It was their first time doing it and it was my first time witnessing it, but it didn’t take long before all of us were thoroughly engaged by the proceedings of a Presidents Cup pairings selection session.
By they I mean both Presidents Cup captains — Geoff Ogilvy and Brandt Snedeker — sharing their well laid, and apparently very private, plans for the first session of this year’s Cup. And by me, I mean one of the 50-ish people attending the press conference and waiting, quietly, as the International Team deliberated whom to send out against Cameron Young and Xander Schauffele.
For 45 seconds that felt like many more, the room was silent. Trevor Immelman leaned in over Ogilvy’s shoulder, peering at their notes. If you didn’t know any better, you’d guess Trevor is International Assistant Captain No. 1, but then Camilo Villegas leaned in even further over Immelman’s shoulder and it felt obvious:
This is a triumvirate.
The other assistants deferred; Tim Clark had taken an observational knee in the background and Taylor Pendrith was removed from the deliberation enough that he didn’t even fit in the frame of the TV shot. All you could see was his right hand.
Villegas had turned away the microphone placed in front of him to keep anyone from capturing their whispers, and after nearly a minute Ogilvy pulled his mic back in front of his mouth:
Hideki Matsuyama and Ryo Hisatsune.
It may be a small token of this event and it may prove meaningless in the end but this team-oriented rumination among people conditioned to compete as individuals is absolutely something this team event does better than its biennial brother, the Ryder Cup. At Bethpage Black, it was Here are our squads. Let’s play ball. At Medinah, it is, one by one, Here are the pairings we think can steal the most points off yours.
If it feels like a reach to compliment the ways in which this event picks its matchups, that’s because these singular weeks each year when individual golf turns into team golf can make us a bit desperate to understand it. We beg each sides to not just have defined strategies, but sound ones, too. The advent of analytics have made team events into the Hindsight Olympics. We likely make too big a deal out of the pace of the greens and how it may impact one team vs. another. We likely make too big a deal out of the course history or event the thread count of the team hotel bedsheets. But if there is one undeniable element of strategy that gets injected into this event, it’s selecting one specific duo against a very specific opponent. And doing so as quickly as possible.
“It’s interesting,” Ogilvy said after I asked him what it was like. “I’m sure Brandt and his team have — we made some guesses based on practice round groups. We’ve got some ideas about what we want to get matched up, and I’m sure Brandt has the same thing. We just thought about it for a bit.
“I mean, these things unfold quite quickly. You just want to make sure you don’t break one of your rules that you’ve set before you come in this room.”
Oh, to know that list of rules.
By comparison, the Americans were much quicker with their choices. After the Internationals took another 40 long seconds to decide who would play in the their foursomes match, Snedeker waited only a few seconds before choosing Justin Thomas and Jackson Koivun. Perhaps there’s less to think about when you have the (on paper) stronger roster, but Snedeker sharply noted, “We’re not just throwing darts at the wall.”
For numerous reasons, Snedeker likes the Presidents Cup format better than the Ryder Cup, and though he is obviously biased at the moment, he thinks it a captain’s asset that he can try to influence the order of events with some strategy. (In an event with such pomp and circumstance, could this be a captain’s most important role?)
And so it feels like there is something there. Something to deciding why you’d hold Chris Gotterup and Patrick Cantlay for the final match against Tom Kim and Si Woo Kim. The captains were notably uninterested in sharing the intricacies of that thought process — at least for now — but it adds a layer of detail we don’t get at the Ryder Cup. It adds intrigue to the daily pairings affair. It adds a helluva lot more to the line-up of 12 singles matches that get decided Saturday night. We could only be so lucky for the match to be close at that point.
This article was written by Sean Zak and originated on Golf.com
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