CORPORAL AMERICA

TOP OF THE STROPS ‘Captain’ Reed was demoted & showed true colours with whining attack on US team

AFTER the Task Force and all the hype about Team America establishing a new era of Ryder Cup dominance, it turns out nothing much has changed. If the true measure of character is to be found not in the glory of victory but in how you handle adversity and disappointment, then Patrick Reed has shown himself to be a small man. Taking a public swipe at his team-mate Jordan Spieth and branding his captain Jim Furyk “not smart” for twice benching “somebody as successful in the Ryder Cup as I am” smacks of breathtaking arrogance. Especially from a guy who played horribly in the two morning sessions at Le Golf National. Surely if he had found more short grass and less deep water he would have been impossible for Furyk to ignore after lunch on both days. Which only made his whining seem all the more like the childish strop of a kid who hadn’t got his own way. Having lapped up the limelight of Hazeltine – when his form and passionate, combative style earned him the talismanic nickname Captain America – it was clearly hard for Reed to accept a bitpart role this time. But it would be wrong to pass this off as simply being the bitter rant of a selfish player who has long had a

So if Spieth wants to play four matches in the company of his regular beach holiday pal Justin Thomas instead of a proven winning partnership with Reed – that’s what he gets.

And fair play to them both – with three points delivered from those four sessions, Spieth and

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