National Post (National Edition)
Stricker right at home guiding Ryder Cup team
Captain to lead U.S. at 2020 event in native Wisconsin
It will be the man with all the answers versus the man with all the questions at the 2020 Ryder Cup at Whistling Straits.
Steve Stricker was named captain of Team USA on Wednesday. The 51-year-old (52 on Saturday) is tasked with trying to lead America to victory for just the third time since the turn of the century. It will be a home game for Stricker, as golf ’s most intense competition heads to his native Wisconsin.
Stricker has long been a putting master on tour who players, including Tiger Woods, have turned to for answers on the greens. His strong relationship with Woods will raise American hopes that Stricker somehow can get the most out of the 14-time major winner.
“With his leadership and the way the guys follow Strick, we thought that he would be the best captain for 2020,” Woods said Wednesday from the WGC Mexico Championship. “The players were unanimous, they wanted him as their team leader.”
Woods is usually good for a point in his Sunday singles match, but only once in eight Ryder Cups has he gone home with a winning record in team play, where he is 9-19-1. Solving that riddle will go a long way in whether Stricker makes a successful captain.
He is the first American captain never to have won a major.
Leading the other side is a man very unlikely to be asked for swing advice from players. It was announced in early January that three-time major champion Padraig Harrington will captain Team Europe. Harrington is a joy to listen to when he’s talking about golf and can frequently be seen on the driving range with whatever new swing aid has caught his eye.
Whether it’s elastic bands, towels, a child’s foam ball or even golf ’s version of a straitjacket, Harrington has tried everything on his seemingly endless journey.
On the driving range before the 2015 Honda Classic, I witnessed him charging at the ball like Happy Gilmore. Apparently, he was working on getting his weight transferred on his downswing.
“If I can swing like Happy, I’ ll be happy,” he told me at the clubhouse. Days later, he won his first tournament on the PGA Tour in seven years.
ELEVATION BENEFITS
Expect to see some surprising shot distances at the WGC Mexico Championship this week.
Instead of fine-tuning their games, most of the world’s best players have spent the past couple of days staring at Trackman numbers, trying to figure out how far they hit each club at Club de Golf Chapultepec, where elevation is 2,400 metres above sea level.
It’s Tiger’s first tournament in Mexico — although he’s a seventime winner of this championship at previous venues — and it sounds like he still has some work to do in his final day of practice.
“I need to figure out how far this ball’s going,” Woods said Wednesday. “It’s a challenge. I hit a couple shots today with a wedge on the course that flew 180.”
Tiger is paired with Bryson DeChambeau and Mexican Abraham Ancer. The group tees off at 2:03 p.m. ET on Thursday.
I’VE GOT AN ALGORITHM FOR THAT
Golf ’s mad scientist Dechambeau is coming off a week at the Genesis Open where he could never figure out his irons, and tough conditions made it difficult to get work done on the driving range.
That didn’t stop him from trying, though. On Sunday, in between his rounds, he was the only player on the range and had clearly won over a longtime tournament volunteer who said he had never seen a guy work so hard.
The 25-year-old star still managed to shoot 6-under and tie for 15th with Woods and a host of others. This week, though, he’s back at the white board and hopes to have an edge over the field when playing at this altitude.
“I’m not giving everything away,” he said Wednesday. “But, obviously people make a percentage change off of it and we have an algorithm that pretty much tells us exactly what it’s going to do. It’s not perfect yet, but it’s very close.”
Not perfect? The supercomputer must still be churning through the numbers back at the mountainside compound.
Interestingly, Dechambeau mentioned the course playing at 9,000 feet elevation, not the listed 7,800. The Associated Press’ Doug Ferguson asked him about this, and at first Dechambeau didn’t seem interested in giving anything away, before relenting and saying that it’s about altitude versus “effective altitude.”
“You can have an air pressure system that is like sea level coming through here and effectively might change it,” Dechambeau said.
He also explained that spin rates diminish much slower at high altitude.