Heroes have emerged from the most unlikely of places, so who’s to say that Rafa Cabrera Bello can’t be the next Paul McGinley and find himself joining an elite group of players who sunk the winning putt in the Ryder Cup.
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Knox declined. He would have needed a fourth-place finish, and to play the Wyndham would have meant playing seven times in nine weeks going to the Ryder Cup and “I probably would have been burned out by the time I got to Hazeltine”. He didn’t mention who he had picked and I didn’t ask.
Canadian Graham DeLaet started things off, but understood that the decision rested entirely with Clarke.
RUSSELL KNOX reckons being cast as a European outsider killed his chances of a Ryder Cup wild card.
Knox also said it might have hurt him that he plays the PGA Tour full time and has lived in the US since he came to JU as a freshman in 2003.
“That call to Russell was as hard a phone call as I’ve ever had to make in golfing terms”, added Clarke, who played with Pieters for the first two rounds in Denmark and saw him shoot a 62 on Thursday.
“That hurt me for a few reasons”.
“Not playing in the Wyndham Championship has been a strong topic of conversation and I could have played there given Darren asked to me go and I chose not to”.
“We spoke for 20 seconds”, Knox said.
Clarke’s decision left McDowell admitting: “I’m gutted not to be part of the team”.
“I look at a lot of the players’ characters and I think they can take it, they can take a fight and a bit of stick”. “But the way Thomas has played golf over the last four weeks has impressed me so much I found it impossible to leave him out”.
“So I’m still very positive”.
Usually that invitation would automatically be extended to the next highest-ranked Scot – now Richie Ramsay – but instead Knox chose his old college buddy Duncan Stewart, who is on the second tier Challenge Tour.
Knox’s decision to pick his friend and former college team-mate Duncan Stewart (360th in the world) rather than the next ranked Scot to partner him in the forthcoming World Cup has also been questioned, but that’s maybe an example of the pettiness within the ranks in Scottish golf.
Less than two hours before it was confirmed that Knox wouldn’t be picked, Lawrie chipped in with a tweet responding to his prodigy, David Law, mentioning he was going for a bounce game with Stewart.
“It will be a very tough task”, he said.
Certainly if that contributed to the distance between Knox and his peers on the European Tour it can not have helped.
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In short, perhaps he was just too American to be fully embraced as a European.
