Where do you begin to dissect what happened at last week’s Ryder Cup?
Europe won at Bethpage and, in doing so, won for the first time on away turf since 2012. A huge lead built across the first two days against America proved too much for the home side to overcome, despite an almighty effort in the Sunday singles.
As feared, the event descended into a farce outside the ropes, with countless reports from the ground detailing abusive shouts and behaviour unrecognisable in the game.
This was then complemented by the constant lung-bursting celebrations of the players competing, which then acted as the hand that turned up the volume switch of the spectators.
Another regrettable feature of the event in New York was the way in which the golf course was set up. Bethpage Black is marketed as a brutal challenge and has hosted the US Open twice, a tournament also marketed as a brutal challenge.
But what we saw at the 45th Ryder Cup was a birdie fest on a soft track with no rough, and pitch marks dented in the greens and fairways, and the world-class players were happy to oblige.
Speaking on the NCG Golf Podcast as someone who has played the golf course, Steve Carroll was thoroughly disheartened by how one of the world’s best venues was presented.
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“I do want to talk about Bethpage Black and what an absolute horlicks they made of that place. I have played that golf course, I know I go on about it, but I have played that golf course and they cut the balls off it,” he said.
“They neutered it to the point where I looked at the set-up and thought, I could break 90 around there. Everything that makes that golf course challenging – they removed it. They pushed tees forward, they stripped it of any rough whatsoever unless you were off-the-planet wide.
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“And by doing that, they completely dismantled the ethos of that golf course and I don’t think it helped them in any sense (Team USA). That golf course demands the rough and demands elevation because the greens are flat. There is very little contour on these greens at all, and if they’re completely soft, either by set-up or by the rain, and you put pin positions that aren’t massively challenging – you’ve got players that can just hit those greens at will.
“Then the thing that stops them from hitting greens, the rough, is removed to the point where it doesn’t matter. I was so angry watching what they’d done to Bethpage Black, as it’s such a fantastic golf course. It’s an amazing challenge to play, and they euthanised it.”
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After getting beaten, US captain Keegan Bradley admitted that he would set the golf course up differently if he had his time again as America’s captain.
The home team has the power to manipulate the golf course at the Ryder Cup. Team USA cut the rough down to below three inches in some cases, hoping it would play to the strengths of the Americans, with their biggest stars being Scottie Scheffler and Bryson DeChambeau.
What followed was a setup that the likes of Rory McIlroy and Jon Rahm benefited from, making countless birdies and putts from what felt like every corner of the soft Bethpage putting surfaces.
Tom Irwin believes the famous Long Island venue didn’t speak to the qualities of America’s best players and wasn’t prepared to identify the best players.
“To me, it speaks to the dumbing down of the whole thing,” he said. “There are two things with it. In a sporting context, he has said it himself (US captain Bradley), it’s a massive error of judgment, and I was saying last week that I thought that the Ryder Cup would essentially come down to the performance of four players: McIlroy, Rahm, Scheffler, and DeChambeau.
“I thought their respective points hauls would go a long way to deciding what happened, and there were obviously huge performances from Rose and from Hatton and Fleetwood. Scheffler was zero from four going into the singles – DeChambeau didn’t get very many points – that is how it played out.
“The golf course was a significant part of that. In someone like Scheffler, you’ve got someone who has the best major record of any player on the planet for the last four years. He’s essentially unbeatable around golf courses set up to find the best golfer, and that golf course wasn’t set up to do that. It was set up to find the best wedge player and the best putter.
“The course set-up neutered their best player to a degree, and I would say the same of DeChambeau because he has played exceptionally well in majors for a long time. When it gets tough, he often stands up. It was a daft decision to set it up like that, and it’s just annoying to watch golf like that.
“The golf on Saturday afternoon, and I’ll sound like such a curmudgeon for saying this because there were so many thousands of birdies, but you’ve got a golf course that was shortened with the rough mown, they put the flags at the bottom of hills and at the front of greens where they could spin it back to them all day long, apart from the par 5s where you can run it up. The whole thing was just set up to make birdies.
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“It was a bit like watching Twenty-20 cricket, where everything is just so skewed in favour of low scoring, where low scoring wasn’t actually that remarkable.”
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What did you make of the Ryder Cup course setup? Was the Bethpage course setup disappointing? What should’ve been different about the Ryder Cup course setup? Tell us on X!
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