Sports Desk: Dhaka, Sept-23,
The United States is counting on six Ryder Cup rookies with impressive golf resumes as they try to wrest the coveted trophy from Europe at Whistling Straits.
The youth movement --
against a veteran European side -- is less risky than it might appear with the
Americans counting the newcomers as RINOs -- Rookies in Name Only -- thanks to
their accomplishments elsewhere.
"I have all the
faith in the world in all the rookies," said Justin
Thomas, who made his
own Ryder Cup debut in the loss to Europe in France in 2018.
"Your rookies are
a two-time major champion in Collin Morikawa or a FedExCup Champion in Patrick
Cantlay, and a (Tokyo Olympics) gold medallist in Xander Schauffele,"
Thomas said. "When you're looking at guys like that that are your rookies,
that says a lot about your team."
The other newcomers are
Harris English ranked 11th in the world, four-time US PGA Tour winner Daniel
Berger and 25-year-old Scottie Scheffler.
Scheffler may be the
lowest-ranked player on the US team at 21 in the world, but only four of
Europe's players are higher in the rankings. Cantlay's late-season surge earned
him Player of the Year honors on the US
PGA Tour, where he
stared down Bryson DeChambeau in a six-hole playoff to win the BMW Championship
then edged world number one Jon Rahm to win the Tour
Championship and the
$15 million FedEx Cup playoff crown. Cantlay said he's expecting the Ryder Cup
to be a "more amped-up version"
of his playoff duel
with DeChambeau, and he's revved at the prospect.
"Playing in that
environment, the idea of that is really exciting so I'm
looking forward to
getting out there and experiencing it," he said.
Cantlay, 29, and
27-year-old Schauffele, have already proved their match-play chops. At the 2019
Presidents Cup, they played together in all four team sessions, winning two
foursomes matches and dropping two four-balls. Each won his singles match as
they finished the week with 3-2 records.
The two prepped for the
Ryder Cup with a joint holiday in Napa,
California, and it's
odds-on that US captain Steve Stricker will put them together come Friday.
Cantlay said playing
with a well-known partner is particularly helpful in the alternate shot format
of foursomes.
"When you are
playing and you hit a bad shot, you don't want any sense of, 'Oh, I wonder what
my playing partner is thinking about the terrible shot I just hit,'" he
said."
That kind of insight
into the format will be useful, especially against an
experienced European
side that features just three rookies in Viktor Hovland,
Shane Lowry and Bernd
Wiesberger.
And US veterans like
Jordan Spieth along with Stricker and vice-captain
Phil Mickelson has been
advising the newcomers on managing emotions that always seem to be magnified in
the Ryder Cup.
Spieth's advice is to
embrace the adrenaline rush, the "nervy feeling" of
a close match with a
point on the line.
- Changing of the guard
- Morikawa, the 24-year-old world number three who won the 2020 PGA
Championship and this
year's British Open, is relishing a long-awaited chance
to do that after
missing out on the Presidents Cup in 2019.
"Just missing that
team kind of just pushed me," he said. "I want to be on
these team events and
these team events are just so memorable that you don't
really want to miss
any."
European veteran Lee
Westwood, playing his 11th Ryder Cup at the age of
48, said that in an
"ideal world" it would be preferable to "filter your
young players in
gradually a few at a time, not necessarily bang all at once
in a team as rookies.
"But that just happens like that every now and again," he noted.
"it almost like a changing of the guard for them." Perhaps the new
guard is what America needs to regain the Cup. The last
time the US had so many
rookies on the team was in 2008 when they triumphed
at Valhalla in
Kentucky.
Paul Azinger, who
captained that side, said he loved the idea of "fresh
blood."
And Thomas said that
ultimately the question of experience versus youth
was moot.
"At the end of the
day," Thomas said, "whatever team plays the best is
going to win."
