Inside U.S. golf’s latest foursomes nightmare: How shocking sweep happened

For a moment, before everything went very wrong, the U.S. Presidents Cup team jumped out to a 1-up lead in Friday’s first match. That flash of red was hardly a surprise, given the firepower involved on the U.S. side. But a favorite’s early lead can feel like a foregone conclusion — even when it’s not.

That first match was a massive mismatch, after all. It pitted arguably the two best golfers in the world (Scottie Scheffler and Sam Burns, who are 1-2 in DataGolf’s rankings) against arguably the two best golfers in Canada (Nick Taylor and Corey Conners), putting in sharp relief the imbalance between the respective sides.

More evidence of that imbalance? Consider that the U.S. team’s top eight players are ranked higher than the Internationals’ No. 1 (World No. 14 Si Woo Kim). Consider the U.S. team left a player home (No. 12 J.J. Spaun) who’s ranked higher than the Internationals’ No. 1. Consider the U.S. team has two assistant captains (World No. 43 Gary Woodland and No. 50 Keegan Bradley) ranked higher in the world than both Conners (No. 55) and Taylor (No. 85).

And then consider that the U.S. team did not win a single point in Friday’s five foursomes matches. A dream session for the International team was a nightmare for the U.S. side, which now faces a jarring 7-3 deficit heading to the weekend.

So how’d it spin out of control? Slowly, then quickly, and then, at the miserable (or glorious, depending on your perspective) end, all at once.

The ending to each match told the story of what came before. Here’s a snippet from all five:

Match I: Sam’s spinout

Nick Taylor picked an unfortunate time to hit a wayward tee shot — on the final hole, with a 1-up lead over the Scheffler-Burns behemoth, into jail down the right side — but it felt like a fitting result that the two sides would walk off with a tie, given they’d played to a near stalemate all day.

That seemed likely as Conners pitched out sideways with his second, leaving Taylor to hit their third before the Americans had played their approach.

But then Taylor did something heroic, something special, something that added an exclamation point to the first match of his Presidents Cup career: he stuffed his approach from 151 yards to kick-in range, providing redemption and then some.

Still, it seemed like it might not matter. Burns — left staring down a birdie putt from just inside 20 feet — nearly matched those heroics. His putt, line matched with speed, did everything but fall and instead spun out, turning what would have been a match-tying birdie 3 into a match-losing par 4 and leaving both him and Scheffler open-mouthed.

Match II: Sungjae’s session

As they reached the 16th green, a match that had felt in the International side’s control for several hours suddenly felt in doubt.

The high-powered duo of Sungjae Im and Hideki Matsuyama had won four holes in a row — 3-4-5-6 — to flip the match from 1 down to 3 up. But the U.S. side of Jacob Bridgeman and Russell Henley had held steady, and they’d reached the 16th hole just 2 down, and after each side had played two shots they looked like they soon might be 1 down; Matsuyama had 19 feet for par and Bridgeman had just 7.

But then came a classic reversal: Matsuyama’s par try found the bottom of the cup while Bridgeman’s caught the edge and slipped past, bringing the match to a jarring 3-and-2 conclusion.

Match III: Out-Foxed

As the day’s action moved to the back nine, the lone red flag on the board belonged to Collin Morikawa and Wyndham Clark, who took a 1-up lead with a birdie at No. 12 and looked determined to break up the International bloc.

But some match-play tropes are true, and one is this: the first ball in usually wins the hole. That proved to be the case at No. 15, when Ryan Fox walked in a 14-footer for birdie and then watched as Morikawa missed from 13 feet. It was also the case at No. 16, when Fox walked in a 19-footer for birdie and Morikawa missed from 10. Clark nearly holed his approach at No. 17, but Morikawa missed the ensuing 5-footer for birdie. When the sides tied the 18th, that match officially went yellow.

Match IV: Great Scott

It was particularly cruel that the only recorded birdie for the high-wattage U.S. twosome of Cameron Young and Justin Thomas came after the whistle.

After Christiaan Bezuidenhout had made things official with a shocking 30-footer for birdie from the right edge of the 16th green — they shook hands, cementing the 3-and-2 result — Young rapped his birdie putt anyway, for practice or frustration, and it found the bottom of the cup. (Some U.S. fans cheered, either as general encouragement or just confusion, hard to say which.)

Snedeker was asked post-round about the pairing and said he’d wanted to keep both players in the lineup after what he’d seen from them Thursday.

“That’s one of the things as captain you look back on, maybe when this thing is all over, with it might not have been the right decision, but it seemed like the right decision at the time,” he said. “But love those guys. They battled their ass off today. Just didn’t quite get the right momentum we wanted.”

Match V: Let’s get out of here

Mere moments separated these last three layers of heartbreak: Fox finished the third match with a short putt at 18, then Bezuidenhout’s putt finding the bottom at No. 16, and then, as if to say, to hell with this whole day, Xander Schauffele horseshoed a 3-foot putt at No. 15, putting a quick if undignified end to the 4-and-3 drubbing he and partner Patrick Cantlay suffered at the hands of Si Woo Kim and Tom Kim.

“Luckily the session is over,” Schauffele said post-round. “And we’ve got 70 percent of the points in front of us.”