When Tiger Woods won the 2018 Tour Championship … was it Jim Furyk’s fault?
When the PGA Tour schedule-makers — years earlier — slotted that Tour Championship on the eve of the 2018 Ryder Cup on another continent … was Furyk to blame?
When Bryson DeChambeau won two playoff events and sprinted to the top of Golf Twitter’s captain’s pick rankings … was it Furyk’s fault that he selected DeChambeau, who then couldn’t find a fairway in France?
And was it also Furyk’s fault that a 47-year-old who essentially appointed himself to the Ryder Cup “task force” also willed himself to a victory that year — and the path of least resistance was simply asking that 47-year-old (we speak of Phil Mickelson) to be a veteran presence to your three rookies in a match on the road?
Oh, the things we choose to forget about a Ryder Cup from eight years ago!
And while we’re at it … was Jim Furyk to thank for having the guts to pair Jordan Spieth with Justin Thomas for the first time? A duo that (1) Wanted to play together, and (2) Dominated their European opponents that year and again in 2021?
Did Furyk receive any hindsight praise when he stared past the trendy picks and stuck to the numbers, selecting Data Golf’s 4th-ranked player in the world as a not-obvious captain’s pick? That would be Tony Finau, a rare bright spot at the 2018 Ryder Cup and clearly a smart selection. But how many people remember it?
They remember only that Furyk’s other captain’s picks could barely reach the 16th hole during their week in the French countryside. They remember only that the Thomas-Spieth pairing nullified Spieth’s partnership with Patrick Reed and that irked Reed so much that the Band-Aid of being paired with his idol, Tiger Woods, dismayed Reed, a notoriously self-focused player. Reed took to the New York Times on that Sunday night and lashed out at Furyk’s leadership. Team Europe’s leadership is praised for giving players no choice in who they play with; Reed threw a tantrum when he didn’t get his top pick.
The smattering of negative, mystified discourse following Furyk’s selection as 2027 Ryder Cup captain has been predictable in many ways. Chiefly that the man who was out front in 2018 will have to continue answering for decisions he made back then — decisions that, at the time, passed every test. Recall that Shane Ryan of Golf Digest, expert chronicler of modern Ryder Cup history, said Furyk had done “everything right” entering that week, and that Thomas Bjorn, on the other hand, deserved some ire.
It can be easy to forget all this stuff as time passes, but know that Furyk hasn’t. He’s made peace with that difficult result, and will surely make a handful of changes to his approach before next year’s Cup, too. But if he gets his tactics wrong in Ireland, will we be talking about Luke Donald’s shampoo choices again?
The most important thing to remember about the Ryder Cup is that it is often simply a collection of coin-flips. The two teams are so stacked with talent that there will be both narrow wins and blow-outs on both sides. There will be 40-footers that win holes and missed 4-footers that lose holes … on both sides. Yes, Dodo Molinari will tilt the course setup in Europe’s favor, but we’re talking about the tiniest of advantages gained there. Truth is, when you flip a coin hundreds of times, you get a normalized result. When you flip a coin only a couple dozen times, you can aggregate a wide berth of plausible results, which causes the storytellers — from both teams and within the media center as well — to focus on the intangibles, like shampoo.
Donald brilliantly navigated the Ryder Cup captaincy for a second time at Bethpage last fall, and reaped all the storytelling rewards in the aftermath, inclusive of his decisions to swap out the shampoo and the sheets in his team’s hotel rooms. Brilliant? Maniacal? Somewhere in between? Whatever the case, hair-care products are what we’ve somehow landed on as a history-telling device for the 2025 Cup.
Much more than we talk about Russell Henley.
If Henley had knocked in his birdie putt on the 18th hole of his singles match at Bethpage Black, the 2025 Ryder Cup gets dangerously close to a coin-flip. (A European assistant captain even said so!) The leaderboard was red, the momentum was leaning in the United States’ direction, and a coin-flip on the totality of the match becomes a coin-flip on everything. On the merits of Keegan Bradley’s pump-up speeches. (Maybe they were brilliant?) On the vulgarity of the home crowd. (Maybe the U.S. fans were just raucous enough?) If that Henley putt drops, it’s coin-flip odds that we don’t spend Sunday night hearing all about how Donald understands thread counts and how light from a hallway can enter a dark bedroom beneath a door frame.
Anyone willing to call the 2025 Ryder Cup “close” would have to acknowledge that Furyk’s 2018 team actually trailed by just one point mid-afternoon on Sunday, once Finau (ahem, Furyk’s captain’s pick) blanked Tommy Fleetwood (now considered an all-time Ryder Cupper) 6 and 4. Brooks Koepka sputtered away a half-point. Dustin Johnson did the same. Jordan Spieth got dog-walked by Thorbjorn Olesen and the end result got out of hand thanks to the final eight matches. The resulting NY Times bombshell was made all the more possible because Reed himself beat up on a Ryder Cup rookie. But it’s all worth remembering that a captain’s legacy can be decided in all those coin-flip points on a Sunday afternoon. Captains’ decisions are multitudinous, be they in lineups made or hotel rooms chosen, and they take place over months, not hours. They are made with a wealth of data and instincts. And then 12 of the best players in the world have to behave like they’re one of the 12 best players in the world.
When Furyk woke up that Friday morning outside Paris, the scoreboard read 0-0, and eight of the 12 best players in the world were on his team. Furyk trotted out a six of those eight in morning fourballs and do you remember what happened? They built a 3-1 lead. That it all came crashing down had a lot to do with those players, but we never seem to talk about that.
In part, because Furyk shouldered all the blame.
