort of books,” McIlroy said. “I just thought as a former emperor of Rome and seeing that we are in Rome, I thought it would be a good time to revisit some of his thoughts, and I revisited them on the way to the course.”


“Humility and gentleness,” McIlroy said. “Those are better virtues than being frustrated and angry.”


If you wanted to be reminded why the Ryder Cup is so much better than other events staged within the universe of professional golf — why it’s the only tournament that could enrage a 4-time major winner over a small grievance and then send him running to Marcus Aurelius for wisdom — then this week was a delight.

You’ll be able to visit Wikipedia in the near and distant future and remind yourself that Europe won the 2023 Ryder Cup by a score of 16 ½ to 11 ½, and that it held serve for the seventh straight time at home. But the score and the match results won’t properly tell the tale of what happened. Somehow, it was both closer than the point totals will suggest, and yet also ultimately a blowout very few saw coming. A surreal controversy over a hat, and whether or not it represented a fashion choice or a principled protest, became a major storyline. A new Ryder Cup stalwart (Max Homa) emerged for the U.S., as well as one for the Europeans (Viktor Hovland) and an old European lion (Justin Rose) inched his way toward the sunset with one last signature moment.

In the middle of it all was McIlroy, who delivered the best Ryder Cup performance of his career, going 4-1. No other player earned as many points. He may not be the best golfer in the world at age 34. He may have gone a full decade without winning a major. But he remains the game’s central figure, whether you admire him or you’re exhausted by him. He puts it all out there, his heart on the sleeve of his quarter zip, even in times when he knows he ought to dial it back.


Two years ago, he wept openly at Whistling Straits, both in the arms of his wife and during a pair of television interviews, convinced he had let his team down. That moment was on his mind prior to this week.


“I don’t know that I’d ever felt so low, not just in a Ryder Cup but in my career,” McIlroy said. “And the fact that the team had the confidence in me to send me No. 1 that Sunday and for me to go and get a point, you can trace my form back for the last couple of years back to that Sunday in Whistling Straits. It meant the world to me that these guys believed in me when I didn’t believe in myself. To have a group around you like that, it means the world to me.”

No one can say whether there will be more majors in his future. But there will certainly be more Ryder Cups. The next two — at Bethpage Black in New York in 2025 and Adare Manor in Limerick, Ireland in 2027 — could be a big piece of McIlroy’s legacy.


“I've said this for the last probably six or seven years to anyone that will listen: I think one of the biggest accomplishments in golf right now is winning an away Ryder Cup,” McIlroy said in the European press conference. “And that's what we're going to do at Bethpage.”

He slapped the table in front of him as he said it. His teammates roared in approval.

If nothing else, you had to admire the audacity.

Patrick Cantlay is not someone who cares much about whether or not he is admired. He cares about hitting good golf shots and about getting compensated financially for it. He has expressed to numerous people in the ecosystem of golf that he believes players should be compensated for playing in the Ryder Cup. He declined the opportunity to discuss it this week, but his beliefs are hardly a secret. Stefan Schauffele, Xander Schauffle’s father, was happy to confirm as much with reporters, admitting in an interview near the putting green Sunday morning that he has been advising both his son and Cantlay on such matters.

“If the PGA of America is a for-profit organization, they need to have the players share in that profit instead of being so damned intransparent about it with intent,” Stefan Schauffele said. “They should reveal the numbers, and then we should go to the table and talk. Alternatively, they can donate all proceeds after opening the books to a charity of our joint choice, and then we will happily play for free. Please print that.”

Both Ryder Cup captains, Luke Donald and Zach Johnson, gave forceful answers when asked to weigh in on whether players deserve to get paid for the competition.


“Absolutely not,” Donald said. “What the Ryder Cup represents. It represents true sport. You saw it with some of the passion at the end there [with McIlroy.] It's a passionate event. It's about pride. It's about representing your country. It's about coming together as a team. It's the purest form of competition we have, and I think because of that, the fans love it. There's no extrinsic motivation involved. It's purely, purely sport. That's what makes it so special.”

“When it comes to the dollar sign, I don't mean to sound cliché, but the Ryder Cup is about more than any of that,” Johnson said. “It's about standing with a band of guys to represent your nation, to represent more than you in the game of golf. It's a sport for one week. And you know what, I would say if there's anything that deals with money, there's guys that would pay to play in this.”

