Will the 2063 Ryder Cup be played at Elon Musk National?

Edition No. 36 | October 6, 2023

Hey,

Two things before we begin — and don’t miss the second one, because Holderness and Bourne is giving away a $500 (!!) box of Ryder Cup gear to one of our readers.

1. My version of #DadLife hit pretty hard this week. On Tuesday, I woke up in Rome to finish off a piece of writing I worked harder on than maybe anything else I’ve done about an international sporting event with very famous athletes that was watched by millions of people. And I ended the day in Dallas yelling Taylor Swift songs in a car with a 4-year-old.

Life comes at you fast but in 24 hours.

Speaking of Taylor Swift. After I posited that perhaps we should get her involved in golf in 2024 (hashtag grow the game), some folks suggested that her and Hovland should date, and buddy, as a sort-of-Swiftie but more as someone who is fascinated with her writing gifts, I am in. Remix the Bad Blood lyrics feat. Joe LaCava and Rory. I want it all.

Also, watch this documentary on her. It's so good. Sad, inspiring, scary, enlightening, hopeful — has a bit of everything.

2. This week’s newsletter is sponsored! Holderness and Bourne is a personal sponsor of mine (I wear their gear for my work at CBS Sports), and this week they’re giving away a $500 package of Ryder Cup gear to one of our readers (drawing at the beginning of next week).

To enter, all you have to do is be subscribed to this newsletter (which you are) and comment on this tweet with your favorite 2023 Ryder Cup moment. If you don’t have Twitter, you can just put your email and favorite moment in this form.

If you haven’t already checked out H&B and their Ryder Cup collection, you should get involved! We’re talking “Europe in foursomes at European Ryder Cups” quality from the best clothing brand in golf. The gray ward sweater (pictured below) is 🤌, by the way.

Onto the news.

Rohm

I wrote 10 initial Ryder Cup thoughts on Wednesday, and here are 10 more to close out what has been my favorite fortnight-ish of the year.

1. But really, who can say? I’ve written this a lot over the last week (probably too much), but the Ryder Cup rules because there is so much ambiguity, which means you can pin success or defeat on almost anything. For example, over the course of a regular tournament or especially a season, the numbers are pretty much the numbers. You didn’t hit it well off the tee? We can see that. You didn’t make any putts over 10 feet? Yep, obvious. You finished 197th in proximity from 125-150 yards? Seems like a problem!

But with the Ryder Cup, because there are relatively so few shots hit — Rickie Fowler, for example, hit like 95 total shots for the week — and because team events are weird, there is just enough noise that you can convince yourself that success or failure can be one of about a thousand different things.

That’s so much fun for content and for discussion and for pontificating upon, as I’m sure you’ll see by the 380ish Ryder Cup podcasts that are made between now and Bethpage Black.

2. Never again: As of this week, I think I have two life rules. Fine, maybe three.

1. Never eat or drink anything pumpkin spice-flavored before Oct. 1.

2. Never tweet about Memphis.

3. Never pick the Americans on the road.

I was sold a bill of goods at Whistling Straits! Convinced myself that THIS time — no REALLY — THIS time will be different. It wasn’t! It won’t ever be!

The year is 2063, Gordon Sargent’s future son is the U.S. captain, the Ryder Cup is being played on Mars at Elon Musk National (technically an away Ryder Cup for the U.S.), European journalists are still hollering about the spike marks at Brookline, the U.S. has 11 of the top 12 players in the universe and is a -600 favorite. In the first hour, some kid from Wales who picked up the game after watching Woosie on his home holographic device chips in on the first seven holes to beat Charlie Woods Jr. 6 and 5.

This is just how it’s going to go.

3. Rahm in Rohm: Rory gets all the headlines, all the shine and all the accolades. When European fans want to discuss a single player, it’s always Rory. Always. He’s the epicenter of not just the European Ryder Cup team but all of golf. It’s deserved in so many ways, and he musters all the maniacal, screaming, chest-thumping bravado he can muster in those weeks. He’s Europe’s core, its lifeblood, its juice.

But buddy.

Rahm is its soul.

One of the more amusing parts of the week for me was watching Rahm get mildly irritated about Rory getting like six of the first seven questions in the presser. When Rahm was finally asked one, he said, “Oh. Oh, yeah.” As in: I’m still here, and I still want to talk. Rory is quite aware of this because he’s quite aware of everything, but it was an intriguing moment to me of somebody in Rahm who not only wants to play every match but wants to put his fingerprints on the pressers as well.

