P R ESENTED BY
USA Captain Zach Johnson
Photo courtesy Shutterstock
Did Luke Donald play his trump card in the Euros’ landslide Ryder Cup win?
T
BY TONY DEAR • CG EDITOR
here are plenty of plausible reasons why Europe won this year’s Ryder Cup so convincingly. Could they all be distilled into one overwhelming advantage, though? “Strong U.S. Team Set to Dominate Next 10 Years” is a headline I wrote in this magazine following America’s record-breaking win at Whistling Straits in 2021. Oops! To be fair, I wasn’t the only one suggesting America would be very hard to beat for the foreseeable future. But here we are, just a few weeks on from Europe’s win in Rome, where the home team’s victory margin may not have been as great as that of its opponent’s two years previously — or even as great as Europe’s victory in Paris in 2018 or the U.S.’s win at Hazeltine in 2016 — but where they outplayed the visitors so convincingly, there were times when you genuinely wondered where the next American point was coming from. How did the Blue and Yellows turn it around so quickly? What happened to the Red, White and Blue team that won the last Ryder Cup by more points than any other team since Continental Europeans were first added to the Great Britain/Ireland team in 1979?
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DECEMBER 2023
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