LAHINCH, Ireland \u2013 U.S. captain Nathan Smith\u2019s initial message to his players ahead of this 51st Walker Cup?<\/p>\n
\u201cHe pretty much just told us he wants us to crush these guys,\u201d said Preston Stout, the world\u2019s top-ranked amateur. \u201cThat\u2019s the goal. We want to put them away early.\u201d<\/p>\n
Despite what the numbers say, it won\u2019t be easy.<\/p>\n
Great Britain and Ireland aren\u2019t going to allow it. Not this time.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe were ready to go last night,\u201d GB&I captain Dean Robertson said on Friday morning, still hours from the opening ceremony.<\/p>\n
While the U.S. has had a stranglehold on this competition with five straight victories dating to 2017\u2019s romp in Los Angeles, GB&I enter Saturday\u2019s opening foursomes session at Lahinch Golf Club with arguably their best chance of capturing the Walker Cup since they last won in 2015 at Royal Lytham.<\/p>\n
\u201cGB&I\u2019s team is so good,\u201d said Stewart Hagestad, who is representing the U.S. in his sixth straight Walker Cup and is 7-1 in singles play. \u201cThey\u2019re hungry. Crowds are there. They\u2019re trying to beat us too, right?\u201d<\/p>\n
The Americans are the clear favorites on paper. Everyone but Hagestad is ranked in the top 12 of the World Amateur Golf Ranking; the average rank for U.S. players is 8.2 compared to GB&I\u2019s 39.6. But for just the second time since 2015, GB&I don\u2019t have a single player ranked outside the top 100.<\/p>\n
And in terms of experience, no Walker Cup team has had more than this year\u2019s home side, which boasts six returners in Englishmen Tyler Weaver, Luke Poulter and Eliot Baker, Scots Connors Graham and Niall Sheils Donegan, and lone Irishman Stuart Grehan, a 33-year-old reinstated amateur who won the British Amateur earlier this summer. Add in U.S. Amateur champion Jack Whaley and GB&I has both major amateur champions for the first time since 2013.<\/p>\n
Those veterans are still stinging from last year\u2019s defeat at Cypress Point, where GB&I trailed by a single point through three sessions before only earning 1.5 of 10 possible points in Sunday singles. Robertson\u2019s mantra that week was, \u201cIf they can believe, they can achieve.\u201d But with lightning-fast greens, hero shots by the Americans and Weaver, the team\u2019s star player, drawing then-world No. 1 Jackson Koivun in all four sessions and going 1-3, any belief was swallowed in a dense fog that rolled in late that Sunday afternoon.<\/p>\n
However, that belief has returned along with confidence and tenacity.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s fuel to the fire,\u201d said Weaver, who hasn\u2019t competed since April\u2019s ACC Championship because of an oblique injury. \u201cYou learn so much from experiences like that. I think this year with the crowd being behind us, being on home soil, it\u2019s just even more fuel. Everything is just kind of building up to this, and we\u2019re so ready to go.\u201d<\/p>\n
Weaver wasn\u2019t hitting full shots when the majority of this week\u2019s 10 GB&I players convened at Lahinch earlier this summer for a training camp around the South of Ireland Championship. Graham shot 62 in the stroke-play portion of that tournament, which Grehan won back in 2015. Grehan has played an estimated 40 rounds on Lahinch\u2019s Old Course, most of anyone on either team by far, while England\u2019s Josh Hill was a somewhat surprising selection until one considered that he was the standout of that camp.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s clear that Lahinch is the ultimate equalizer. Its par-5 fourth and par-3 fifth holes, both relatively untouched from the late 1800s when Old Tom Morris designed them, feature blind shots hidden by massive sandhills. The rest of the holes, a combination of Alister Mackenzie\u2019s 1927 redesign and Martin Hawtree\u2019s extensive work before the turn of the century, roll beautifully through the coastal dunes, many of them forcing players to relinquish any desire to bomb and gauge.<\/p>\n
When the U.S. players first arrived on Monday, they started bombing drivers down the par-4 10th, only to quickly realize that it was better to lay back and hit something closer to 270 yards, avoiding the chokepoint of the fairway.<\/p>\n
But with wind like players faced on Friday \u2013 and likely will see come Sunday afternoon with forecasted gusts as high as 38 mph \u2013 even finding fairways with irons and greens with wedges aren\u2019t guarantees.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou\u2019re going to have to be dynamic with a lot of your decisions,\u201d Hagestad said, \u201cand what you think could be the case in the morning of how to play a hole might change to the afternoon, let alone day-to-day.\u201d<\/p>\n
The wind has been out of the southwest all week, same for the South of Ireland, which has blown a significant amount of salt on the greens. Already slower than the 13s players faced at Cypress, Lahinch\u2019s greens have been made stickier by the accumulation of salt, and it\u2019s been difficult for greenkeeper Brian McDonagh and his staff to keep the desired low 10 numbers on the Stimpmeter.<\/p>\n
The good news for McDonagh is that Saturday will see a shift to a southeasterly wind, which will firm and speed the course up. For the players, it will make the par-3s easier, though there will be tradeoff if the greens get too quick in 20 mph gusts.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn terms of the weather and the wind, am I happy about it?\u201d Robertson said. \u201cI\u2019m very happy about it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Robertson just wants the rain to stay away. While his guys have no problem being mudders \u2013 Whaley won his U.S. Amateur in wet conditions \u2013 he wants dry weather for the sold-out crowds of over 8,000 expected to attend.<\/p>\n
Most of them, of course, will be rooting for GB&I, which has led after Day 1 in four straight Walker Cups on home soil, though have allowed American rallies in each of the past two.<\/p>\n
Both sides know how important singles are, especially with that format accounting for 18 of the possible 26 points. The U.S. has won nine of past 11 Walker Cups and during that span hold a 126.5-77.5 advantage in singles.<\/p>\n
Robertson is well aware of his side\u2019s struggles in the 1v1.<\/p>\n
But maybe this time, he hopes, it will feel more like 1v1,000.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s funny, we\u2019ve been walking around town this week, and everyone\u2019s telling us good luck, and we\u2019re like, \u2018Yeah, they\u2019re saying good luck now, but come Saturday they ain\u2019t gonna be telling us that,\u2019\u201d said Stout, who is one of three U.S. players who have been dealing with illness; Ethan Fang and Williams Jennings didn\u2019t practice on Thursday and missed that night\u2019s gala along with Stout, though all three returned to the course on Friday.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s going to be loud, but we\u2019re all just super pumped. We don\u2019t always get to play in front of a ton of people. Even though they\u2019re rooting against us, it\u2019ll be fun to put on a show.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"LAHINCH, Ireland \u2013 U.S. captain Nathan Smith\u2019s initial message to his players ahead of this 51st Walker Cup?…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":837206,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[71],"tags":[427,99],"class_list":["post-837205","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\/837205","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=837205"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/837205\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/837206"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=837205"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=837205"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=837205"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}