Whether or not Cantlay’s stance on the matter was connected to his decision this week to play golf without a hat remains a matter of dispute. He denied a Sky Sports report that framed his decision as a silent protest, saying only that he couldn’t find a hat that fit, but other outlets — including No Laying Up — have been told similar information from multiple sources. Whether it was an actual protest or an anecdote shared and then re-shared via a messy game of telephone will probably take weeks to sort out, but at the moment, the story spread rapidly through the galleries on Saturday, and it clearly galvanized both Cantlay and the Americans.

Cantlay, typically not someone who displays any emotion on the course, grinned often at the crowd as they sang songs about his hat and his bank account, and then he kept making birdies to keep any chance of an American comeback alive. It was reminiscent, in some ways, of Patrick Reed’s best Ryder Cup performances, rounds when he channeled the crowd’s negative energy into something spectacular.

“I just try to use it as fuel,” Cantlay said. “You know, you can take all that energy and turn it into focus and turn it into good adrenaline. That's what I tried to do this week. I think it’s great. The fans are invested. You have to embrace it.”


If any part of Cantlay was trying to make the case that players should get paid for playing in the Ryder Cup, his shotmaking and his putting put together a more effective case than his hat. Without his gritty performance on Saturday against McIlroy and Fitzpatrick, then again on Sunday when he dusted Justin Rose, the Ryder Cup would have been something of a snooze.

If nothing else, Stefan Schauffele said, it’s time to have a conversation about Ryder Cup compensation that doesn’t result in questioning someone’s patriotism.

“I think it’s absolutely non-controversial,” Schauffele said. “Imagine if the winners got $2 million and the losers get nothing. How good of a competition would we have now? I think it could be made so much better because of that. I don’t see a negative there. I think we need to talk about it without bringing up the issue of patriotism, which I think is a really, really cheap shot. Because they’re so wrong, especially these [PGA of America members] are not owning any mirrors in their houses because they’re the ones that are not patriotic. Hopefully the conversation, in seriousness, leads to talks about it that make sense. And then everyone can be happy.”

Stefan Schauffele had plenty of other things to say on a number of matters, including that McIlroy was a “soft egg” for getting so worked up about LaCava, and that ”If Jay Monahan had a spine, he’d resign!” He even revealed that Cantlay was getting married in Rome the day after the Ryder Cup, which forced Cantlay to address it in the press conference after the trophy ceremony.

“I am getting married tomorrow, yes,” Cantlay confirmed. “I’m very excited about that.”

The American Ryder Cup team, still simmering over allegations that they hadn’t gotten along, erupted in unanimous applause.

Max Homa was not panicking. But only because of his caddie, Joe Greiner.

Late on Sunday, Homa was just right of the 18th green, staring down at his lie, which was horrendous. In truth, it was worse than horrendous. It was ghastly.

He’d just hammered a 3 wood from 290 yards away, going for the green in two, but his ball had drifted right and taken an unfortunate bounce, then nested down in the deep, gnarly rough growing all around the greenside bunker.


Homa was clinging to a 1 up lead against Matt Fitzpatrick, but the entire Ryder Cup literally hung in the balance. Europe had clawed its way to 14 points. If Fitzpatrick could squeeze out a half point from this match, the American comeback effort was finished. Not only that, but Homa would have to own the weight of knowing he failed to serve as a firewall. He had to find a way to make par, but he wasn’t even sure he could lash his ball into the bunker. If he tried, it might go into the water on the other side of the green.

“We’re going to take an unplayable,” Greiner said.

They had already executed this strategy once during the round, on the third hole, when Homa was faced with a similar lie. But the Ryder Cup wasn’t on the line at that moment. Whatever happened next, Homa and Greiner, two California kids who grew up together playing on a 4300-yard golf course, would remember this moment for the rest of their lives.


Homa took his drop and the one-stroke penalty that came with it.

“Watch out for the water, Maxy!” a European fan heckled.

Homa gathered himself and took a few practice swings. He took a deep breath. Then nipped a beautiful pitch off a downhill, downgrain lie and watched it land on the green and trickle over the crest of a hill. It started tracking toward the hole. Fans didn’t know whether to hold their breath or scream.


The ball came to rest 7 feet behind the pin.


