1 important reason elite golfers need the Ryder Cup

FARMINGDALE, N.Y. — No matter what they’ve done as juniors, no matter what they’ve done as pros, there’s a weird thing most Ryder Cuppers feel during their first team event:

That they don’t belong. 

The more players you talk to, the truer it seems. Some evil Ryder Cup equation — between the two-year break, the individual, plodding nature of their seasons, outsize passion and discomfort — that makes the greatest golfers on the planet … a bit sheepish in front of their peers. 

“I think that first year for me was a lot of discovery,” Cam Young began, “just in terms of just accepting that I fit in out here golf-wise. And that I’m meant to be here and this is what I want to do. You know, I’m qualified to be on these teams.”

Young is a Ryder Cup rookie but was talking about the Presidents Cup, which he played all five matches at in 2022. Less than a year prior to being on that squad, he had been watching the PGA Tour as a fan, he said. 

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“You stick me 10, 11 months later in the team room, and I’m sitting there kind of still a bit uncomfortable just because I don’t know anybody really well,” Young said. “There’s a few guys on the team that I had known from junior golf but there had been a gap — six, seven, eight years — where I had not really seen them much.”

Young  was a top 20 player in the world, but “I was still getting my feet under me, and I think now that I’ve been out here for longer, I’m much more comfortable.”

He’s not alone.

“I learned that I can compete at the top level of golf,” Bob MacIntyre said Wednesday. That’s it for Bob, who reiterated the thought a moment later. He changed all his equipment after that Ryder Cup, believing he could reach a new level. And sure enough, he’s found it in the years since, winning twice and becoming a top 20 player in the world.

He feels differently about the presence he holds in the world of golf now. It all started at the Ryder Cup. 

You could say the same of Scottie Scheffler, the World No. 1, who was the 12th and final man on the 2021 American team. There’s nothing offensive about that, Scottie knows it. He hadn’t won a PGA Tour event yet but earned a massive endorsement from Steve Stricker and his fellow teammates. Just receiving the phone call made him “very emotional,” he said. Then he beat Jon Rahm 4 and 3 in a singles match and has won basically everything else since. 

Even Rahm himself wasn’t completely sure the role he could play during his first Ryder Cup. 

“I was high in the World Rankings, yes, and I had been playing great golf,” Rahm said. “But the second I got in that locker room, it was very, very, very apparent to me that I was way lower down when it came to Ryder Cup, just because of how comfortable some players were and how different the dynamic of the week is.

“Did I belong? Yes. But the presence — nowadays, they’ll say the aura of some players — the second you walked in the locker room in Paris, Sergio [Garcia] and [Ian] Poulter were very big. Just the heaviness of their presence was apparent right away.”

Rahm called it intimidating and humbling. But similar to Scheffler, a few days after he found himself in a crucial singles match … against Tiger Woods. 

If he hadn’t belonged yet, he did a few hours later when he won 2 and 1.

“The pride I feel right now,” Rahm said that day. “It’s indescribable.”