Rickie Fowler, Matt Kuchar and J.B. Holmes named U.S. Ryder Cup captain’s picks (read here): The majority of the suspense surrounding Davis Love’s captain’s picks has now subsided as with three players with Ryder Cup experience already added, only one slot remains to be announced after the Tour Championship. 2 at Hazeltine National Golf Club in Chaska, Minnesota.
Advertisement
That’s not to say Watson won’t be at Hazeltine, an expansive ballpark cut into in farmland outside of Minneapolis that would suit his grip-it-and-rip-it philosophy, in two weeks.
Love still has one more player to name and will complete his line-up following the conclusion of the Tour Championship on 25 September. But he still has the one pick left to decide after next week’s Tour Championship, so he might end up picking Bubba anyway. His only previous appearance coincided with the last USA victory at Valhalla in 2008, picking up two valuable points along the way. However, he has failed to win a match in two previous Ryder Cup appearances – a record he will be determined to improve on. “I thought I had a nice year, yet not nice enough to qualify on points”, Kuchar said.
Love said that he and his four assistants had deliberated the pros and cons of various contenders for captain’s picks well into Sunday evening before reaching a consensus. We kept coming back to three for now. “There’s going to be a lot of stats and a lot of things to look at”. Love has picked Rickie Fowler, who has a losing record in the Ryder Cup, and that goes for Matt Kuchar as well.
He has been out of action since then while recovering from two back surgeries.
“The players that are playing in the Tour Championship need to try and win the Tour Championship and not think about Ryder Cup points”.
If this is your first time joining us for the daily roundup, the idea of this piece is generally to help keep you up to date on the best of all the latest golf news from around the world on a day-to-day basis. Tiger looks at it a lot differently. These three guys are who we really all wanted. “We’ve been there. We’re going to learn from our mistakes in the past and build on it”.
He has consulted widely among the players who have qualified for the United States team over who they want alongside them at Hazeltine and Watson’s name clearly has not come up too often. 2, so he also relied on the input of the automatic qualifiers for his wildcard selections.
“When Zach Johnson got off the golf course, I called him”.
Bubba silence: You have to be careful these days trying to parse the utterings of Love, who noted he spent time with famously lock-jawed New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick.
“We were waiting to talk to our team about where we were”.
Advertisement
After the last capitulation to the Euros, at Gleneagles in Scotland two years ago, the USA launched a task force – and, yes, Fowler’s on it – to pick over the bones of all those losses and find a way to win.
