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.<\/p>\n
After Saturday afternoon\u2019s four-ball session at Liberty National, the U.S. led the Internationals 14 \u00bd to 3 \u00bd, needing only a solitary point on Sunday to clinch a seventh consecutive victory. According to Kevin Kisner, however, if it weren\u2019t for Tiger Woods, it would have been over entirely before Sunday\u2019s singles session even began.<\/p>\n
On the Fore Play podcast on Tuesday, Kisner told the story of how Woods, then a captain\u2019s assistant, instructed the U.S. squad to give the Internationals a putt on the final hole of the final match on the course on Saturday (Kevin Chappell\/Charley Hoffman vs. Anirban Lahiri and Si-Woo Kim) so the cup would still, mathematically, be up for grabs on the final day.<\/p>\n
RELATED: What happened to international men\u2019s golf, and is it America\u2019s fault?<\/p>\n
Ultimately, the story is pretty innocent. The U.S. 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 was to \u201cgo out in New York City.\u201d And when a bunch of southern boys go out in NYC on a Saturday night? Well, let\u2019s just say chaos is sure to follow. What\u2019s 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, \u201canything can happen, especially with where he\u2019s hitting it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Was Woods just throwing NBC a bone? Was he beginning to soften in his old age? Was he making sure Kisner didn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n
RELATED: Presidents Cup 2026: How to watch on TV, streaming all the action at Medinah<\/p>\n
This article was originally published on golfdigest.com<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The United States owns the Presidents Cup. Since its inception in 1994, the International Team has won the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":901542,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[566],"tags":[4225,64,63,755,138747,44,85],"class_list":["post-901541","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-golf","tag-article","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-golf","tag-golf-digest","tag-news","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/901541","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=901541"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/901541\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/901542"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=901541"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=901541"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=901541"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}