You only have to look at interview/press conference transcripts from every PGA Tour and DP World Tour event pretty much since The Open Championship to know that Ryder Cup discourse has been the dominant theme.
We’re as guilty as anyone else here at Irish Golfer, but I make no apologies. We’re heavily focused on it because, once Scottie Scheffler tapped in that 18-incher on the 72nd hole at Royal Portrush, it was by far the biggest thing coming down the tracks.
Sure, we’ve had subplots – Tommy Fleetwood’s adversity and subsequent triumph was one, Cameron Young’s first PGA Tour win preceded that, Rory McIlroy’s Irish Open heroics was another, and Alex Noren’s revival was the latest – but we’ve viewed them all through a Ryder Cup lens. Tommy’s win was great for Europe because he now knows he can win on U.S. soil, Young’s win meant that it was easy to pick a native New Yorker and strengthen the bond between the U.S. team and the home fans, Rory’s win was great for Europe because it was a confidence booster ahead of Bethpage, and Noren’s wins – two in three starts – came too late or he’d have been near impossible to leave out.
And another Ryder Cup subplot played out in Napa, California in the early hours of Monday morning.
The only reason Scottie Scheffler was teeing it up at the Procore Championship is because Keegan Bradley had specifically requested that the U.S. team – or as many of them could, at least – all get in a competitive rep before heading to New York.
Despite being clearly one of the best 12 American players in 2025, Ben Griffin was the man rumoured to be most in danger of missing out had Bradley opted to pick himself. He and Cameron Young are the only Ryder Cup rookies among the six captain’s picks, and despite winning twice this season – once alongside Andrew Novak at the Zurich Classic and then playing solo at the Charles Schwab Challenge – a further confidence boost by winning the Procore Championship would’ve been a big feather in both Griffin and Bradley’s caps.
But, enter Scheffler.
While everybody else was happy to talk Ryder Cup and virtually Ryder Cup only, Scheffler wasn’t.
“I’m present, I’m ready to play this week,” Scheffler said on Wednesday, prior to the action starting. “I didn’t show up to Napa to talk about the Ryder Cup for four days. I’m here to play a golf tournament.”
Four days later, he’d won that golf tournament, and in doing so, he’d tracked and overtaken his Ryder Cup teammates, one by one, so that by Sunday morning, Griffin was the only one left to catch. Even when Griffin opened with three birdies to Scheffler’s one, pushing the lead to four, you got the sense that it was only delaying the inevitable.
Like a seal that manages to escape a hunting orca by boarding a floating sheet of ice, it was only a stay of execution. The orca would keep circling, keep using its powerful tail to create waves and rock the sheet of ice, causing it to split or hurling the seal back into the sea where the deadly jaws await.
Scheffler has become the game’s apex predator, a man whose mere appearance on a leaderboard is enough to send shivers down the opposition’s spines. And its on putts that the trembling shows up most.
Griffin missed five putts from inside six feet in his final 14 holes – including one on the last which would’ve got him into a playoff – and failed to seriously threaten the hole with a bunch of 20-footers on the way in.
We’ll never know, but it’s odds-on that if it was anybody else coming up in Griffin’s rearview mirror, he gets over the line and heads for Bethpage with a spring in his step, another trophy on his mantlepiece, and his confidence sky-high.
Perhaps Bradley should’ve had a quiet word in Scheffler’s ear around the turn, explained to him the value in taking a dive and allowing Griffin to ride off into the sunset, but the first rule of any wildlife documentary maker is that you don’t get involved. You let nature take its course, and that course is often bloody. And in this case, it was almost cannibalism.
But there’s no way Tiger Woods would’ve eased his foot off the pedal to allow Chad Campbell or Scott Verplank confidence-boosting wins ahead of their Ryder Cup debuts, and there’s no way that Scheffler would do it either.
With each week, and with each win, the comparisons between Scheffler and Woods become stronger. No player since Tiger has been able to instill the fear in the competition that Scheffler can, no player since Tiger has been able to reel off wins at such a consistent clip, and no player since Tiger has had the killer instinct that Scheffler has.
But it remains to be seen whether Scheffler can produce his best in a Ryder Cup on a more consistent basis than Woods did. Scheffler has two wins, two losses and three halves, with an overall victory and an overall loss in his two previous Ryder Cup appearances,
We’ll not have a definitive answer in a fortnight’s time, but we’ll have a clearer picture.
And we’ll have a clearer picture of what effect the slow strangulation had on Ben Griffin.
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