[Photo: Vaughn Ridley]
As we all know, the 2025 Ryder Cup didn’t go the way the US team hoped. Anything but, in fact. The home side was asleep at the wheel throughout the first two days of the tournament, entering Sunday in a seven-point hole that they had dug. The reasons/excuses for this were myriad: Keegan Bradley’s disastrous will-he-won’t-he captainship. Underwhelming play from stars, ugly behaviour from fans and the bed sheets being tucked too tight at the team hotel…
…OK, we made that last one up, but allegedly the course setup at Bethpage Black did play a big role in the outcome. Though far from the core issue, the Americans complained that the setup didn’t match what they had asked for, including the greens, which were reportedly much slower than Captain Keegan specified. This week Justin Thomas joined the No Laying Up podcast and shed some light on the behind-the-scenes friction between the US team and the grounds crew that helped to derail the squad’s Ryder Cup bid. Watch it and weep.
“I don’t know why they [the greens] weren’t at all what Keegan had asked for. I mean, he had been pretty clear of asking for a certain speed and wanting it fast enough. I watched them argue with us that they were 13s [on the Stimpmeter],” Thomas said. “It’s like, ‘Guys, we play golf every week. Like, look on TV at how many guys are leaving putts short. Nobody is getting… You can’t have a putt, roll, three feet, four feet past the hole. Like these greens are slow, speed them up.
“It was just bizarre because that’s not something you would expect at a home Ryder Cup,” Thomas continued. “A fun advantage you generally have [as a home Ryder Cup team] is being able to do that a little bit, and it was just so frustrating that we were being fought with and argued with on the speed of the greens that we asked for. So that was bizarre.”
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Thomas is a Ryder Cup veteran, so when he says something is out of the ordinary, we’re inclined to believe him. Certainly the grounds crew bickering about the setup, instead of simply speeding up the greens regardless of who was technically “right”, seems abnormal.
On the other hand, the US being this fixated on the green speeds instead of their actual play illustrates a lack of focus – like an AFL team that gets rattled by poor officiating and spends the whole game arguing with the umpires instead of playing the game. As that Sunday, when the greens finally slicked up, demonstrated, there was some merit to the logic that DP World Tour pros play on slower greens than their PGA Tour counterparts, but the bigger impact was clearly the internal friction the disagreement created. If there’s one lesson for Thomas, DeChambeau, Scheffler and Bradley to take from all of this, it’s to roll with the punches, not into them. If they can’t learn to do that before the Ryder Cup shifts back to Europe in 2026, then they might get KO’d again.
