Motivation Burns Naturally for Team USA Ryder Cup


HAVEN, Wis. – United States Ryder Cup captain Steve Stricker has not given a single electrifying speech against his accusations this week. He also avoided showing the motivational videos that many of his predecessors liked to make.

When Stricker became a Ryder Cup contender, as opposed to a non-playing captain, he thought these tactics only pissed him off.

At the 43rd Ryder Cup kicking off Friday morning, Stricker will rely on a more fundamental inspiration for his team: He has the youngest US roster in decades and knows that these players have spent most of their lives listening to Europe’s continued dominance of the event. .

Americans, eight of whom are younger than 30, are increasingly fed up with this story, and they don’t need a speech or the bright theme music from “Rocky” to wake them up. As Tony Finau, a 32-year-old senior to the USA team, said on Thursday: “There’s extra motivation or extra drive to change American golf culture.”

Finau added: “Hopefully our culture of not getting the job done in the Ryder Cup will change this week.”

Europeans who have won four of the last five Ryder Trophies, understandably relieved, even somewhat baffled by the unrest and intrigues among Americans. For example, it was a lot intrigue about makeup The number of matches Stricker selected for the first two days of 16 team matches. Strategic American combinations were discussed and tried this week during practices at Whistling Straits, the daunting golf course that hosted the event across Lake Michigan.

European players instead played loosely, training in ambiguous groups that seemed devoid of forethought. On Thursday, Brit Paul Casey explained: “We’re so good, we’re so comfortable about what we’re going to do tomorrow, it’s like why should we think so hard on Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday?”

But at the event’s opening ceremony late Thursday afternoon, some details were finally revealed in the final part of the biennial competition, as Stricker and European captain Padraig Harrington determined the pairings for the four-by-four on Friday morning. dated to 1927 and postponed for a year due to the coronavirus pandemic.

For Europeans, who often race their fellow countrymen together, the matchups came as little surprise. In the first match of the event, Spaniards Jon Rahm and Sergio Garcia met with Lee Westwood and Matthew Fitzpatrick from England.

Generally responding well to an emotional, high-energy partner, Northern Ireland’s Rory McIlroy has been paired with England’s Ian Poulter, one of the most passionate and successful Ryder Cup players of this century. Harrington also chose to unite Ryder Cup veteran Casey with Viktor Hovland, a first-time Norwegian player to compete at the event.

On the American side, Stricker appears to be leaning towards the methods that American captain Paul Azinger successfully employed in the 2008 Ryder Cup.

In what Azinger called the “pod system,” he divided his 12-man team into four-man units that would spend the pre-match period doing everything from lunch to practice laps, eventually being brought together in competition. The hope was to develop a bond between certain groups of players, similar to the one that Europeans naturally display.

Groups of four led the Americans to a runaway victory in 2008, for the first time in nine years. Since then, Azinger’s approach has been largely abandoned. But based on the top four matches selected on Thursday and the training batches Stricker has sent in over the past three days, it looks like some four-man grouping is forming on the American team.

The first matchup announced by Stricker was Justin Thomas and Jordan Spieth, who will play against Rahm and Garcia on Friday morning. The Thomas-Spieth combination was a rare bright spot where the Americans teamed up four times in the first two days and won three times at the Ryder Cup in 2018. Thomas and Spieth have known each other since childhood, competing in premier junior golf tournaments, and have become close friends professionally.

While nothing will be clear until four more games are played on Friday afternoon and eight more games are played on Saturday (Friday afternoon draws will be announced at the end of the morning games), the duo will most likely be played by Thomas and Spieth, with Patrick Cantlay, who will face off in Game 4 against McIlroy-Poulter on Friday morning. and Xander Schauffele.

Cantlay and Schauffele are Ryder Cup rookies, but Schauffele won an Olympic gold medal this summer and finished in the top 10 nine times at major championships. Cantlay was recently named Player of the Year on the PGA Tour. Winning the FedEx Cup playoffs. In the 2019 President’s Cup, a team competition between a collection of international golfers from outside the United States and Europe, Cantlay and Schauffele played together and won in two of the four team sessions.

Other American teams playing on Friday morning will be Dustin Johnson and Collin Morikawa, who will face Casey and Hovland, and Brooks Koepka and Daniel Berger, who will face Westwood and Fitzpatrick.

As they train together periodically this week, Johnson, 37, and Morikawa, 24, who are the oldest and youngest members of the American team, respectively, are perhaps seen as half a capsule alongside Bryson DeChambeau and Harris English. Koepka and Berger would later team up with Finau and Scottie Scheffler on a pod.

The Friday morning foursome format requires players on a team to take turns hitting the same golf ball on each hole. The Friday afternoon format is four ball, where each golfer plays their own ball on each hole and a team wins a hole by having a player (or players) with the lowest score among the four golfers in the group. Most holes are usually connected.



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