National Post (National Edition)
MICKELSON BACKS UP BRASH TALK IN RYDER CUP
Sunday saved the 41st Ryder Cup from dishonour and Team USA’s tall foreheads from the psychiatrist’s couch.
It was a day of good cheer, of good cheering, and of even better golf.
As 17-11 blowouts go, it was sensational entertainment.
As leadoff bouts go, pugnacious Patrick Reed taking down Rory McIlroy 1-up in the opening singles game was that rarest of heavyweight contests that lives up to the hype.
As 46-year-olds go, Phil Mickelson, throwing a 10-birdie round of 63 at Sergio Garcia and only getting a half-point out of it surely rivalled Jack Nicklaus’s 1986 Masters win as one of the best-ever performances by a golfer his age.
And perhaps, all things considered, that was how this one should have ended: with Mickelson, the man whose public shaming of 2014 captain Tom Watson was the catalyst for a PGA of America task force aimed at rethinking the factors that make Team USA perform — and more recently, not perform — standing centre stage and basking in the limelight. Few enjoy it more. “I’ve been part of 10 successful Presidents Cup teams and eight losing Ryder Cup teams and it’s easy to see what the difference is,” said Mickelson, whose voice captain Davis Love III will be hearing in his sleep for weeks to come, so pervasive was Lefty’s influence on all the decisions Love and his multitude of vicecaptains made about Team USA.
“These are incredibly talented players, and given the right environment, they brought out some of their best golf this week and we won the Ryder Cup. I’ve known for some time these guys had this level of performance in them.”
He may not have known he had that level still in him, but everyone knew Reed, who may really be the perfect Ryder Cup player, a combination of relentless competitive fire and boundless confidence, was the guy to start the ball rolling, if anyone was going to.
Ryan Moore, the last man aboard after finishing runnerup to McIlroy in the Tour Championship, scored the Cup-clinching point, winning the last three holes from Lee Westwood for a 1-up victory in the seventh match out, but Reed’s conquest of McIlroy set the performance bar so high, all the subsequent matches seemed to enjoy reaching for it.
For one four-hole stretch from the fifth to the eighth holes, McIlroy birdied all four and Reed went one better, with an eagle and three birdies — the eagle at No. 5, where he hit driver to eight feet on the par four, relieving McIlroy of his only lead.
“This is the greatest match I think I’ve ever seen,” said NBC’s Johnny Miller, and no one was arguing.
In the midst of it all, Reed danced and screamed “Come on!” and fist-pumped, mimicked the elaborate bow McIlroy made to the crowd on Friday, wagged his finger after holing a birdie putt on top of McIlroy’s — and the Irishman responded by cupping his ear and mouthing “I can’t hear you” to the crowd, and at one point shushing them the same way Reed had done to the European spectators two years ago.
And then they grinned at one another and left the eighth green with arms around each other’s waists. “Oh, it was all played in the right spirit, which was great. Yes, we mocked each other, but it was all in good fun. No problems with Patrick at all, he was immense this week,” McIlroy said.
“The emotion we showed … I knew I had to keep doing that if we had any chance, and I did it pretty well for the first eight holes, but I just didn’t have enough out there at the end to stop Patrick.”
You wouldn’t have called the Mickelson-Garcia match genial, but they were civil while being brilliant, and the crowd followed suit.
For all the scolding the spectators deservedly took for rude behaviour in the team matches, they adopted a more even-handed tone Sunday — partly, no doubt, because there were 12 games to watch, and the 50,000-plus fans were not packed around just four holes.
As for the singles session, it was a longshot for the Europeans after they messed up Saturday afternoon’s four-ball matches and fell three points behind.
That meant the U.S. needed only five points to retake the Cup, after losing three straight and eight of the last 10.
European captain Darren Clarke put four of his six rookies in the last five slots, which was always going to be a problem if none of them was named Thomas Pieters or Rafa Cabrera-Bello, the only two of his debutantes who shone here.
“This team had to come together,” said Love. “We’ve been criticized for eight years for not coming together, but what Bubba (Watson) did, what Phil Mickelson did, what they all did … I’m humbled they put me in this position. I think we’ve been kicked around for so long, you keep losing, you feel like you gotta do something different. But from Raymond Floyd to Rickie Fowler from that first meeting, we all said we’re going to put this on the right track. Our guys handled the pressure. Phil put up 10 birdies today and only got a half. The Europeans came here and played a lot of stunning golf.”
Henrik Stenson put the first point up on the day for Europe, beating Jordan Spieth 3&2, and Pieters and Cabrera-Bello followed with 3&2 wins over J.B. Holmes and Jimmy Walker, respectively, but it was all red on the bottom half of the lineup, except for Martin Kaymer, who beat Matt Kuchar 1-up long after the Cup was already won.
Sunday was an especially tough day for English players — Justin Rose, Westwood, Danny Willett, Chris Wood and Matt Fitzpatrick — who comprised half the European side and didn’t get so much as a half-point.
“I don’t think I can even digest what happened,” said Moore, whose comeback against Westwood was likely the last Ryder Cup round ever for the 43-yearold. “To clinch the last point for the Ryder Cup, unbelievable. There’s nothing like it, and there’s nothing better.”