[Photo: Andrew Wevers]
Jackson Koivun’s Presidents Cup case isn’t complicated, once you accept what the event actually is.
The 21-year-old won the 3M Open on Sunday, his third start as a professional, and by Monday Golf Twitter—tough crowd, that Golf Twitter—turned a historic week into a referendum. Deserving pick, for a US team that already has its top nine mostly spoken for? Or a headline-chasing, prisoner-of-the-moment selection, the kind this game makes in July and spends every fall picking apart?
The case for him starts with what the Presidents Cup has never let itself be, which is a primer for the Ryder Cup. The Americans, despite almost always having the better team on paper, have spent years chasing a European side that out-prepares them, out-pairs them, out-executes when things matter most. And the tool for closing that gap has sat in plain view and was painfully highlighted last year at Bethpage Black. Call it bureaucracy—the Ryder and Presidents Cups answer to different arms of the same sport—but the result is the same either way. An opportunity, passed over, year after year.
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What makes it exasperating is how elementary it all is. The US can still field its best eight and be comfortably the better team. It’s the other four spots that have gone to waste. Those slots could be assimilation and audition. They could be the difference between a Ryder Cup team that knows itself and one still introducing its parts to each other under Friday morning lights.
The tour will tell you, and not quietly, that the Presidents Cup is not an audition. It has its own case for existing on its own terms, and every year someone tries to shrink it down to a proving ground, the people running it bristle. Fair enough. But wanting an identity and functioning as a pipeline were never actually in conflict. The Presidents Cup can hold onto both, and picking Koivun doesn’t cost it anything. Besides, the real problem the Presidents Cup has never solved isn’t credibility. It’s indifference. Nobody hate-watches this thing. Nobody circles it on a calendar the way they do the Ryder Cup, dreading it and craving it in equal measure. The matches are competently played and mostly forgotten by October, the golf perfectly fine and the stakes nonexistent for anyone watching from home. Koivun’s presence gives people a reason to tune in and find out what the fuss is about.
[Photo: Luke Hales]
On the surface, this looks like a case built on adrenaline. Golf’s newest obsession wins his third start as a pro and suddenly he’s a lock for the US team. But the scepticism only holds if you grade the event on a curve meant for something with actual teeth, and the Presidents Cup doesn’t have them. There’s no animus here, no rivalry that keeps anyone up the night before. The US has lost this thing once in more than 30 years. What the Presidents Cup lacks is a reason to lean forward, and Koivun gives them the chance to go that direction.
There’s more to it than nerve, too. DataGolf rates him the best amateur golfer of the past 15 years, a stretch that includes Jordan Spieth, Jon Rahm, Collin Morikawa, Viktor Hovland and Matt Wolff. Koivun’s résumé already sits ahead of Ludvig Åberg’s when Luke Donald handed him a Ryder Cup debut in 2023—a pick that looked like faith in September and looked like foresight by the time Åberg was outplaying men who’d won majors while he had yet to tee it up in one. What seemed like a gamble then is remembered as the moment the rest of golf caught up to what Donald already knew.
And if the worry is that a Presidents Cup without depth would feel diminished, the question is simple: diminished compared to what? USA Basketball runs the FIBA World Cup every four years leaving most of its household names home, and the event survives fine. People still watch and argue about it and what it means for the upcoming Olympics. Nobody calls for it to be cancelled because the Americans sent the second string. They just adjust what they’re watching for. The Presidents Cup could stand the same adjustment. Less an argument over which 12 are unambiguously the best, more a stage for what American golf wants out of what’s coming.
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There’s a chance Koivun—or Akshay Bhatia, or Ryan Gerard, other young guns who merit this same campaign—aren’t a factor next year at all. Golf has a bad habit of falling in love with the next big thing, only to discard him a few months later, the hype outrunning the game. That’s a real risk, and it doesn’t change the answer. Pick him anyway. The point is to find out what the guy is made of.
The Ryder Cup doesn’t wait for certainty, and neither should the event that’s supposed to be preparing for it. Adare Manor will be loud and hostile and unforgiving in ways a September in Chicago against the Internationals simply isn’t, and the American team that shows up in Ireland will be built, in part, on decisions being made right now about who gets exposed to pressure before it actually counts. Koivun winning at the 3M Open handed the selection committee its easiest excuse to finally act on it.
