It could be argued our cover stars, Ripper GC, are having more fun than anyone else in professional golf. The all-Aussie team has inspired us to ponder: who are the best teams in golf? From LIV Golf’s partnership with the Asian Tour to Scottie Scheffler and caddie Ted Scott, we list the all-star combinations doing it best.
Golf, inherently, is an individual sport. It’s why we love it. But as we’ve seen during the past three years, pro golfers from every nation have yearned for the team camaraderie they cherished as juniors, amateurs and, for some, in their US college days. Just ask Ripper GC’s Marc Leishman, who, at 40, feels reinvigorated after almost 20 years as a pro. The six-time PGA Tour winner joined LIV Golf in 2022 and plays on Ripper GC with fellow Australians Cameron Smith, Matt Jones and Lucas Herbert.
“I’m genuinely excited every time I go to an airport now to come to a tournament,” Leishman says. “That’s not a fib. I actually am. Obviously it’s very serious golf and there’s a lot on the line and you’re playing for each other, but it almost feels a little bit like we’re going on a boys’ trip every time we go to a golf tournament, which I love.”
Teams are why the Ryder Cup is arguably the biggest spectacle in all of golf. It’s part of the reason for LIV Golf has had some success and it’s why player-caddie relationships receive the publicity they do. People like golfers, but they also want rivalries. All of that is easier to produce when there’s a squad with a common goal. So, who are the best teams in men’s and women’s golf? We look, from the PGA Tour to LIV, pros and caddies, to TV commentary teams and social media.
Ripper GC
No team in golf has more fun. But they also have success, too. Smith, Leishman, Jones and Herbert comprise the LIV Golf franchise that Smith has captained since leaving the PGA Tour for LIV. Look no further than their Instagram page, or this magazine’s countless profiles on its members and the team as a whole, as a reason why every Australian golf fan would probably give an arm and a leg to have this as their workplace.
They have ‘terrible shirt’ challenges, like at LIV Golf Adelaide, where they contested a game during their pre-tournament press conference to avoid being the last player to say, “Too easy.” The loser had to wear a shocker of a shirt to the launch party on event eve. Jones was last, and had to wear a loud and colourful button-up with pictures of cats on it.
Then there are the actual golf games they play. They’re nothing elaborate but a ton of fun. At LIV Golf Valderrama recently, this writer watched the four lads engage in a fiercely contested game of Wolf (where four players compete for points and rotate the order of teeing off on each hole so that each player, every four holes, takes on the role of the ‘Wolf’. The Wolf watches the other players’ tee shots and then decides whether to select one as a partner for the hole or to play alone for more points).
The caddies have games, too. At LIV Golf UK, the players set the bagmen a challenge of who could bring the most random daily objects to carry the clubs as a substitute for a golf bag during a practice round. Sam Pinfold had the team laughing with Smith’s clubs lugged in a wheelbarrow.
The four have all improved most aspects of their game by sharing ideas, resources and tips. As a team, they’re in great form on LIV. In 2024, they’ve recorded team wins in Adelaide and Singapore, as well as second placings in Greenbrier, the UK and a third in Hong Kong. Herbert best summed up the team’s dynamic, including their skipper: “He’s pretty cruisy. We don’t have to answer to too much. As long as all of us are practising and working at things the right way, I don’t think he’s got an issue with where Ripper GC is going to go. He trusts all of us to get all our work done as we need to. Once we get to the tournaments, it’s like we just go and have a lot of fun together. There’s not a lot of critiquing of each other, of what we’re doing.”
Smith and Sam Pinfold
Smith and “Pinna”, as he refers to his bagman, are one of the very best partnerships in golf. This year, they’ve celebrated 10 years together. Their first 18 holes as a duo will make you believe in destiny. Australian golfer Michael Sim had Pinfold on the bag at the 2014 New Zealand Open in Queenstown when he missed the cut. Pinfold, an experienced New Zealander, had caddied for the likes of PGA Tour pros Trevor Immelman, Ryo Ishikawa, Aron Price and Brendan Steele. Long-time golf agent Ian Davis knew Pinfold well and suggested he use his free weekend in Queenstown to loop for one of Davis’s clients, Smith. He was a 21-year-old rookie pro carrying his own clubs in the NZ Open. “I wanted Cam to experience what it was like to have an experienced tour caddie,” Davis says. Pinfold teamed up with Smith in the third round at The Hills and the young Queenslander hit all 18 greens and the next day finished T-10.
