[PHOTO: Vaughn Ridley]
There was a moment very early on that spelled trouble for the International team in the disastrous opening session of the Presidents Cup at Royal Montreal Golf Club. It happened on Wednesday afternoon, local time, when captain Mike Weir eschewed all logic and reason and decided to not lead off the opening four-ball session with a Canadian player, or, better yet, a duo from the Land of Maple.
Asked if he thought about leading off with one of his three fellow Canadians – you know, to get the Quebec crowd buzzing early – Weir offered some odd reasoning that “the match-ups are the match-ups” and then added, “We didn’t really just want to put out a Canadian just to do that.”
Uh huh.
Let’s translate that logic into an ice hockey analogy: “We really didn’t want to clear the puck out of the zone to kill a power play just to do that.”
No, no, no. Some things in sport you absolutely do, one of which is: you do everything possible to get the home crowd frothing.
Weir had been saying for the better part of 18 months that the plan for this 15th Presidents Cup was to make the American team, the one with the dominant 12-1-1 record, more uncomfortable than they ever had felt before in an ‘away’ match. The former Masters champion was hoping for something in the vicinity of hostile.
Then he didn’t pull the trigger on the one move that might have helped get his team off to the start they absolutely needed to have. At day’s end, the Americans seized the early momentum, the crowd never got into it and it’s not too soon to start thinking about pairings for 2026 at Medinah Country Club, near Chicago, after the US whitewashed Weir’s charges, 5-0.
The sweep marked the fifth time that one team shut out the other in a session and the result each time has been the Americans wielding the brooms. The last time it happened also came at Royal Montreal in 2007. So much for hostile.
The US has never lost when leading after the first day. So there’s that.
It might seem like an oversimplification to suggest Weir erred in leading off with Jason Day and Byeong Hun An against Xander Schauffele and Tony Finau instead of, perhaps, Corey Conners, who was paired with the Internationals’ best player, Hideki Matsuyama, in the anchor match. But as Golf Channel analyst Paul McGinley noted during the broadcast coverage, that first match often can be psychologically crucial. The former Ryder Cup captain recalled how important it was for Collin Montgomerie and Padraig Harrington to take down Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson in the first match of the 2004 Ryder Cup at Oakland Hills. “It filtered down to the rest of us,” McGinley said.
Both Canada’s Taylor Pendrith and South Korea’s Tom Kim noticed how little they heard from the partisan crowd. That happens when you’re struggling just to keep up. “I think it was a little too quiet today being on home soil,” Kim said. “I don’t think the fans were really… I wish they would have helped us out a bit more.”
Fair enough. But they have to have a reason to cheer.
Having forfeited his team’s biggest psychological edge, Weir had to watch his International players start to press when they fell behind. The crowd was not there for them, and the Americans fed off their negative energy. Their putts dropped. The Internationals were hitting edges so regularly you almost thought they were aiming at them.
No one epitomised the desultory nature of his team’s afternoon more than Christiaan Bezuidenhout. The 30-year-old South African, ranked among the best putters this year on the PGA Tour, missed a handful of crucial putts over the closing stretch that could have earned a half-point or even a full point for himself and Pendrith against Keegan Bradley and Wyndham Clark. Instead, the US duo eked out the 1 up win.
US captain Jim Furyk was being diplomatic in saying that the day’s competition was closer than the eventual 5-0 result. True, three of the five American victories were 1-up decisions – and they played brilliantly to earn those wins. Which begs the question, if the crowds had gotten involved a bit more, could the home team be looking at a much more manageable deficit?
Weir had no choice but to remain optimistic, and, yes, perhaps the International team can pull itself out of the pit of muck it now finds itself wallowing in.
“I think you get a little momentum going on your side, that’s when the crowds can get going,” Weir said on Thursday night.
Sounds like a plan. One that might already be too late.
