In 2016, Ryder Cup captain Davis Love III had a difficult choice to make with his final pick to fill out his roster. There was a wave of sentiment that he should pick veteran Ryan Moore, who was coming off a compelling performance in the Tour Championship. Moore had already won the John Deere that season, and in the final event before the selections were made, he\u2019d clawed his way into a playoff against Rory McIlroy. McIlroy beat him, but the idea that Moore was a hot hand made a lot of sense. Why risk it? No one would criticize the safe and sensible.<\/p>\n
Love reluctantly called a young player he was thinking of picking for his last roster spot (before Moore got hot) to let him know he was not going to be on the team this time.<\/p>\n
That player was Justin Thomas.<\/p>\n
I share this anecdote a decade later with the acknowledgment that the Presidents Cup is not the Ryder Cup. The venues are different, the pressure is different, and the organizations running the events are different. But I think the somewhat surprising decision on Tuesday by U.S. Presidents Cup captain Brandt Snedeker to pick 21-year-old Jackson Koivun with his final selection shows the American brain trust might finally be willing to embrace a little risk for the potential of a larger payoff in these events.<\/p>\n
Love might, to this day, feel good about his decision to pick Moore. The 33-year-old veteran played serviceably in a 17-11 win for the Americans at Hazeltine, and winning the Ryder Cup after the embarrassment and mutiny in Gleneagles was paramount. But the United States missed a real opportunity to get Thomas involved in team matches a year early, one that would have benefitted the Americans in the long run, particularly in France in 2018. Moore was never again one of the 12 best Americans, and he hasn\u2019t finished in the top 100 of the FedEx Cup since 2019. Thomas has been an essential part of American team chemistry ever since he played in his first Presidents Cup in 2017.<\/p>\n
If you think this kind of thing is only obvious in retrospect then you haven\u2019t been paying enough attention to the European side and how they construct their teams. They were in a similar situation in 2023 when they could have selected Adrian Meronk but instead went with Ludvig \u00c5berg, even though \u00c5berg had not yet won a tournament. \u00c5berg played well in 2023, but the move really paid off for Luke Donald in 2025 when \u00c5berg was the only European player to win his singles match at Bethpage. Without Aberg, the Americans likely would have pulled off the biggest comeback in history.<\/p>\n
Imagine if he had that weight on his shoulders, in front of a hostile crowd, in what might have been his first Ryder Cup.<\/p>\n
If you think you have a budding superstar on your hands, youth is irrelevant. Sergio Garcia was just 19 years old when he played in his first Ryder Cup in 1999, and while he earned his way onto the team instead of needing a captain\u2019s pick, European captain Mark James wasn\u2019t afraid to play him in five matches, thrusting him into action ahead of veterans Jean van de Velde, Jarmo Sandelin, and Andrew Coltart. Garcia went 3-1-1, and went on to become one of the greatest Ryder Cup players in history. James was heavily criticized for his decision to sit his veterans after Brookline, but in the long run, his faith in Garcia benefited Europe tremendously.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m genuinely a little surprised Snedeker was willing to bet on Koivun\u2019s talent, if only because it runs counter to how the United States has previously constructed its roster for these events. (Jay Haas selecting his son Bill instead of, say, Brooks Koepka in the 2015 Presidents Cup comes to mind.) But it suggests to me that Snedeker believes \u2014 as many do \u2014 that Koivun is a generational talent. It isn\u2019t just that he might be better than Ryan Gerard or Akshay Bhatia or J.J. Spaun, it\u2019s that he may be better already. \u201cI just felt very comfortable with him,\u201d Snedeker said. \u201cI feel like he’s got a bright future ahead of him. I feel like he brings a ton to our team, and excited to see what he does when the bright lights are on.<\/p>\n
Koivun seemed a little shocked to make the team, but “It still feels like a pinch-me moment, I’m not going to lie,\u201d he said. \u201cWhen he called me and told me I was going to Medinah I was shell-shocked for about 4 hours and then it started to settle in. It was truly exciting and a really big wow moment for me because the fact that he, the vice captains and the other guys trust me and want me to be on that team, it’s a great feeling.”<\/p>\n
No one in Ponte Vedra headquarters wants to hear that the Presidents Cup should serve as an experimental science lab for Ryder Cup strategy, but to be frank, that\u2019s exactly what it should become. No one\u2019s legacy is shaped by their Presidents Cup performance. In the Ryder Cup, Europe has mastered the art of having its vice captains and captains work together in harmony. There is a line of succession, and a collaborative approach. The Americans have found countless ways to bungle their leadership handoff, but this is the first time I can imagine the Ryder Cup captain \u2014 Jim Furyk in 2027 \u2014 feeling like the Presidents Cup captain is seeing the big picture and making a pick that might benefit the United States long term. Even if the United States loses, something that\u2019s only happened once in 15 times this event has been held, I\u2019m convinced it was worth the gamble.<\/p>\n
I would be bummed if I were Gerard or Bhatia. I would have taken either of them ahead of Jacob Bridgeman, who I think has been pretty quiet the back half of the year. But after Koivun turned pro and held off Scottie Scheffler to win a tournament almost immediately, he needed to be on this team.<\/p>\n
We\u2019ve seen phenoms disappoint before. Koivun\u2019s stardom isn\u2019t guaranteed. But he might be The Prince Who Was Promised. He might be a match-play demon, and if so, the United States will benefit from it in Ireland and beyond.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In 2016, Ryder Cup captain Davis Love III had a difficult choice to make with his final pick…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":834288,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[71],"tags":[427,99],"class_list":["post-834287","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-golf","tag-golf","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/834287","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=834287"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/834287\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/834288"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=834287"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=834287"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=834287"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}