Then he delivered the quote of the week (for me). The one I’ve thought about the most: “It's the ability to walk through 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.”

Rahm (obviously) has all the gifts. All of them. Elite driver. Every shot. Magic hands. Great putter. But there are two gifts he has that are difficult (perhaps impossible) to earn. One is a sense of the moment. A startling ability to clear the mechanism and become hyper-focused on the task at hand. What this looks like is clutch golf shot after clutch golf shot.

The other gift is this ability to summarize and speak with tremendous clarity and eloquence. Many Europeans have done this, of course. That is what they’re known for. But to have all the gifts plus those two extra stocking stuffers is remarkable and rare. It almost never happens (of course Europe has two and maybe THREE of these guys) so it’s easy to spot but sometimes difficult to appreciate after it becomes normalized over time.

I’m here to say, don’t normalize it. Don’t eschew it. Don’t write it off.

Rahm is as special as they get.

4. A picture that says what 40 years cannot

Non-golf watcher: Explain to me why the Europeans are so good at this and the Americans seem to be laboring toward a culture they may never attain?

Me, a golf watcher and a genius: Well, it’s kind of complicated. Gosh, I guess we need to go back to the 70s or 80s and talk about the landscape then and then walk through how the Euro culture evolved and then we have to discuss the War on the Shore and what changed after that and maybe I should just give you Shane Ryan’s number.

Non-golf watcher: This photo seems instructive.

Me, a golf watcher and a genius: Oh. Yeah that’s kinda the whole deal right there.

5. Friday’s backbreaker: If you have attended a tournament or watched enough majors, you always know when something is probably ending. I remember Bubba going ham in the second round of the 2014 Masters. Same with Scottie at Augusta in 2022. Both second rounds made you think something like, Anything, I guess, could happen, but this feels like a tournament-winning stretch this guy just went on.

That is exactly how Friday afternoon felt at Marco Simone. First, Hovland from 33 feet to steal a half point. Then Rahm from 26 for another half. Then Rose from a more respectable 9 feet before pointing and screaming at everyone on the grounds except for Morgan Stanley. You could feel in that moment that 6.5-1.5 was a total wrap on the festivities.

And yet … and yet … it still felt kind of real at the end. Every time the event plays out like this, you know there’s going to be a 👀 moment on Sunday. Every time. It happened at Gleneagles (barely), it happened at Paris and then it happened for a longer time than I imagined on Sunday in Rome.

The upshot was this: The conversation DJ Pie and I kept having was, If this gets a little crazy, is the 2023 Ryder Cup going to come down to Wyndham Clark and ……….. Robert MacIntyre?

It didn’t (obviously), but it would been the television of the year if it had.

6. Vulnerability: A question I have been thinking about a lot since last week: Should America try to replicate what Europe has done?

I think it should, and the reason why is something I wrote on Twitter after Day 1 last week. Here’s a snippet of it …

Everybody wants to know who or what to blame this U.S. disaster on. I'm sure you could point to a thousand different things. Here's the one that stood out most to me on Friday at Marco Simone: The U.S. has very few guys who create their own energy.

Ryder Cups are won with golf that emanates from (or leads to) tremendous waves of enthusiasm and emotion. They feed each other. Sometimes that energy comes from making putts. Sometimes it comes from crowds. And sometimes it comes from screaming at your partner after a great shot.

On the road, they react as if they've never been booed or jeered before, which maybe some of them haven't. Their reaction to all of that, though, seems to be almost indifference which looks like completely rolling over.

This is bizarre! Because they all truly do seem to care!

Most of the U.S. energy comes from JT -- again, imagine not bringing him -- but for the U.S. to ever win a road Ryder Cup, he cannot be the only one who creates it. They must find some guys who will lean into the the wild Euro crowds and turn that fervor into an advantage.

Culture encourages players toward (not away from) this, and the opposite of true. A lack of true culture — a more individualistic mindset — means you probably shy away.

It’s difficult to overstate how jarring it must be for these guys to hear 40,000 fans screaming at them for four straight hours at these road Ryder Cups. They’re so unused to that, it’s so different from their usual experience. And you have to have something to absorb it all.

Again, I do think the U.S. is getting closer to having a good culture, but it is clearly not there yet. That doesn’t mean it’s not worth vying for, though, because without it, you might not have a chance. Especially overseas.

7. The Rory Story: What a wild week. He cried at the end again, and it was, like, the 15th most notable moment of his tournament.