The next year, Smith and Pinfold formalised their partnership in the US and they’ve never looked back. Pinfold guided Smith through his first full season on the PGA Tour in 2015-2016 and within two years, he had his maiden victory on the main US circuit. Another four wins followed, including the Players Championship in 2022, before Pinfold helped Smith to calm his nerves down the stretch of his breakthrough major victory at the 150th Open at St Andrews. That was his sixth career PGA Tour win. Now that Smith plays on LIV, he and Pinfold have enjoyed three tournament victories together. In addition to the Open Championship win, Smith also owns career top-10s in the other three majors, including a T-2 at the 2020 Masters. Through it all, Pinfold has been right next to him, and the pair are great mates off the course.
European Ryder Cup team
The European Ryder Cup side might be – hear me out – one of the best teams in world sport, not just golf. What team in any code changes its members as often as Europe but maintains an utterly dominant home record, and a decent number of victories away? Last year in Rome, Europe obliterated the USA 16½-11½ at Marco Simone in the biennial teams event. That shut out the Americans from grabbing their first win in Europe since 1993. While the USA do inflict their share of pain on Europe in the US, they haven’t won every home cup for 30 years. In 2012, the tourists came back to defeat the Americans at Medinah in Chicago.
Rory McIlroy and Justin Rose have been stalwarts of the team for the past 16 years, but Europe has seen a high turnover of the other 10 spots and yet they keep winning. Why? Firstly, because they have a culture of leaving the ego at the door and uniting as a team, while the American players, to generalise them perhaps unfairly, are more conditioned to the lone-wolf mentality of the weekly grind on the PGA Tour. It also helps that the DP World Tour runs the team, and the European circuit gets a lot of things in their orbit right. This dynamic is only set to continue with Luke Donald returning as European captain at Bethpage in New York in 2025. The Englishman has a stellar backroom behind him and did a masterful job as skipper in Rome.
Scottie Scheffler and Ted Scott
Scott and Scheffler had been friends for a while, attending bible-study sessions together on the PGA Tour before linking up. Scott was notably on the bag for Bubba Watson during the left-hander’s Masters wins in 2012 and 2014, while Scheffler was the PGA Tour’s Rookie of The Year in 2020.
They started working together in November 2021. “[We’re] trying it out,” Scheffler said at the 2021 RSM Classic, where Scott debuted on his bag. “I’ve known Teddy for a couple of years, just a good dude around the tour… He was available and I thought he’d be a good fit for me, and we’ll see how things go.”
Things went well.
Since February 2022, the “Scotts” have teamed up for all 13 of Scheffler’s PGA Tour victories, which includes two Masters green jackets and two Players Championship titles in addition to an Olympic gold medal. This year, Scheffler won seven PGA Tour events, most recently his FedEx Cup triumph in Atlanta. Given caddies receive between 5 and 10 per cent of a player’s on-course earnings, Scott is estimated to have accumulated $US5,238,499 ($A7.7 million). His estimated caddie earnings are so high that he would sit 18th on the players’ moneylist this season – above Adam Scott, Tommy Fleetwood, Jordan Spieth, Justin Thomas and Max Homa.
Hannah Green and Jarryd Felton
Australian golf’s power couple. Women’s major winner and two-time Olympian Green and her PGA Tour of Australasia pro husband Felton have been together for more than 10 years. The two West Australians married in January 2024 but soon after, Felton had to travel east for the Webex Players Series Victoria and Green had to fly to Asia to kick off her LPGA Tour season. Perhaps inspired by tying the knot, Green secured her fourth and fifth career LPGA Tour wins in Asia and Los Angeles in the three months after their wedding. She is currently Australia’s top-ranked golfer at world No.7.
“It can be tough not seeing each other for weeks and weeks on end, but we’ve been dating for so long and we chose to become golf professionals, so we knew the sacrifices,” Green says. “We’re both living our dream – that makes it a little bit easier. Thank goodness for FaceTime!”
