Johnson’s underheated Americans drive poor Scottie Scheffler to tears | Andy Bull

bUnder the sweet smell of cut grass, hot coffee and olive wood, you could notice the faint trace of something fetid in the air at Marco Simone’s on Saturday morning. And if you had turned your nose to the wind, you could have eventually followed him all the way to the American locker room, where their hopes and dreams of winning in Europe for the first time since 1993 lay in a messy heap and disintegrated in the heat.

“It’s done,” said American captain Zach Johnson, when his team trailed by five points on Friday evening. And it was, just not in the way Johnson intended, as he was talking about their poor play that day.

“We’ll leave it at this,” Johnson insisted. Well, they picked it up right back on Saturday, when he sent his alpha males out to play the morning foursomes, Justin Thomas and Jordan Spieth, followed by Brooks Koepka and Scottie Scheffler. They have eleven majors between them, more than the entire European team. But within an hour, Thomas and Spieth were three behind to four against Rory McIlroy and Tommy Fleetwood, and one hole behind, Koepka and Scheffler were the same behind Viktor Hovland and Ludvig Åberg.

The American action raised the interesting question of whether you can hold a post-mortem on something that, at least in theory, is still alive. Koepka, who has won more majors than anyone in his generation, and Scheffler, the world No. 1, paired like crazy. They started with double bogey, bogey, double bogey and ended up playing ping-pong around the front nine in 40, from bunker to gallery to rough. Hovland and Åberg won the match nine against with seven to play. That was a Ryder Cup record, the heaviest defeat in 96 years of competition.

Koepka, who had complained Friday that Jon Rahm was “acting like a child,” disappeared, leaving Scheffler choking and crying after him. Ultimately, the 11th green at Marco Simone was watered with the tears of the best golfer in the world, which wasn’t quite the plan laid out in the morning pep talk. The crowd fell silent, as one might do when observing the last rites. Scheffler, who had played a great game by playing along with the fans on the first tee, holding his ear and urging them to curse him, had to put up with something far worse than their contempt, their pity.

Neither Koepka nor Scheffler played in the afternoon four-ball. Johnson also seemed to retreat from view as the day passed. He always wears a wide-brimmed baseball cap, but the bill now seemed to be pulled down extra low as he sank into his shirt and pulled his head into his collar like a worried turtle. He has made mistakes, every captain does, but unfortunately for him it is only the losing one who has them picked out, examined and preserved for posterity.

Like any losing captain, his combinations were all wrong, although the decision to leave Spieth and Koepka out of Friday morning’s foursome might have been smarter than it seemed given the way they played Saturday. And he also made himself look ridiculous on Friday night by making an excuse about his team suffering from a mysterious illness (no, not motion sickness, but “congestion”), while insisting he “didn’t want to get into it.” ‘ and had no intention of using it as ‘an excuse’. All that was missing from the unraveling disaster was a scandal of division within the team.

Patrick Cantlay inside, stage right. Cantlay had refused to wear the team hat all week, despite the blinding sunshine, and there were rumors that he did it in protest at the team not being paid to play. The US was forced to deny this before the afternoon celebrations. They pointed out that he had also not worn a hat at Whistling Straits in 2021, which, given his ability to hold grudges and that he is known for having strong feelings about the way the sport’s profits are distributed, proves nothing. a lot of.

Johnson’s real problem, however, had less to do with the semiotics of Cantlay’s clothing choices than with the fact that the rest of his team was playing so damn poorly. During the first three rounds, it seemed like every time you looked at the big screens you saw an American player winning a drive, chunking a chip or dipping a ball into the water. Between them they made just 11 birdies in 63 holes in the foursomes on Friday, and although they improved as the tournament progressed, they were still only 36 of 138 in the fourballs that afternoon. You don’t need a team of data analysts or a sports psychologist to figure out the reasons for this.

They were right there in the form book. Nine of the twelve men on the American team had not played a competitive round in a month. Two of the exceptions were their best players, Max Homa and Thomas. The Europeans, on the other hand, played at Wentworth, Crans and the K Club until September. There are plenty of ways to get your game in shape for the first tee when you’re playing in the Ryder Cup, but taking a month off isn’t one of them. Especially when it all starts with the most awkward foursomes format. Their preparation makes it seem like they left behind a team that was underpaid, underdressed, undercooked, and here. At least until Sunday.