Europe all charged up
McIlroy leads loud rally
CHASKA, Minn. — The morning dawned with the stands crammed and cheers of “USA! USA! USA! rolling across the grounds at Hazeltine National Golf Club, and the 41st Ryder Cup opened with the American team drubbing the Europeans, 4-0, in foursome matches.
By the time the long shadows of approaching evening began to spread, however, it was as quiet as night fall at a cemetery.
Momentum, that most elusive of things in sport, swung like a dark pendulum back toward the Europeans, who quite literally roared back behind Rory McIlroy in the afternoon four-balls, winning three of four matches to finish trailing 5-3 after Day 1.
But the real feeling was they had somehow won the day.
“As you could probably imagine, the mood in the team room was quite buoyant and definitely feels like there was a shift in momentum this afternoon,” said McIlroy, after his 15-foot eagle putt on the 16th hole won the final match of the afternoon session. “Hopefully we can carry that into the morning.”
For the U.S., it felt like opportunity lost, as the twosomes of Jordan Spieth and Patrick Reed, J.B, Holmes and Ryan Moore and Dustin Johnson and Matt Kuchar came up short, defeated by Justin Rose and Henrik Stenson, Sergio Garcia and Rafa Cabrera Bello and Rory McIlroy and Thomas Pieters, respectively, in four-ball. Only the team of Brent Snedeker and Brooks Koepka, who had not played in the morning, survived the European onslaught, defeating Martin Kaymer and Danny Willett 5-and-4 in leading from the first hole to the 14th, where the match was settled.
It is difficult to end the first day of Ryder Cup competition with a 5-3 lead and feel like you’ve lost but that was the odd sense of it after a morning so elevating the Americans seemed to float into the team room after it was over.
Soon they would learn, nothing had been settled.
“It was a long day,” U.S. captain Davis Love III admitted. “It’s frustrating not to come out a little bit more ahead, but I know Darren (Clarke, European team captain) is happy with the momentum. I thought we came out and competed real well. Even the guys that were kind of run over, buzz-sawed (in the afternoon), still hung in there and kept making birdies and got these guys as far as they could.”
That wasn’t very far. No afternoon match reached beyond the 16th green and the last ended dramatically and emphatically there when McIlroy hit a perfect 226yard 4-iron approach to within 15 feet and holed the downhill eagle putt to close out Johnson and Kucher.
McIlroy then turned and directed deep and villainous bows toward the highly partisan crowd in all directions before shaking his fist in the air.
“Incredible,” McIlroy said. “This is my second (Ryder Cup) in the U.S. It’s definitely a little more hostile out there than it was at Medina (in 2012). Reactions like that on the last (his deep bows), I just want to let people know how much it means to us. You know, we’re not going down without a fight. It was 4-zip after the morning. We’ve pulled it back a good bit and we plan to pull it back even further.”
A few years ago, it was McIlroy who demeaned Ryder Cup competition by calling it an “exhibition,” a statement he now deems as sounding “kind of stupid.” That came before he’d played in it and felt the surges of emotion and energy that flowed from first the roaring and later the stilled crowd to the players and back.
It is a symbiotic relationship between the two unlike anything else in golf. Normally tournament golf is a solitary walk, one man against the course and himself. The crowd‘s relationship to the golfer is more akin to a symphony crowd’s polite connection with the first oboe player, appreciative but polite and disconnected.
Ryder Cup is a different breed of event. Until tomorrow’s singles each player is part of a larger group, both the twosome he’s playing with and the 11 other men he’s sharing the team room with.
That creates unique tensions and pressures foreign to these players and difficult for some to cope with, as American rookies Moore and Koepka and their European counterparts, Cabrera Bello, Pieters and Andy Sullivan learned yesterday.
That pressure can make short putts long and long putts look like a hiking trip through the Himalayas. The air is thin and breathing becomes difficult at such a height.
That’s what made yesterday’s morning outbreak by the Americans and the crowds wild-eyed response to it and the Europeans’ stirring answer that quieted them both in the afternoon so noticeable to all.
Not the least of them was the fiery McIlroy, who is not only among the best players in the world but also the European standard bearer of the moment.
“Obviously not fazed by anything that is said by the crowd and not fazed by anything that the U.S. team throws at us,” McIlroy said. “I wanted to put an exclamation point on the end of that session and thankfully I was able to do that for my teammates.”
In the eyes of the partisans at Hazeltine, Rory McIlroy is now an enemy of the state. When he tees off at 7:35 a.m. alongside Pieters again in foursomes against Phil Mickelson and Rickie Fowler, the crowds will be raucous once again.
How long they stay that way today will say much about whether fast starts or strong finishes meant the most.