The couple are incredibly supportive of each other, with Felton often finding gaps in his tournament schedule to support his wife’s career in person, including at the recent Olympics in Paris.
Minjee and Min Woo Lee
How can any golf fan not enjoy the banter, support and healthy rivalry between Perth tour pros, two-time major winner Minjee and her younger brother Min Woo? While Minjee, 28, has a résumé far superior to her 26-year-old brother – she owns an Evian Championship and a US Women’s Open as major victories among 10 LPGA titles – Min Woo’s career is taking off with three wins on the DP World Tour prior to joining the PGA Tour full-time in 2024. He posted two runner-up finishes in his first full year on the US circuit and recently earned a debut for the International team at the Presidents Cup in Montreal. In August, the two also became just the second ever siblings to compete in golf at the Olympics, after Americans Nelly and Jess Korda teed up in 2021.
As for the race to world No.1 in their respective careers, world No.42 Min Woo says Minjee, who is 16th on the women’s rankings but has been as high as No.2, will get it done first. “She’ll get there, she plays too good all the time,” Min Woo says. “I mean, I’m busting my butt to win a couple of tournaments and she’s just doing it regularly, so I’ve got to somehow work my way out of that shadow.”
Lydia Ko and Paul Cormack
Cormack, a Scottish caddie, began working for Ko, the Korean-born New Zealander, towards the end of the 2023. He quickly helped Ko to a mixed teams victory alongside Jason Day at the Grant Thornton Invitational in Florida last December. Cormack, a former barman, postman and pro golfer, had previously worked with Sweden’s Anna Nordqvist, including during her victory at the AIG Women’s Open at Carnoustie in 2021.
In 2024, Ko went to another level in her first year with Cormack. In January, she won the LPGA Tour’s Hilton Grand Vacations Tournament of Champions before claiming a stunning Olympic gold medal in Paris. Weeks later, the Scot was no doubt emotional when his boss won her third career major at the AIG Women’s Open at St Andrews, which secured her membership in the LPGA Hall of Fame.
Jordan Spieth and Michael Greller
This is golf’s most entertaining team when they’re on. Since 2011, this familiar sight has delighted PGA Tour fans: Greller, a former Seattle school maths teacher, having to hide his horror behind a poker face while his boss, Spieth, talks himself into hitting insane recovery shots that have ranged from silly to downright dangerous (like in 2022 at the cliff’s edge on the par-4 eighth hole at Pebble Beach). Despite Spieth’s struggle for consistent form recently, they’ve enjoyed 13 PGA Tour wins together including three majors.
Bryson DeChambeau and video producer Chase Green
The two-time major champion has established a seamless partnership with creative video producer Green to become the undisputed king of golf content. Since joining LIV Golf from the PGA Tour in 2022, DeChambeau’s YouTube channel has become must-watch TV and several of his videos, which run less than an hour, garner a bigger audience than most golf broadcasts on linear TV. His video with the legendary John Daly, where the two tried to break 50 (yes, 50) for 18 holes from the forward tees in an ambrose, garnered more than 5 million views. He’s also played with major winners like Sergio Garcia and even former US president Donald Trump. Since winning a second US Open title, which he claimed at Pinehurst in June, DeChambeau has accumulated almost 100 million views to his uploads and attracted more than 750,000 new subscribers. He now boasts a total of 1.4 million on YouTube alone.
DP World Tour commentary team
Given the friendly overlap between European time zones and Australian evening TV, golf fans Down Under have grown fond of the cast of DP World Tour commentators. Most weeks, the team is led by Australian former tour pro Ali Whitaker [right], whose incredible insights and dulcet tones combine with the hilarious quips of Tony Johnstone to bring the European pros, courses and tournaments to life. Whitaker and Johnstone are typically joined by Sam Torrance, Ken Brown, Anthony Wall and Jamie Spence, as well as the familiar American voice of Jay Townsend. The DP World Tour’s in-house commentary team travel further than any other broadcast team in golf and regularly create an engaging, soothing, informative and fun soundtrack to the play. From this Australian lover of the DP World Tour, a standing ovation to its on-air cast.
