The United States owns the Presidents Cup. Since its inception in 1994, the International Team has won the competition just once (at Royal Melbourne in 1998). Even by that standard of dominance, however, 2017 was an outlier.
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After Saturday afternoon’s four-ball session at Liberty National Golf Club, the US led the Internationals 14½ to 3½, needing only a solitary point on Sunday to clinch a seventh consecutive victory. According to Kevin Kisner, however, if it weren’t for Tiger Woods, it would have been over entirely before Sunday’s singles session even began.
On the Fore Play podcast on Tuesday, Kisner told the story of how Woods, then a captain’s assistant, instructed the US squad to give the Internationals a putt on the final hole of the final match on the course on Saturday (Kevin Chappell and Charley Hoffman vs Anirban Lahiri and Si Woo Kim) so the trophy would still, mathematically, be up for grabs on the final day.
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Ultimately, the story is pretty innocent. The US team, needing only a single point on Sunday, collected four-and-a-half. Plus, Woods probably saved the star-spangled boys from a couple of brutal hangovers, because Kisner said the plan for Saturday night if they had clinched it was to “go out in New York City”. And when a bunch of southern boys go out in NYC on a Saturday night? Well, let’s just say chaos is sure to follow.
What’s more interesting is how out of character this decision seems for Woods, one of the most hyper-competitive athletes in sports history. Like Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant and Tom Brady, there was no score too lopsided for Tiger Woods. No victory too complete. Just ask poor Stephen Ames, who Woods destroyed 9&8 at the 2006 WGC–Accenture Match Play after Ames told reporters before the match, “Anything can happen, especially with where he’s hitting it.”
Was Woods just throwing NBC TV a bone? Was he beginning to soften in his old age? Was he making sure Kisner didn’t wake up in a cell on Rikers Island? We may never know for sure, but whatever the reasoning, the story is a rare glimpse of the softer side of Tiger Woods.
