MONTREAL — If the headline to this story looks vaguely familiar, it’s a mirror image of the story we ran on Thursday following the American whitewash that left the visitors up 5-0 and seemed to murder any intrigue at the Presidents Cup. The rout seemed to give credence to the vocal detractors who demand a format change every two years.
MORE: Internationals kick-started their Day 2 comeback with historic rout
There are a few ways to describe what happened in the 24 hours since. You could go with the old-school cliche of “what a difference a day makes!” or the new-school cliché of “life comes at you fast.” Or, to get really modern, you could draw on the obscure match-play vocabulary of Sahith Theegala and call it a “Mongolian Reversal.” Either way, the reality is stunning: In Friday’s five alternate-shot matches, the Internationals won the full five-pack and turned the Presidents Cup from a funeral march into a legitimate competition. At 5-5, the stakes have returned from their overnight hiatus higher than ever. Every shot on Saturday will be dripping with tension.
In short, put your hot takes on ice, because this sucker is good again.
“Incredible day for us,” Adam Scott said, unable to keep the emotion out of his deadpan delivery. “To come back and show everyone what this team is made of after a tough day out there yesterday is just incredible. … This team knows what it’s capable of now.”
The formula for any epic match-play comeback, from Brookline to Medinah, always seems to include some lopsided victories at the top of the lineup, preferably against the other team’s big guns. Along with the benefits of simply winning a point, there’s a psychological boost for the rest of the team seeing their own flag on the board. That role fell first to Hideki Matsuyama and Sungjae Im, who played the most astounding golf of the day, making eight birdies in 12 holes and closing with seven straight to boat race the formerly intimidating duo of Patrick Cantlay and Xander Schauffele.
The Americans had a brilliant start to their career as a pair, but have now lost four straight in the Presidents Cup and Ryder Cup, dating back to 2022 in Charlotte. And despite American captain Jim Furyk’s confidence in putting them up top, they had absolutely no answers for the International onslaught.
That match ended 7 and 6, and the second pairing, of Adam Scott and Taylor Pendrith, built a lead gradually and then suddenly as they closed out Theegala and Collin Morikawa 5 and 4. The other blowout came courtesy of the first all-Canadian team of this Cup, when Corey Conners and Mackenzie Hughes won 6 and 5 in the fourth spot against Wyndham Clark and Tony Finau.
Hughes, in fact, may have been the player of the day. It was Conners’ incredible iron that shut the door on the par-3 13th—and indeed, he finished as the player with the most strokes gained on Friday—but Hughes got the energy humming as early as the bus ride to the course, when he was among those to deliver a motivational speech to the team in what must have felt like a hopeless situation.
Hughes closed out the Americans by converting Conners’ tee shot into a birdie, at which point all eyes turned to the last two matches on the course. There, in another reversal of Thursday, the Internationals seemed to do everything right on the last hole.
Christiaan Bezuidenhout and Jason Day held a 2-up lead for most of the back nine, but unsteady play (particularly by Bezuidenhout) saw them holding on by one-hold thread on 18. That’s when Day dropped the chip of the day from off the green, trickling it toward the hole and securing the fourth point of the day.
ICE IN HIS VEINS 🥶
Si Woo Kim seals the @IntlTeam sweep in foursomes @PresidentsCup. pic.twitter.com/i8lWpBJOxm
— PGA TOUR (@PGATOUR) September 27, 2024
Finally, in the day’s most competitive match, the Internationals seemed poised to concede a half point after a sloppy final hole, until Si Woo Kim did this:
The 5-0 sweep is nothing less than a total palate cleanser. There are various opinions about how to “fix” this event, the most talked about being a mixed event with the LPGA. But as in a sneaky-close Charlotte edition, and at Royal Melbourne in 2019, the action at Royal Montreal is as good as it gets in the fall of a non-Ryder Cup year. If they’re not quite breaking out the champagne at PGA Tour HQ, they’re at least putting it on ice.
The stats were as gaudy as you might imagine. The Internationals won 27 holes, the Americans just six. The Americans led for just a single hole the entire day. The Internationals occupied seven of the top nine spots in the strokes-gained metrics for the day. But in the great debate about what changed from Thursday to Friday, one prominent answer from all parties was the crowd itself.
“They were unbelievable today,” said Tom Kim, who criticized the lack of fan support on Thursday and spent all of Friday in a cheerleader capacity. “They definitely brought it. … I think the reason why we were able to play so good today, other than these guys going out and performing, was our fans backed us up. I think that gives you momentum, that gives you energy.”
The Internationals’ performance also gave them a reason to show up in great numbers, and great volume, on Saturday and Sunday. That might be the biggest gift of all for the International team, who are now poised to see what will undoubtedly be the greatest home-course advantage for their team since the advent of the Presidents Cup.
But just as the greatest loser on Thursday was the Presidents Cup itself, so it benefited the most from the Friday turnaround. For all the criticism it takes, there’s a Lazarus-like quality at play here, a half-comical and half-impressive back-from-the-dead resilience that churns out hope and drama from what looked, just 24 hours ago, like a vacuum.
It’s almost October, there’s no Ryder Cup this year, but against all odds the golf world will have something incredibly compelling to watch this weekend. Game on.
This article was originally published on golfdigest.com
