Writing from Medinah, Illinois
Wednesday, September 23, 2026
What is is about team golf – LIV excepted – that so captivates us?
It is because, contrived though it sometimes is, it harkens back to the team sports we watch most of the time?
It is because when Old Glory is unfurled, many hearts flutter?
It is because it’s just different from the week-in, week-out thrum of professional golf, where one tournament, usually sponsored by a beer, a bank, or a car, almost always looks like the one before and the one to come?
Maybe it’s all of that. Maybe it’s also something else.
Maybe it’s because when there’s a cup on the line – Presidents this week, Ryder, Solheim, Walker and Curtis on others – there’s no money on the line. No purse, no oversized check, nothing but pride and the fear of letting down the team as motivating factors.
Maybe that’s it. A dozen guys or gals, all dressed alike, all for one and one for all, until the last putt drops on Sunday afternoon. It brings about butterflies the size of pterodactyls in some stomachs and empties others, with not a shilling to be earned, unless an endorsement comes along later.
This is pure golf, and it’s closer to the game most of us play – a brew or a buck or three on the line, and do you mind if I press at the turn? – than the weekly scrap for $20 million, which for the elite might as well be Monopoly money at this point.
So here we are at Medinah, a century old and sporting a new-look No. 3 course to go with the clubhouse that has a 14th century look to it. The Presidents Cup starts Thursday, the Americans, guided on this occasion by Brandt Snedeker, are heavily favored as always – with a 13-1-1 record against the Internationals, they’re the golf equivalent of Secretariat in this race – and thousands are expected to attend to gawk at the six new holes designed by Geoff Ogilvy and his associates, and to root against Ogilvy’s International dozen. More about the redesign later this week.
Fourteen years ago, Ogilvy will surely whisper into the ears of his charges, the European Ryder Cup team had no chance against the Americans on Sunday afternoon, until they did, and the tables turned more quickly than the skywriting planes could write “S-E-V-E” into the clear September skies.
That final three hours on Sunday was the most exciting golf this correspondent has had the good fortune to cover. Will the coming Sunday come close to matching it? Only the golf gods know, and they’re not telling.
Tim Cronin