The LaCava brouhaha was bizarre. And while — this will shock you — I think LaCava was mostly in the wrong given how long he was out there (the video below is damning), Rory being as wound up about it as he was in the parking lot 30 minutes or more after the fact is also confounding.

Even in the post-even presser he was not dismissive, only saying that time will heal their disagreement. It seems as if there is something deeper and more personal at play, perhaps not something that happened in the moment, but a bigger picture frustration.

Two things stood out to me about Rory’s week, though.

1. After all these years and all those Cups, he’s still (maybe even more so) the one who gets going the most throughout the week. That joyful energy — even when he goes all five almost every single time — is astounding. The ability to maintain it from Monday morning through Sunday night is entirely underrated.

Sometimes we think only about guys like Poulter and Molinari being transformed during a Ryder Cup week, but superstars also change, and Rory seems to play at a different clip than even his usual all-time baseline.

2. Best Ryder Cupper of all time is in play. He’s played in seven and won five. He’s up to 16 matches won and 18 points won. Sergio’s 25 matches won and 28.5 points are definitely are within striking distance. It’s a part of Rory’s legacy that gets overshadowed by the “hasn’t won a major in nine years” thing, but it shouldn’t. His ubiquity sometimes normalizes both his gifts (video above) and his extraordinary career, but it absolutely should not.

He is as singular as he is decorated.

8. Sixteen: The moment I’ll remember from the week was not pivotal to the outcome at all. It was on Saturday evening as the sun started to bleed and the Rory-Fitz vs. Cantlay-Wyndham match got to the 16th.

As everyone stepped to the tee box on that drivable par 4 to watch, Rory hit a 3-wood that sounded like murder. A searing, soaring missile that looked like it might run into the sun on its way down. I’ll never forget it.

There must have been 5,000 people on that hole, crammed into every nook, running up and down the entire thing. The walk into that amphitheater was what your imagination goes to when you close your eyes and think about the Ryder Cup.

At that point, the whole world was chanting and singing at Cantlay, it was the last match on the course and Europe was on the verge.

What’s the best scene in golf? Sixteen at Phoenix, 18 at ANGC on Sunday, the first tee at LACC in Paris or the walk up the 72nd at an Open? They’re all great.

Nothing to me beats a not-quite-to-the-end drivable par 4 on the back nine at a Ryder Cup. That hole was, to me, the best scene in golf this year.

9. The singing rules: Speaking of the singing and the chanting. I cannot get enough. I sang “USA is terrified, Europe’s on fire” the whole flight home. I woke up singing “Tom-Me, Tom-Me, Tom-Me Tom-Me-Fleet-Wood.” The European tendency is to get out over its skis with the lyrics — which it often does — but the energy around those songs is like nothing I’ve ever experienced in golf.

10. But really: I can't stop laughing to myself about the fact that a $100 million event that has been planned for several years by thousands of people who think about, consider and take care of every single absurd detail was so immensely affected by the absence of a hat.

What a stupid, ridiculous, preposterous, amazing and wonderful sport.

Normal Moment(s)

All very routine sports stuff.

I don’t want to spend too much time on Normal Sport stuff given how much Ryder Cup we just went through, but boy, this one was difficult to ignore.

Oil tycoon, advisor to a future king and governor of largest sovereign wealth fund on earth — literally the person who controls more money than any human in the world — playing in a professional sporting event at the most renowned venue in the world under a pseudonym because nobody running the event wanted to draw attention to it.

My reaction.

One commenter said something like, Dude we get it. You think golf is unique.

Well surely other members of some king’s court have participated in an actual NBA game or NFL game or NHL game before. Surely Jeff Bezos, Sergey Brin or Carlos Slim — while in the midst of trying to merge a company with the Premier League — have played in an MLS game under different names than their own.

Oh, that doesn’t happen? Warren Buffett couldn’t get a court at Wimbledon during Wimbledon under the name Arneb Trewtuff? That doesn’t happen elsewhere?

Normal freaking sport.

The Infirmary

I think I am addicted to NYT word games. I identified with what DJ Pie said to me on Thursday last week, “So, do you want to read a book tonight?” “Nah, I think I’ll just get on the NYT word games app for an hour and 45 minutes instead.”

When I’m traveling, my wife and I send each other our Wordle and Connections outcomes with ridiculous, trash-talking-probably-not-for print texts (a sure sign of how cool I am).

One night, like 1 a.m. Italy time, I was stuck on the Wordle and I found myself legitimately trying A-B-E-R-G as a guess.

Might be in too deep.

SOS.

See you next week.