“Joe Greiner is the brains; I just swing it,” Homa said. “It was an awful break. I don't know how it didn't get into the bunker. And I was frustrated. My head was spinning. He said ‘We're going to take an unplayable here, chip it down to ten feet and you're going to make it.”


When Fitzpatrick missed a lengthy birdie putt, the stage was set. Homa had a do-or-die putt to keep Europe from winning the Ryder Cup.


“I don't know, that was an out-of-body experience,” Homa said. “I will say, two nights ago I wanted that opportunity. I missed it against Rosey, and I wanted the chance again. So I just told myself this is what you asked for, so here's an opportunity.”

For a few seconds, it was so quiet at Marco Simone that you could almost hear the click of the ball against Homa’s putter.

And then — bedlam. He poured the putt in.

“C’mon!” Homa screamed, his right fist punching the air.

The United States comeback eventually ran out of gas. Rickie Fowler ended up being the end of the firewall when he conceded a short putt to Tommy Fleetwood on the 16th hole. But for another 40 minutes, Homa made a miracle seem possible. In his first Ryder Cup, he was the only American to finish the week with a winning record at 3-1-1.

“You watch this your whole life on TV and you get to experience it, it's amazing,” Homa said. “It's a bummer to lose, clearly, but it was cool. I really love these guys, and it was a true pleasure to be with all of them. It's always amazing to be around greatness, and we get to do it week-in and week-out, but to actually be in a team room with everybody, it's a pleasure.”


Every two years, when the Ryder Cup ends, an interesting question emerges:


Is team golf about execution, or is it about chemistry?


Sunday Scenes from the 2023 Ryder Cup

ROME — The 2023 Ryder Cup at Marco de Simone isn’t (technically) over yet, but I have no problem making a broad statement about American golfers over the last decade in this competition.

They are tremendous front-runners. When things start to fall in their favor, they are the kind of sporting bullies you can’t help but admire. They drive greens and dunk wedges. They exchange terrible but bombastic chest bumps and clumsy high-fives. They play like they’re running downhill and do it with a sneer on their faces. You saw it at Hazeltine and you saw it at Whistling Straits. American team golf is at its best when they are comfortable and cocky, chugging beers or sipping champagne and laughing in the press conferences about how they can’t wait to down a few more.


They are also uncomfortably soft when faced with adversity, far more likely to fold than fight back when they fall behind. They sit greenside when their matches are over and fiddle with their phones, their heads down, their faces sullen, looking like a collection of sulky teenagers whose parents dragged them to Europe on a week-long vacation and forced them to order something other than chicken fingers of the menu.


It’s not that they don’t care. I reject that dumb narrative, and so should anyone who watched Scottie Scheffler tear up next to his wife Meredith on Saturday after he and Brooks Koepka were on the wrong side of a stunning 9&7 loss to Viktor Hovland and Ludvig Aberg, the worst defeat in Ryder Cup history. Match play tends to strip even the best players of their suit of armor. The majority of American golfers desperately want to be good at this, and truly do want to snap this 30-year streak of misery in Europe. But for the most part, their personalities are not built for it.

The United States will likely rebound in two years when the event returns to a more comfortable venue. They will get to have things exactly the way they want again, whether it’s format or course set up. Fan support will likely give them an early lead, and they may get out and run with it. We have reached an era where home field advantage in the Ryder Cup can seem daunting. But don’t assume going to Bethpage in 2025 — where the crowd will be vicious and the fairways wide — is going to be a panacea for everything. Europe might be underdogs, but they’ve also shown they can be competitive away from home, that they can thread a needle or catch a Hail Mary. The U.S. hasn’t shown they’re capable of a road comeback in more than a decade.


The easy (and frankly moronic) defense of the Americans' sulky behavior this week should go something like this, so prepare yourselves for it:

Of course they were sullen; they weren’t playing well! Do you expect them to pound their chests and high-five each other when they’re getting their asses kicked?

That rebuttal blatantly muddles the timeline of how Marco de Simone unfolded.

The Americans were already deep into a collective mope late Friday, all while the day’s most crucial matches were still in doubt. Sometimes it’s hard to pinpoint which Ryder Cup session was the most important in a blowout, but it isn’t hard to do in this one. Even though the Americans got punched in the mouth in foursomes Friday morning, they actually had a little momentum in the afternoon, a chance to recover from a historic sweep. They had a slim lead in three matches, and a 3-1 bounceback would have given them momentum and energy as they headed to bed.

