Trevor Immelman wants to win the battle, don’t worry about that. He’s determined to help his International team charges to a Presidents Cup victory at Quail Hollow next September.
But Immelman is perhaps even hungrier to win the war, and that is why the 2008 Masters champion could become the most important captain in the 27-year history of the biennial Presidents Cup.
The teams event which allows golfers from outside Europe to take on the United States is at a pivotal moment in its timeline, when choosing the right path could turn this into a truly global showpiece down the track.
I spoke with the South African a few days ago and the takeaway from our chat was he wants to ensure the Presidents Cup enjoys long-term success. He knows he has an opportunity to take the event to the next level. It’s a legacy all captains dream of.
The 2019 edition was incredible. Tiger Woods and Royal Melbourne were a truly magical combination and the golden potential of the Cup was laid bare for the sporting world to see.
But steps need to be taken to ensure that gold wasn’t just a flash in the pan. The first challenge is to win the 2022 Cup in Charlotte’s Quail Hollow Club in North Carolina. That’s essential to the product and to make this competition, well … competitive.
The International team has won only once (Royal Melbourne, 1998) since the Cup was created in 1994.
Immelman, who at 41 will be the youngest ever International team captain, knows he has his work cut out. The American team will largely be the same as the side which cruised to a Ryder Cup victory on home soil this year and they’ll be chugging beers on the first tee once again if the International team isn’t up for a fight.
But Immelman has to start somewhere. He wants to begin by taking the new team logo his predecessor, Ernie Els, introduced for the 2019 Cup and use that to build a team that is beloved by golf fans outside the United States.
Els created that logo as a way to unite this motley crew of golfers from all around the world under one flag. Having a mentality that players were representing their home countries in Cups before 2019 clearly wasn’t working.
The logo was a step in the right direction, but Immelman (and Els, it must be said) know the fans need more than that.
“I think you have to start from the grassroots,” Immelman told Australian Golf Digest when asked how does a captain bottle the lightning of the 2019 Cup. “And, by that, I mean the fans. What’s very important to me is how do we build a fanbase? This is something that really we should have been working on a long time ago. When you consider the regions of the world we represent as the International team, I mean, that’s billions of people.”
Immelman is right. When India’s Anirban Lahiri and China’s Haotong Li have been on the team, they open up the event to a percentage of the 1.4 billion people living in each of their homelands. Each! There is also the potential to capture a percentage of large populations like Japan and Argentina when golfers from those countries are involved.
“It’s huge,” Immelman continues. “So, from those billions of people, how do we find a way to get the people who love, or have even a mild interest in, golf to support our team? How do we get them to buy a piece of merch with our logo on it and travel to the President’s cup and post up at a corner of Quail Hollow and cheer us on?
“I want to see one of our players hitting his approach up onto the second green at Quail Hollow and he looks up and he sees like 10 fans standing with with the International team shield on their hats, or on a hoodie, or a T-shirt. We need to start to build all of that. That’s the way you’ve got to do it.”
It’s a smart plan and perhaps one that could give the International team an edge to counter the bottomless well of talent Team USA has at its disposal. If the Internationals can build a boisterous and almost daunting fanbase, all bets are off. World rankings go out the window. We saw that in 2019 when Cameron Smith swept aside Justin Thomas in the Sunday singles.
The Australian in me says there’s a short-term answer to all this: alcohol. Every good sporting event has booze flowing and good, certainly respectful, crowd banter. But that’s at the event. What about before and after Quail Hollow?
Well, Immelman knows growing the profile of this team is achieved by two things: firstly, that prospective International team members win somewhat regularly on big tours around the world, the PGA Tour especially. And they are – it doesn’t get much bigger Hideki Matsuyama winning the Masters at Augusta National in April and the Zozo Championship in his native Japan. That needs to continue.
The second is storytelling; getting the captivating tales of colourful characters on the International team, who hail from far corners of the globe, out there in golf media, sports media and hopefully even mainstream media.
As a golf writer, I’m going to hold up my end of the deal. Let this be the first of many 2022 Presidents Cup stories.
