MEDINAH, Ill. — Times were different in 2012, the last time elite match play golf was contested at Medinah Country Club. Spectators pulled out their flip phones on the 1st tee in the early morning at that Ryder Cup and tapped the buttons to turn on their flashlights.
“It was terrifying to me as a player,” Brandt Snedeker said Tuesday from the Presidents Cup, again at Medinah. “That was my first experience.”
Phone technology has changed a good bit in 14 years, and so has Snedeker’s role. He’s the American captain, a title that carries plenty of responsibility, down to gathering phone numbers together in one big group chat.
“I was in charge of the name,” Snedeker said. “It’s called Medinah ’26. Really inventive, yeah.
“I think it’s a great way to get these young guys involved in the team. I’ve been super impressed with how funny Jacob Bridgeman and Chris Gotterup and Jackson are in these things. It’s been hilarious to me to see them interact with the guys on the team. It’s gotten to the point where Scottie’s even had to chime in, which Scottie is not a big texter. For him to chime in, you know it’s gotten pretty good.”
So what goes on in the chat? It’s one of the four main things we learned Tuesday from the Presidents Cup, which you can read below.
1. Team USA broke its rookies in with … karaoke.
All 24 players will tell you about the closeness they feel from various team bonding activities, which they rarely experience in this individual sport. But a few of them were not too keen on Snedeker’s rookie hazing.
“Last night, the rookies, we had to sing a song for everybody,” first-timer Bridgeman said. “It was quite a few — there was maybe 40, 50 people in the room, no phones, no videoing nothing. That was nerve-racking but hilarious.”
Bridgeman belted out “God Bless the USA”. Twenty-one-year-old Jackson Koivun went with “Heartless” by Kanye West, and Chris Gotterup chose a Creed classic, “One Last Breath”.
“I went with Creed last night and destroyed it in a bad way,” Gotterup said. “Not good. Yeah, it was bad.”
Gotterup is also having a bit of a tough time in the group chat.
“My teams have created me being a punching bag,” Gotterup told me. “Rutgers has not helped my cause in the group chat. And there was a funny picture from a vacation I went on that was supposed to be secretive, and Jacob [Bridgeman] sent it in the group chat. So I have to get him back at some point.”
As for the context of that photo:
“ No, no,” he said. “That’s limited information.”
2. Team Kim is back and bigger than ever
Among the unforgettable memories from the last Presidents Cup, in Montreal, was the coming-out party for Tom Kim and Si Woo Kim, a Korean duo who have gone 2-1 together, and each beaten Scottie Scheffler and Sam Burns in matches played apart.
Most recently, they decided to indoctrinate a third Kim into the family.
“I became Brother Kim,” Canadian Nick Taylor told us Tuesday.
Si Woo and Tom have been calling Taylor “Nick Kim” ever since joining up in a 6-ball a couple of weeks ago during a team scouting trip to Medinah. In the process, Taylor helped the Kims mop up their money game, to the point that Tom said, “We made it rain.”
For Tom, it’s continued through the first two days of this week.
“I’m not [just in the] positive. I’m very positive,” he said.
3. Sam Burns and Scottie Scheffler together again?
The first player I had a chance to pepper with questions was Sam Burns, who very quickly teased his playing partner this week.
“Do you already know who you’re going to play with?” I asked.
“I do, yeah,” he replied.
“Is his name Scottie Scheffler?”
“His name starts with an S,” Burns said, wearing a smile.
This info may not surprise anyone. Scheffler and Burns are best buds. And they’ve been paired together a bunch over the years. But those matches, on paper, haven’t delivered desirable results.
Team Scheffler-Burns have played four matches, losing three times and tying once. All four came at the 2022 Presidents Cup and 2023 Ryder Cup, and we haven’t seen them paired since. But there’s nuance to this match play stuff, and Burns hasn’t forgotten that.
“I feel like we played really well together [in 2022],” Burns said. “I remember getting off the course and the stats guys were like, ‘well, if you guys would have played any other match this day, you would have won,’ but unfortunately we didn’t.”
4. The Medinah of Old at the Medinah of New
This place is different. Course No. 3 at Medinah Country Club has been made totally anew thanks to the recent renovation. It should play and feel quite differently than the last few times it has hosted top pros, but there’s history here that everyone seems very aware of.
The 2012 ‘Miracle at Medinah’ that saw the Europeans mount a historic comeback on Sunday still rings around vividly in Captain Snedeker’s head.
“As I’ve spoken at length about, I think you learn way more from your losses than your wins,” Snedeker said Tuesday, “and what happened Sunday at Medinah that year taught me a lot. It taught me how much these guys care, seeing my idols of the game and who I was a teammate with crying in the locker room on Sunday night when things didn’t go our way.
“I think you learn from those experiences. You try to build up a team around those experiences. I’ve built my career around that.”
Sneds is the first to point out all the changes at Medinah; it will absolutely inform the proceedings and perhaps what is shared and invoked in locker-room speeches this week …
… perhaps for both sides.
Golf junkie — and Open Champion — Ryan Fox has never played in a team event of this stature, but has gone so far as to attend Presidents Cups earlier in his career. He has gladly woken up early in his native New Zealand to watch Ryder Cups played in the United States, and figured out some way to consume middle-of-the-night matches when they’re hosted in Europe. It’s safe to say he (and a few of his teammates) are interested in creating a similar negative memory at Medinah for this batch of American opponents.
“I mean, [2012] was such drama,” Fox said. “It’s hard to pick one moment out of that whole Sunday, but I remember watching that vividly. I’ve seen the documentary on it and everything that happened.
“It gives us a lot of motivation this week that you can do something incredible on a Sunday like that, especially at the same venue.”
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