MEDINAH, Ill. – Times were different in 2012, the last time elite match play golf was contested at Medinah Country Club. Spectators pulled out their flip phones on the 1st tee early in the morning at that Ryder Cup and tapped the buttons to turn on their flashlights.
“It was terrible for me as a player,” Brandt Snedeker said Tuesday the Presidents’ Cupalso in Medina. “This was my first experience.”
Cell phone technology has changed a lot in 14 years, and so has Snedeker’s role. He is the American captain, a title that carries a lot of responsibility, until he gathers the phone numbers in a large group chat.
“I was in charge of the name,” Snedeker said. “It’s called Medinah ’26. Really inventive, yes.
“I think it’s a great way to get these young people in the team. I was super impressed by how much fun Jacob Bridgeman and Chris Gotterup and Jackson are in these things. It was fun for me to see them interact with the guys on the team. It got to the point that Scottie even had to hit, that Scottie is not a good text.”.
So what’s going on in the chat? That’s one of the four main things we learned on Tuesday the Presidents’ Cupwhich you can read below.
1. The USA team shared their rookies with … karaoke.
All 24 players will tell you about the closeness they feel from various team bonding activities, which they rarely experience in this individual sport. But a few of them weren’t too thrilled about Snedeker’s rookie hazing.
“Last night, the rookies, we had to sing a song for everybody,” Bridgeman said. “It was a little bit — there were maybe 40, 50 people in the room, no phones, no video anything. It was nerve-wracking but fun.”
Bridgeman sang “God Bless the USA.” Twenty one years Jackson Koivun He went with Kanye West’s “Heartless,” and Chris Gotterup chose a Creed classic, “One Last Breath.”
“I went with Creed last night and destroyed him in a bad way,” Gotterup said. “Not good. Yes, it was bad.”
Gotterup is also having a hard time in the group chat.
“My teams raised me to be a punching bag,” Gotterup told me. “Rutgers didn’t help my cause in the group chat. And there was a funny picture from a vacation I went on that was supposed to be secret, and Jacob (Bridgeman) sent it in the group chat. So I’ll get back at some point.”
Regarding the context of this photo:
“No, no,” he said. “This is limited information.”
2. Team Kim is back and bigger than ever
Among the unforgettable memories of the last Presidents Cup, in Montreal, there was the coming out party for Tom Kim and Si Woo Kim, a Korean duo who went 2-1 together, and each beat Scottie Scheffler and Sam Burns in games played separately.
Recently, they decided to indoctrinate a third Kim into the family.
“I became Kim’s brother,” Canadian Nick Taylor told us on Tuesday.
Si Woo and Tom have called Taylor “Nick Kim” since they joined in a 6-ball a couple of weeks ago during a team scouting trip to Medina. In the process, Taylor helped the Kims screw up their money game, to the point where Tom said, “We made it rain.”
For Tom, it continued for the first two days of this week.
“I’m not (only in the) positive. I am a lot positive,” he said.
3. Sam Burns and Scottie Scheffler together again?
The first player I had a chance to pepper with questions was Sam Burns, who very quickly blew away his playing partner this week.
“Do you already know who you’re playing with?” I asked.
“I know, yes,” he replied.
“Is his name Scottie Scheffler?”
“His name starts with an S,” Burns said with a smile.
This information may not surprise anyone. Scheffler and Burns are the best tops. And they’ve been paired up a bunch over the years. But those matches, on paper, did not yield desirable results.
The Scheffler-Burns team played four games, losing three times and tied once. All four made it to the 2022 Presidents Cup and 2023 Ryder Cup, and we haven’t seen them together since. But there is a nuance to this game play, and Burns has not forgotten it.
“I feel like we played really well together (in 2022),” Burns said. “I remember coming off the course and the stats guys were like, ‘well, if you had played any other game today, you would have won,’ but unfortunately we didn’t.”
4. The Medina of the Old to the Medina of the New
This place is different. Course No. 3 at Medinah Country Club has been made again thanks to the recent renovation. It should play and it feels very different from the last few times that it hosted the best professionals, but there is a story here that everyone seems to be very aware of.
In 2012 “Miracle in Medina” that saw the Europeans mount a historic comeback on Sunday, still rings vividly in Captain Snedeker’s head.
“As I’ve talked about for a long time, I think you learn a lot more from your losses than from your victories,” Snedeker said on Tuesday, “and what happened on Sunday in Medinah that year taught me a lot. It taught me how much these guys care, seeing my idols of the game and that I was a teammate crying in the locker room on Sunday night.
“I think you learn from those experiences. You try to build a team around those experiences. I’ve built my career around that.”
Sneds is the first to point out all the changes in Medinah; It will absolutely inform the proceedings and perhaps what is shared and invoked in the locker room talks this week…
… maybe for both sides.
Golf junkie – and Open Champion – Ryan Fox has never played in a team event of this stature, but he went so far as to attend the Presidents Cups earlier in his career. He has happily woken up in his native New Zealand to watch Ryder Cups played in the United States, and has discovered a way to consume midnight matches when they are hosted in Europe. It is safe to say that he (and some of his teammates) are interested in creating a negative memory similar to Medinah for this batch of American opponents.
“I mean, (2012) was such a drama,” Fox said. “It’s hard to pick one moment from that whole Sunday, but I remember seeing it so vividly. I saw the documentary about it and everything that happened.
“It gives us a lot of motivation this week that you can do something incredible on a Sunday like that, especially in the same place.”