Pieters, who won the Made in Denmark on Sunday in front of Clarke, got the nod.
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Pieters stood out, though, after an impressive run of finishes over the past month: Fourth place at the Olympics, second place at the Czech Masters, and then a third victory in the past year at the Made in Denmark where he birdied the last three holes to win.
The towering 24-year-old rose to the occasion under pressure on the final day, making seven birdies and dropping just one shot to win by a solitary shot from Bradley Dredge. As I’ve spoken all along with the qualification process and how the team was shaping up, I was going to look towards experience and in Lee (Westwood) and Martin (Kaymer) I have two former world number ones.
“The last pick was very hard”.
Knox said to play the Wyndham Championship would have meant playing eight out of 10 weeks through the Ryder Cup and “I probably would be burned out when I got to Hazeltine”.
Westwood admitted he was relieved to get the captain’s call ahead of other less experienced but younger campaigners like Luke Donald and Graeme McDowell.
DEFIANT Russell Knox revealed he’s on a mission to prove Darren Clarke wrong after his Ryder Cup snub. That’s been an incredibly tough decision.
“If I’d played there and played well I might have been in exactly the same position as Thomas, but it’s impossible to say what would have happened had I done this or not”, he added.
“It came down to Thomas Pieters and Russell Knox and the phone call to Russell was one of the hardest I have ever had to make”. Kaymer owns a 4-3-3 overall Ryder Cup record.
“It would be another great experience of a golfing career to play four Ryder Cups in a row… it would be unbelievable”, said Kaymer who holed the putt that kept the trophy in Europe’s possession in the “Miracle at Medinah” in IL in 2012. No one can forget the putt he holed at Medinah a few years ago.
The 41st Ryder Cup will take place between 30 September and 2 October. But neither has shown his usual good form this season.
“I was going to look toward experience”, Clarke said.
The selection of Westwood and Kaymer was more straightforward adding experience and class to a team featuring six rookies. It’s just not about playing, it’s about the dynamic of the team room and that’s involved in it.
They qualified automatically along with four-time major victor Rory McIlroy, British Open champion Henrik Stenson, Olympic gold medalist Justin Rose, and Sergio Garcia. It is unusual to have five rookies among the nine automatic qualifiers and, fantastic though they all are, a rookie is a rookie, and that makes it even trickier to hand a wild card to another Ryder Cup debutant.
“It’s different having a rookie at home than it is having a rookie away”, Rory McIlroy told Golf Digest recently.
RAFAEL CABRERA-BELLO (Spain): Age 32; Caps 0; Majors 0.
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One pairing to watch for early Friday morning at Hazeltine: The English tandem of Westwood and Willett.