Shot by shot, and hole by hole, the Europeans pulled the Americans’ hearts right out of their chests. You could feel the energy in the air, particularly on the 18th green, as the European players whose matches were already finished gathered in a group to send waves of emotional fuel toward the crowd and then back toward their teammates. It was never more apparent than during the birdie that Viktor Hovland made to secure a halve for Europe after he and Tyrell Hatton had trailed Justin Thomas and Jordan Spieth for much of the back nine. As the ball dripped into the cup, you could see Shane Lowry dancing along the ropeline, imploring the crowd to erupt.

Several minutes later, when Justin Rose made a birdie on 18 to steal half a point from Max Homa and Wyndham Clark (who had been 2-up with two holes left) the 43-year-old Englishman turned to the throng of teammates and screamed “You! You! You!” as he pointed to each of them. Even though Rose has been a member of six Ryder Cup teams, he said after his match he felt like he’d never been part of a truly special moment. He’d never made a putt on the last green or stuffed an iron to close out a match. And when he finally did, all he could think about was the men (all 10 players, all 10 caddies, and all the vice captains) behind him.

“I think it was you and you and you and you; that's what I was saying,” Rose said. “For all the boys. You know, just because everyone is in it together. Made the putt because I had ten people willing it in behind me. It's for them, as well.”

That was the hour that decided the 2023 Ryder Cup. Going down 5-3 would have been tough but manageable for the United States, nothing to panic over. Going down 6 ½ to 1 ½ essentially slammed the door. It was all over, but  there was some inevitable finger-pointing, which Koepka did when he grumbled unprompted about Jon Rahm’s behavior late in the match, saying he acted like a child when he punched the wall surrounding the tee box after a bad shot.


"If Brooks thinks that's childish, it is what it is,” Rahm said. “He's entitled to think what he thinks. I'm very comfortable with who I am and what I do. I've done much worse than that on the golf course. I needed to do that to blow off some steam.”

Say whatever you want about Rahm, at least he cares. On the very next hole, he made an eagle to halve the match. Was it a lucky putt? Rahm conceded as much, but you also make your own luck. It essentially broke Koepka and Scheffler’s spirits.

You could see it in their faces the following morning on the first tee. Scheffler and Koepka played like zombies, making two doubles in the first three holes.


I know this sounds like one of those grouchy columns that old men sometimes write when they want to bury a team for not playing the game properly, but I assure you I don’t give a shit about any of that stuff. One of the reasons I argued Justin Thomas should still make this team, despite being mired in the worst slump of his career, is I admire people who understand that the Ryder Cup is as much about passion as it is about strokes gained.

Yes, you need to play good golf. Yes, you need to make putts and hit fairways. But that alone is not enough, and understanding how closely the two are connected in this event is the reason why Europe has a real shot in two years at Bethpage and America has zero chance at Adare Manor in Ireland in 2027 — unless they can figure out how to trust and embrace each other. It doesn’t matter if it’s via Friendship Task Force or group therapy.


I’m convinced the Americans thought they had this stuff figured out after Whistling when they gave us that hilarious press conference where everyone had a drink in their hand; Dustin Johnson had the room in stitches, and Koepka and Bryson DeChambeau even hugged it out for a laugh. But all they really proved is they’re great when they’re the favorites – when they can exploit Europe’s weaknesses. Give them a captain they don’t love (Tom Watson, Hal Sutton), a course they don’t love (Le Golf National) a teammate they don’t love (Bryson; Patrick Reed) or pairings they don’t love (Patrick Reed, again) and the knives come out. The one constant through the years of the American Ryder Cup team is how they handle adversity.

For most of them, the answer is obvious: Poorly.

On Saturday, Rahm and Tyrell Hatton dropped in for a press conference between sessions, fresh off another win in foursomes. I decided to ask Rahm about the scene behind the 18th green, and why Europeans consider passion such an essential part of match play.

“We seem to have an ability to come together as teammates very, very well and feel how close we are,” Rahm said. “And I think in moments like that when we are there, a player feels the support, whether it's myself, Tyrrell out there, anybody, you feel support of the 12 plus the vice captains. Maybe that's why you see some of the things that happened so far and the reactions that come with it.”

Another reporter asked Hatton for his thoughts, but Hatton had to admit he wasn’t listening.


“Sorry, what was the question?” Hatton said.

