Greetings!
I have gotten so much feedback on my Monday newsletter outlining where our business is at and what we want to do, which has been awesome. Thank you to everyone who has reached out with ideas, connections or just a “thanks for sharing.” It has meant a lot and been extremely encouraging.
Name drops today: Scouts Consulting, Shane Ryan, Paris, Roger Angell, Coach K and Phil Mickelson.
This newsletter is brought to you by Experience Ireland Golf and Travel.
[Jason here] Flying off to a new golf destination can feel a little daunting. Just getting your clubs there (at the time, without Shipsticks) can feel daunting!
I felt some of that last year when Seed Golf sent a Normal Club member and me to Ireland for the Links Challenge, hosted by Experience Ireland Golf and Travel.
All of my trepidation disappeared when I rolled up to Carne Golf Links and met Tom Kennedy — who is the CEO of EIGT — as well as the other golfers there for the event. I quickly realized that Tom is a golf sicko running an event with other golf sickos.
This could be you.
Tom's superpower is making you feel like a golf buddy within his golf world. On our first night at Carne, we were enjoying some Guinness, watching the sun set over Carne's massive hills, and Tom told us to go sneak in some holes. That's something you do with buddies sitting on the terrace of your club.
But at one of the most beautiful courses you've ever seen?!
Tom gets it.
You can contact EIGT right here or check out their operation below for any type of Ireland travel you might have in your future.
OK, now onto the news.
As someone who cares way too much about the Ryder Cup in [checks calendar] April of a non-Ryder Cup year, I thought today’s newsletter would be a great time to reflect on the announced Jim Furyk captaincy, what it means for the United States side and whether this team has a chance of taking down the tremendous European machine (😂).
Let’s jump in.
1. Winning captain selection day is very much not the point of this entire process. Is Jim Furyk an inspiring choice as the U.S. Ryder Cup captain? Absolutely no. Does that have any bearing whatsoever on how the team performs in Ireland a year and half from now? Also unquestionably not.
Here’s an instructive question: Do you think Luke Donald inspired the Euros back in 2022 when he took the reins from Henrik Stenson? I do not recall that there was parading in the streets nor any predictions whatsoever regarding what was about to unfold with Donald now on the short list of people you think of when you hear the phrase “best Ryder Cup captain of all time.”
So I don’t really care about any of that. Because it doesn’t matter.
I believe Shane Ryan said this best.
I don’t really believe that all sexy picks are terrible picks, and I actually will still defend parts of the Keegan pick. But the better (and more important) point is that systems do win Ryder Cups, and Jim Furyk is — I believe — nicely positioned to submit to and possibly even help facilitate a system that will usher in a new era of U.S. competition in the Ryder Cup.
(how many different ways have I written that sentence over the last 12 years?)
2. I admit that the previous paragraph is the most optimistic view imaginable of this Furyk pick. But I guess my broader point is that we get excited about captains on the U.S. side because of the system or philosophy they might bring to bear for our team.
This is a backwards way of viewing it.
The Euros, conversely, view their captain as a custodian of the system that is already in place. The steward of a plan that has been forged and formed over decades.
What this means is that even when the U.S. wins a Ryder Cup because of one individual’s system — see: Azinger at Valhalla in 2008 — there is no through line for that system going beyond that single Ryder Cup.
So I am less concerned about who the captain is and much more concerned about whether the U.S. has any infrastructure in place around Furyk (and future captains) at this event.
That part remains to be seen.
USAdare Manor
3. I am with Garrett here.
I would much, much rather talk to a board of PGA of America executives about the future of this Ryder Cup program than I would want to talk to Jim Furyk about the future of this individual 2027 Ryder Cup team.
I’ve talked to multiple people who believe Scouts Consulting is either no longer affiliated with the U.S. team or at some point in the near future will not be. I am not reporting this and have no idea if it’s actually true, but the people I’ve talked to are well connected and insinuated that the PGA-Scouts relationship was potentially not a long-term one following Bethpage.
So the question remains: What is the plan? Naming a captain is not a plan. It’s a byproduct of a plan. A formality. A weigh station en route to a destination informed by your GPS of choice. I’m unconvinced the U.S. has truly had one since … 2021? Earlier? Ever?
The alleged exit of Scouts Consulting underscores something that has plagued the U.S. for most of this century: They lack the ability to get everyone on the same page and pulling in the same direction. This is why they have the pressers they have following losses at this event.
4. I loved this clip from Furyk on the NLU pod from 2020 after he lost in Paris. It’s a line he’s trotted out a few times, but it is emblematic of who I believe Jim Furyk to be as a player and probably as a person: dogged, humble and thoughtful.
I guess the ... comment that surprises me, it shocks me the most is I've had a handful of people come up and say, “You know, if you got to do it all over again, would you do something different?”
And I almost laugh. I'm like, Well, what arrogant asshole would have the event go the wrong way and then say, “Nope. I'd do everything the same way?”
Jim Furyk | NLU Pod No. 352
You should go listen to the entire thing. The Ryder Cup stuff starts around 40 minutes, and it will give you a deeper appreciation for Furyk.
I think it’s very easy to write him off as “boring white bald guy with a dumb swing who didn’t win many majors.” Fine, that’s certainly the surface level version.
But I believe he’s a certified dog who seems willing to listen and to change. That’s rare, and if (again, potentially the biggest IF in the history of team sports) the PGA of America can build an infrastructure around him and future captains, I legitimately think he can be successful.
5. I outlined what an infrastructure for the U.S. could look like right here in point No. 5. It’s a wild stab at … something and a facsimile of how I believe Europe goes about its business. Does Ryder Cup Europe care way too much about this event? One-thousand percent. Am I jealous of the fact that they care this deeply about something this ridiculous? Also an affirmative.
