MEDINAH, Ill. – It was the first time they had done it and it was my first time witnessing it, but it didn’t take long before we were all thoroughly engaged in the proceedings of a Presidents Cup pair selection session.
By them I mean both Presidents’ Cup the captains – Geoff Ogilvy and Brandt Snedeker – share their well-disposed, and apparently a lot privately, the plans for the first session of this year’s Cup. And for me, I mean one of the 50-ish people attending the press conference and waiting, quietly, while the International Team deliberated who to send against Cameron Young and Xander Schauffele.
For 45 seconds that seemed like much longer, the room was silent. Trevor Immelman leaned over Ogilvy’s shoulder, poring over his notes. If you didn’t know better, you would know that Trevor is the International Assistant Captain No. in addition over Immelman’s shoulder and it felt obvious:
This is a triumvirate.
Other deferred assistants; Tim Clark had taken an observation knee in the background and Taylor Pendrith was removed from the deliberation enough that he is not even in the frame of the TV shot. All he could see was his right hand.
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Villegas had moved the microphone placed in front of him to prevent anyone from picking up his whispers, and after almost a minute, Ogilvy put the microphone back in front of his mouth:
Hideki Matsuyama and Ryo Hisatsune.
It may be a small symbol of this event and it may be meaningless in the end, but this team-oriented rumination between people conditioned to compete as individuals is absolutely something that this team event does better than its biennial brother, the Ryder Cup. At Bethpage Black, it was Here are our teams. Let’s play ball. To Medinais, one by one, Here are the pairings that we think can steal the most points from you.
If it feels like a reach to complement the ways in which this event chooses its matchups, it is because these singular weeks every year when individual golf turns into team golf can make you a little desperate to understand. We ask each party to not only have defined strategies, but also know them. The advent of analytics has made team events the Olympics of hindsight. We probably make too big a deal out of the pace of the greens and how it can affect one team versus another. We probably make too big a deal out of the history of the course or the event the thread count of the team’s hotel sheets. But if there is an undeniable element of strategy that is injected into this event, it is selecting a specific duo against a very specific opponent. And doing so as quickly as possible.
“It’s interesting,” Ogilvy said after being asked how it was. “I’m sure that Brandt and his team did – we made some assumptions based on the groups of practice rounds. We have some ideas about what we want to achieve, and I’m sure that Brandt has the same thing. We just thought for a little bit.
“I mean, these things develop pretty quickly. You just want to make sure you don’t break any of your rules you set before coming into this room.”
Oh, to know that list of rules.
In comparison, the Americans were much quicker with their choices. After the Internationals took another 40 long seconds to decide who would play in their foursomes match, Snedeker waited just a few seconds before choosing Justin Thomas and Jackson Koivun. Maybe there’s less to think about when you have the strongest (on paper) roster, but Snedeker pointedly noted, “We’re not just throwing darts at the wall.”
For many reasons, Snedeker likes the format of the Presidents Cup better than the Ryder Cup, and although it is obviously biased at the moment, he thinks it is an asset as a captain who can try to influence the order of events with some strategy. (In an event with such pomp and circumstance, could that be the most important role of a captain?)
And so it feels like there is something there Something to decide why you keep Chris Gotterup and Patrick Cantlay for the final match against Tom Kim and Si Woo Kim. The captains were notably disinterested in sharing the intricacies of that thought process — at least for now — but it adds a layer of detail that we don’t have in the Ryder Cup. Add intrigue to everyday couple affairs. It adds a lot more to the list of 12 singles matches that are decided on Saturday night. We can only be lucky for the match to be close to that point.
