US Ryder Cup debutants sweep away deadwood of doomed Tiger-Phil era

Team USA's Patrick Cantlay makes a putt on the 15th hole during a Ryder Cup singles match at Whistling Straits. Picture: AP Photo/Charlie Neibergall

The generational shift that defines Steve Stricker’s US team continued to pay off handsomely as the Americans won the Ryder Cup along the shores of Lake Michigan.

The youngest team in Ryder Cup history — average age: 29 — continued its rampage in Sunday's singles on the Straits Course and their European foes. The Americans, who became the first team in competition history to lead by six or more points after three sessions, not only won back the Ryder Cup, but quickly ran away with it as the singles competition played out.

All six of the US team’s first-time players — Xander Schauffele, Scottie Scheffler, Harris English, Patrick Cantlay, Collin Morikawa, and Daniel Berger — delivered at least a half point on Friday as the Americans stormed to a commanding 6-2 lead, their widest advantage through day one since 1975.

The debutants kept it up on Saturday as Schauffele and Cantlay took a full point with a 2 and 1 win over Lee Westwood and Matt Fitzpatrick. It was the same for Morikawa, playing with Dustin Johnson, after a 2 and 1 win over Paul Casey and Tyrrell Hatton.

Schauffele ran into a back-in-form Rory McIlroy, but had already contributed three points in all to what would become a runaway win. Cantlay, the newly minted PGA Tour Player of the Year and FedExCup Play-off champion, added 2½.

Morikawa, the reigning Open champion and last year’s PGA Championship winner, had chipped in two, same as Berger.

Stricker, the Wisconsin native who used four of his six discretionary picks on first-timers, did an excellent job of selecting players who are comfortable together. That hasn’t always been the case for a US side that has won only two of nine Ryder Cups this century, despite routinely coming in with the superior individual players.

For the first time since 1993, the US played a Ryder Cup without Tiger Woods or Phil Mickelson in the team, though Mickelson was at Whistling Straits in a vice-captaincy role. They were not missed, as a 12-man US contingent with only 12 previous Ryder Cup appearances among them made the most of their opportunity to turn the page in the book of Ryder Cup history.

A large part of the US team’s inexplicable Ryder Cup futility in the Tiger-Phil era was down to the lack of team morale so frequently ascribed to the team’s broader failings.

Even if you were paired with Woods, and Woods was your friend, it was intimidating just to play with him — and there was a certain intimidation coming off Mickelson, too, that did not make an ideal partner. You simply didn’t want to lose if you were playing with these guys, and so you played tighter.

Woods and Mickelson didn’t always bring it themselves, either — at least not to the standards of a pair that have won a combined 21 major championships and 127 PGA Tour titles between them. Mickelson owns the competition record for most matches played (47), but has won fewer than half of them to overtake the all-time mark for matches lost (22). Woods played in eight Ryder Cups overall, none on the winning team since 1999, amassing 13 wins, 21 losses and three draws; a record that is almost shocking in light of his dominance outside the competition in that time.

The duo’s vast talent failed to catch fire, regardless of the format. They also struggled to mesh with all types of partners — including each other, as their ill-fated 2004 pairing at Oakland Hills demonstrated.

While it’s flatly unfair to attribute the US team’s chronic underperformance over the past two decades to Woods and Mickelson alone, the inability of the sport’s two most decorated players over that span to thrive in the competition became a symbol of doomed individualism.

Freed from the psychic baggage of two decades of failure, this year’s team have realised the lofty expectations that weighed down previous iterations. Spirits were high as the afternoon pairings went off while Johnson guzzled a beer and spiked it to the ground amid rollicking chants of “U-S-A! U-S-A!” from the jam-packed grandstands.

They were getting closer, and everyone can feel it.

“We have a whole new team,” said Tony Finau who, at 32, is the third-oldest American in the team.

“We have a team with no scar tissue. There’s only a handful of us that has even played in a Ryder Cup, and the few of those, we have winning records. So we actually don’t have guys on our team that have lost a lot in Ryder Cups.”

- Guardian