What Tiger Woods said to U.S. Ryder Cup team after victory

Tiger Woods, Xander Schauffele said, was “fist-pumping from the couch” on Friday.

On Sunday, he wanted to celebrate. 

In a tweet sent from an iPhone about an hour and a half after the U.S. won the Ryder Cup at Whistling Straits, Woods congratulated the team he had previously been a part of eight times. 

“A dominant performance by @RyderCupUSA!” the tweet read. “I can’t wait to see and celebrate with all of you! Congrats to all the players, Vice Captains and of course Captain @stevestricker.”

The tweet was not the first time Woods, recovering from injuries he suffered in a car accident in February, reached out to the American team. On Tuesday, captain Steve Stricker said he had been “in my ear a lot and I call him pretty regularly.”

“He’s part of our Ryder Cup team,” Stricker said. “He’s part of what we do. He’s been part of so many of these teams. So to bounce ideas off of him, all of us, players alike, I know some of the players went over to see him.

“But I think it’s just not a good time for him to be here physically because of where he’s at in his rehabilitation and tough course to walk, right. Everybody is going to see it, from tee-to-green, it’s difficult. So probably won’t show up. But he’s getting better and his focus and mine is on making a comeback to play again. We don’t want to get in the way of that because we would all love to see him come back and play.”

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Schauffele and Patrick Cantlay, after they won their foursomes match on Friday morning, also revealed that Stricker had read the team a text from Woods. 

“We had a nice message from Tiger last night, and obviously not going to reveal what it said, but Pat and I know,” Schauffele said. “We referred to it a few times today, and we knew what we needed to do.”

Said Cantlay: “No better role model and no better leader, and just somebody that you can always learn from,” Cantlay said. “So I saw him last week at home, and just picked his brain on Ryder Cup and applied some of that here today.”

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Nick Piastowski

Golf.com Editor

Nick Piastowski is a Senior Editor at Golf.com and Golf Magazine. In his role, he is responsible for editing, writing and developing stories across the golf space. And when he’s not writing about ways to hit the golf ball farther and straighter, the Milwaukee native is probably playing the game, hitting the ball left, right and short, and drinking a cold beer to wash away his score. You can reach out to him about any of these topics — his stories, his game or his beers — at nick.piastowski@golf.com.

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