Think you want to be Team USA captain? Think again

MEDINAH, Ill. — Brandt Snedeker spent a sizable chunk of his Sunday evening pacing back and forth, back and forth between Medinah’s 15th green and the 16th tee. From afar, he looked steely, but up close, he was a frenzied mess.

His phone was in and out of his pocket, one hand almost always covering his mouth, masking his words like a baseball pitcher does with his glove. He’d whisper softly into his radio set, then project more forcibly to his increasingly giddy American players, then back to a whisper for his assistant captains. 

Then, wham. An expletive into the mic.

The gravity of Presidents Cup matches ahead had pulled the crowd toward the 18th hole and, damnit, Snedeker wanted to be there to see “the kid,” Jackson Koivun, finish. But he looked around and thought about Russ Henley, squarely in a tied match, reading a putt on the 15th, then walking off the green to see … none of his teammates? Snedeker stayed put, for at least a few more moments, as the manifestation of his many, many decisions built to a crescendo hundreds of yards away. 

In the end, the team who was favored from the jump won this Cup, but the process to get there was one big, four-day reminder: You don’t want that job. Yes, you, the layman punter at home who watched hours and hours of golf on this fall football weekend. You think you’d be a great captain, but you don’t want the U.S. captaincy. 

Would you have benched the best golfer since Tiger Woods in alternate shot? Okay, maybe if he wasn’t playing like the best golfer since Tiger.

Do you bench a rookie who you really believe in if they struggle early, like Chris Gotterup did? Yeah, JT led Thursday in Strokes Gained! He’d do great with Cam Young. Oh, so sorry — you look silly now because it’s Saturday night and Gotterup has posted an Instagram story with the quote, “My mf [dawg emoji]” and a picture of Cam Young. They burned Medinah to a crisp and you acted too slowly.

Would you have paired Scheffler with his best friend because relationships matter? Well, those friends keep losing those foursomes matches. Wait, are those friends different than Xander Schauffele and Patrick Cantlay? You send them out again, as if it’s 2021 and they’re invincible. Unfortunately, it’s 2026, and they’re not so invincible. They lose 4 and 3, and you’re wondering … Am I doing any of this right? 

The immense roster depth that routinely makes American teams the betting favorite is the same depth that makes their captain’s job weirdly excruciating. No writers are publishing articles about snubs left off the International team. No one is critiquing European captain Luke Donald as he sits a Hojgaard twin for more sessions than they’ll play. But back here on the American side of things, three or four American pros — led chiefly by J.J. Spaun — are rather upset, annoyed or just disappointed with Snedeker for not choosing them. 

A better name for these team events would be the Hindsight Olympics. And they’re driving American captains crazy. Zach Johnson’s captaincy in Rome went so poorly — despite very close relationships with his players — that he’s been kept “out of the loop” ever since, as he recently explained to GOLF.com. (He hasn’t exactly been treated well by American fans in that time, either.)

Keegan Bradley’s time in the Ryder Cup chair ended in a way he called “the darkest time of my life.” He’s spent much of 2026 in a not-so-soft and not-so-private state of depression over it. Only on Sunday, after a historic singles performance, did he feel some release from those negative memories.

And before this comes across as a spree of sympathy, plenty of the stress is deserved. Snedeker erred in many ways — just as Bradley did — some of which was out in the open and, if we are to trust his word, more of which took place behind closed doors. One thing became abundantly clear in each of his daily pairing sessions: the International team accurately predicted many of his chess moves, and threw him off with some of theirs. Geoff Ogilvy and Trevor Immelman have purposefully kept close relationships with European captain Luke Donald to try to better understand their blueprint to beating the Americans. (They damn near did it.)

If Donald is an example of anything, it’s that a successful captaincy can sprout a positive fruit from the waning years of a playing career. Captaincies are some of the final duties these pros assume in the very public side of their careers. It’s one of the final things they can be remembered by. 

So, we ask: How will you remember Brandt Snedeker, winning Presidents Cup captain? 

For me, it’s a man who badly, badly wanted the job and came close enough to life as a losing American captain that he realized it while it was happening. (And then, much to his benefit, that fate never became reality.)

“I was surprised [about how stressful it was],” Snedeker said after the victory Sunday night. “I don’t think anybody knows the weight a captain carries on their shoulders all week. I don’t think they realize that you’re not just making a decision that affects you, you’re making a decision that ripple-affects the whole team — people’s families, people’s lives. Every decision you make carries a serious consequence.

“You think you know, but you don’t until you’ve done it.”

Conveniently seated a few spots down the podium from him was Jim Furyk, a man who knows far too well how a captain can be remembered, and who now grabs the baton for an even higher mountain to climb in Ireland.