CHARLOTTE, N.C. — The emotion flowed out of Si Woo Kim on the 15th green with a furious fist pump to celebrate the putt he rolled in to answer Justin Thomas. In almost the same motion, he put a finger to his lips to silence the crowd that had been so loud around that green all week.
Shush Woo Kim found a way to inject some drama into proceedings that looked like a foregone conclusion, finally asking questions of the U.S. team it had to dig deep to answer on the final day of the Presidents Cup.
Kim ended up beating Thomas on the 18th to win that match, but it wasn’t nearly enough for the Internationals. Thomas didn’t even see Kim’s celebration on 15; he’d already started walking to the next tee and had to turn around to see what the noise was all about.
That’s kind of how it was from the start at Quail Hollow. Whatever the International team did, for better or mostly worse, the United States kind of went about its business anyway, not on autopilot exactly, but not really tested until Saturday afternoon, and by then it was too late and not enough. The United States was pushed again Sunday but safely retained the Cup with five of the 12 closing matches entirely moot.
There’s a broader conclusion to be drawn that far exceeds the boundaries of this remarkable week, a trend that’s becoming an assumption. This is a new generation of American golfers, one that didn’t grow up having its dreams crushed under Tiger Woods’ heel, week after week, and the place where it really shows are these international match-play tournaments.
The same killer instinct – let’s be honest, the utter absence of persistent chokability that would so often bubble to the surface in Sunday singles – that the U.S. team showed at Royal Melbourne in 2020 and at Whistling Straits in the Ryder Cup last fall was in full evidence at Quail Hollow. The unfathomable Ryder Cup collapse at Medinah in 2012 seems like a long time ago now, even if similar circumstances started to encroach Sunday.
When the Americans were pushed, when they wavered a little bit, they wobbled but they never fell down. The early week dominance led to a rather orderly procession to victory on Sunday, even after their front-loaded lineup was unable to deliver the desired early closeout.
Thomas lost and Sam Burns tied Hideki Matsuyama, but Jordan Speith went on a wild ride early against Cam Davis, in the rough and over trees and out of bunkers, tossing a club 20 feet in the air at one point before putting Davis away on the 15th for his first-ever singles win in the Ryder or Presidents cups. Patrick Cantlay went up early and coasted against Adam Scott.
That left things a little more up in the air than the Americans would have liked, but four matches in, the Americans still had all but two of the points they needed to retain the cup. What little opening there was for a collapse was slammed shut by Tony Finau and Xander Schafufle, whose scrambling par on 18 clinched the Cup.
Even when the nervous moments briefly arose Sunday, the outcome was never really in doubt. That might not be great for television ratings, but it was great for the crowd that had such a great time all week and even better for American golf.
There were concerns early in the week that down the road, this event may need a tweak to the format – mixed gender?– because the Internationals were struggling to keep up even before the LIV Tour cut a wide swath through their roster.
Without legitimate competition, then this festival atmosphere, a bunch of international golfers you’ve never heard of and fewer than the expected number of holes actually played runs the risk of merely being a match-play LIV Tour done right, without the sportswashing or ethical quandaries.
But over the final two days, this cobbled-together International group gave a credible account of itself, not only salvaging some drama but perhaps this event itself. History will tell that tale, and any of those decisions will be made somewhere else, sometime down the road. The week at Quail Hollow was memorable in its own way, regardless of the foregone outcome, which is the only one the fans wanted to see anyway.
“Man, they were fighting,” International captain Trevor Immelman said. “I hope fans out there really do appreciate, these guys have got massive hearts. Massive hearts. And I’ll go to battle with them any day.”
That was part of why the inevitability of it didn’t mean it wasn’t fun to watch, though, whether it was the Speith-Thomas comedy duo during foursomes and fourballs or the unexpected star turns from Tom Kim and Max Homa – the two reigning champions of North Carolina’s PGA Tour events, even if Homa won this edition of the Wells Fargo in its temporary quarters in Maryland – culminating in Homa’s furious closing stretch to win their Sunday showdown.
It looked at one point that Kim and Homa might be running out of energy, understandably so, but that was never the case at Quail Hollow. The home team took care of business in focused fashion, making noise the Internationals couldn’t answer or silence, every bit as loud as the crowds that wouldn’t have stood for anything else.