He had been busy looking over at a television in the corner of the room. On the screen was Tommy Fleetwood and Rory McIlroy’s match against Thomas and Spieth. It was close, but Europe would soon prevail. Hatton kept fidgeting in his seat, like he was living and dying with every shot.

You could tell he was desperate to get back out on the course. Not to play, though. He was done for the day. He and Rahm wanted to cheer them on in person.

Kevin Van Valkenburg is the Editorial Director of No Laying Up.

The Adversity Gap

It is not something I am particularly proud of. I grasp (and appreciate) the sentiment of therapy-speak that has become important in recent years, that suppressing your emotions is far more dangerous than letting them bubble over. But it can be embarrassing when you find yourself welling up in public, when your voice catches in the back of your throat and your vision blurs.

None of my friends, when I was growing up, were as quick to cry as I was. They were tough and I was soft. For years, this was a source of shame. I did not want to feel so vulnerable, and yet I did not know how to suppress it, how to change my DNA.


It was particularly embarrassing when those tears were connected to sports.

To cry at a funeral, or because I had my heart broken, was one thing. Listening to sad songs was another. You could do those things in private. But spilling tears in disappointment over a loss, over having let others down, felt like the personification of weakness. No one, I suspected, wanted that in a teammate. I gravitated toward football for numerous reasons, but part of its appeal — I realize in retrospect — must have been that I could better hide my emotions inside a helmet, or at least claim it was sweat that was smearing my eye black, not my own tender heart.

I do not remember when I started watching the Ryder Cup. I’d love to pretend it was the War on The Shore in 1991. I am, after all, the appropriate age. I was 13 that September, heavily invested in sports. A month later, I would uncontrollably sob in my kitchen when Magic Johnson announced he was retiring from professional basketball after testing positive for HIV, but to pretend that I cared about golf back then would be an invention of the mind, a rewriting of history, the way you look at a picture of yourself as a kid enough times that your brain makes a copy, tricking you into believing it’s a memory.

I remember scenes from Brookline in 1999, but only vaguely. The obvious stuff. Ben Crenshaw wagging his finger. Justin Leonard with his arms raised, his mouth open, a herd of American players, caddies and wives dressed in ridiculous shirts spilling onto the green in rapture. I jumped off my couch and let loose an emphatic roar. But I quickly turned my attention back to football.

Golf was a curiosity, and my investment in the Ryder Cup was incidental. It happened to be on television that morning. I had nearly missed it, and would not have given it a second thought if I had. I have no memory of the 2002 Ryder Cup. I doubt I watched a shot.

Whatever flame Brookline lit did not take long to flicker out.


In 2009, a friend called me with an unexpected inquiry: Did I want to join him and some of his friends on a golf trip to the Homestead Resort in Hot Springs, Virginia? We would divide into two teams and face each other in match play, much like the Ryder Cup. With some trepidation, I accepted. I was 31 years old. I played golf infrequently, leisurely, and rarely broke 100 when I did tee it up. I had never played a single round of match play in my life. It seemed like an excuse to drink beer and meet new people.

I did not expect to be nervous. It was, after all, a meaningless competition played in front of no fans. The stakes could scarcely have been lower. We didn’t even have a trophy. But on the first tee, I could feel my chest pounding. Over the course of three days, the club felt like a rattlesnake in my hands. I barely knew my teammates, but each bad swing I made (and there were many), I was convinced I was letting them down, and would never be invited back. My partner and I got blown out in our first two matches, and I was so embarrassed, that I wanted to walk into the Virginia woods — alone — and have a good cry. The desire to do so only intensified my embarrassment.

Writing

The Prevailing Magic of Golf

Ryder Cup: Reviving the United States

Sunday Scenes from the 2023 Ryder Cup

The Adversity Gap

Driving and Crying

KVV Mailbag: 2023 Ryder Cup Edition

2023 Solheim Cup Takeaways

2023 Ryder Cup: A New Era for Team United States

Lexi Thompson! Let's Talk

When Revelation Comes Photo Gallery

2023 Solheim Cup Preview

When Revelation Comes: Scotland Loose Ends

Walker Cup Observations

The Justin Thomas Gamble

2023 Walker Cup Notebook

KVV Mailbag: FedEx Cup Playoffs, Soup and Blockie

The U.S. Women's Amateur still delivers

Jay Monahan Has A Problem