The US captain unveiled Rickie Fowler, J.B. Holmes and Matt Kuchar as the first three of his picks at Hazeltine yesterday, with the final piece of the jigsaw to be completed straight after the Tour Championship at half-time of the Minnesota Vikings NFL game. In order of ranking, they are: Dustin Johnson, Jordan Spieth, Phil Mickelson, Patrick Reed, Jimmy Walker, Bruce Koepka, Brandt Snedeker, Zach Johnson, J.B. Holmes, Rickie Fowler and Matt Kuchar.
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His last hope is to be the fourth pick, which Love will announce on Monday week after the Tour Championship, the final event in the FedEx Cup series.
Speaking in an interview on Golf Channel, Kuchar said he has “heard” Woods may receive the final captain’s pick despite his status as a vice-captain. I don’t know how popular he is with the other players, but intense winners are not always everybody’s favorite.
We won’t know until the early evening of October 2 whether Fowler, Kuchar and Holmes were the best selections for the team. When it comes down to that last pick, the will of the team as a whole, the compatibility of the golfers, the strategies for playing the golf course and the potential pairings will likely outweigh any finish at the Tour Championship.
Love: I think it has caused more stress for the players than me, because it has just dragged out further into the Playoffs.
“I still have massive love for the European Tour and I’m going to watch Hazeltine with a sort of sadness that I can’t be part of that”. “We went through a lot of scenarios and talked about a lot of great players”.
If Love were weighing up between Fowler and Watson, he might find it even more hard to pick Fowler after a tournament in which he won’t even have the opportunity to impress. It’s a new system, but it’s what the players – the top players – asked for. We’ve changed ours a lot over the years. We kept coming back to three for now. He’s great, got a great attitude for matchplay, he’s a great partner. I don’t know if this is a factor, but you’re naive if you don’t think it could be a factor.
“He’s such a great teammate”, Love said. It meant Fowler’s finish was too low for him to progress to the Tour Championship and he will have no more competitive golf before the Ryder Cup. The “next man up” concept has been created to give every vice captain and player a detailed plan for every conceivable scenario for this year and onward.
Kuchar clearly struggled to get his Skype account working so he could join in on the call at one point referring to what was on his computer as “the world wide web”. “It’s going to be pretty wonderful getting to play in front of a home crowd”.
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Love: There’s been a lot more work this time around. “We looked at adding to our team to build the best, now 11, that we could”.