What was it Roger Angell said once about baseball?
It is foolish and childish, on the face of it, to affiliate ourselves with anything so insignificant and patently contrived and commercially exploitative as a professional sports team, and the amused superiority and icy scorn that the non-fan directs at the sports nut (I know this look - I know it by heart) is understandable and almost unanswerable. Almost.
What is left out of this calculation, it seems to me, is the business of caring — caring deeply and passionately, really caring — which is a capacity or an emotion that has almost gone out of our lives.
And so it seems possible that we have come to a time when it no longer matters so much what the caring is about, how frail or foolish is the object of that concern, as long as the feeling itself can be saved.
Naïveté — the infantile and ignoble joy that sends a grown man or woman to dancing in the middle of the night over the haphazardous flight of a distant ball — seems a small price to pay for such a gift.
Roger Angell
I have used this line — the business of caring — multiple times in Ryder Cup hype videos I have written for the PGA of America. It is how things are supposed to be.
And while I do not doubt that each individual on the U.S. side does care about the Ryder Cup, I do not believe that any individual on the U.S. side cares as deeply or as hopelessly as almost everyone on the European side. Furthermore, I believe that the Euros care together rather than as individuals.
This is not necessarily why they win, but it is absolutely why they invest heavily in an infrastructure that brings about the kind of trust in everyone that leads to them winning.
If the Euro organization was an image, it would be this one.
6. This thread of suggestions for who the PGA should have picked is incredible. Names mentioned include …
Soly
David Duval
McConaughey
Justine
Jay Wright (!)
John Daly
Rich Lerner (!!)
Duffy Waldorf
Phil
Jackson Koivun
Among others.
The suggestion of folks like Jay Wright is, frankly, exactly what I’m talking about when I talk about the wrong way to look at all of this. I know Jay Wright was probably mentioned as a joke, but Phil Mickelson seriously mentioned Coach K at the end of last year (!).
Someone like Coach K (I cannot believe I’m typing this) could feasibly implement an amazing plan for Adare Manor in which Scottie Scheffler and Collin Morikawa combine to go 9-0-1 and the U.S. wins in Europe for the first time in 35 years. But singular plans do not make great organizations, and Europe wins the Ryder Cup over and over and over again because they have organizational excellence.
7. I wrote about the idea of organizational excellence extensively after Bethpage, and while I’m not going to re-litigate every single thing that was said (you can read more here, here or here), I will restate my thesis.
All of my theories about why Europe makes more putts revolve around trust.
Players perform best when they’re most comfortable, and they’re most comfortable when they have the highest level of trust possible. In their prep, in their teammates and in the work put in by their organization and their captains.
Europe’s leadership has engendered more trust by caring for every detail, running every model, considering every backup plan. And thus they have created tremendous comfort for their players, even in hostile environments.
I realize there is no SG: Trust or SG: Comfort. You can’t measure any of this, which can make it sound like woo woo nonsense. But if you’ve ever played a team sport (or heck, had a job that required high performance) you know that trust is a predecessor of whatever your personal version of “just making more putts” is.
You can easily argue that against me because I can never prove it, but it’s going to be very difficult for me to ever believe it isn’t true.
Me
The U.S. seems so, so far from this that I’m not even sure if they can see the signage for the path to get there. There are 1 million reasons, but I would say near the top is the fact that the PGA of America is an organization that most American players rarely interact with and perhaps almost never interact with outside of the PGA Championship.
That makes building anything — an infrastructure, trust, any of it — quite difficult.
8. Anyway, because it’s April of a non-Ryder Cup year, we need to wrap this up. My last point was going to be a different version of what I said back in October of last year, so I decided to just point you back to that again. ⤵️
It is a very American attitude to say, “Well, we will just find better players who play better and do better, and we will win that way.” This works. Sometimes! But it’s no way to go about things on a regular basis.
Again, most of this is nobody’s fault. I have no doubt Keegan did his best as the captain and made every single move he thought would most help the U.S. win. But the buildout and infrastructure of the U.S. team is just leaps and bounds behind what it is on the European side.
Keegan assured us all on Sunday evening that he had every resource at his disposal — of which I have no doubt! — but the problem is that he was seemingly flying a bit blind at an organization and for a team that has so much churn that you legitimately could get an entirely different plan and philosophy from the captain every two years.
Me
Have I made it clear enough that I believe that while the captain certainly matters, he is one (very big) piece of an entire puzzle. The U.S. team sometimes feels like it’s trying to put the puzzle together without all of the pieces.
Shane Ryan argues a bit differently in this column. He says that the U.S. had a system and an infrastructure but went away from it. I hear that, but I’m unconvinced it was a strong enough system for prolonged long-term success.
Again, I could be wrong about this. I am not in every meeting, do not see every decision. That infrastructure (if you want to know exactly what I mean by repeatedly saying the word infrastructure, you can again read point No. 5 here) is potentially being (re)built out as we speak!
But the evidence of the last few decades is that this would be a questionable assumption at best.
So whether you believe Jim Furyk is a terrible piece with rounded edges that doesn’t fit anywhere in any puzzle or you — like me — believe that he is a good piece with sharp contours that can help put the whole thing together, none of it really matters without all the other pieces.
And until the U.S. has proven that it has the ability to put all the other pieces of the organization together, I refuse to even entertain a belief that they can contend to win a Ryder Cup on the road on European soil.
Thank you for reading our outrageous golf newsletter that is sometimes — but often barely — about golf and for reckoning with the golf world alongside us. Every edition is algorithm-free and handcrafted by me (Kyle) and Jason. It is a joy for us to build and to publish it for you to read. As always, we hope you love it.
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