INTERNATIONAL RESCUE
Once again the International team will be relying on the Aussie stars to supply the bulk of the team spirit in their war against the Yanks in the Presidents Cup. This isn’t specifically Australia’s fight to take up, but it’s one we’re in, whether it still captivates the fans or not.
If you’re Australian and a reader of a glossy sports magazine such as this crackerjack journal, chances are you have an allegiance to a sports team. Could be one from Australian rules, could be one from a code of rugby, could be one from the game known as “football” in this and most other countries, though let us not go delving into #CodeWar rabbit holes; there can be no coming back.
Instead, let’s stay on positive ground and posit that if you’re a team sports fan – Go You Raiders! Up the Arsenal! and so on – you would also likely support our national teams: the cricketers, the Matildas, even the wobbly old Wallabies. Every four years at the Games of the so many Roman numerals Olympiad, Australians invest in the fortunes of teams – basketball, rugby 7s, our awesome coxless fours.
But ask yourself: do you care, viscerally, in your plumbs, as they say – or even just in passing – about the International team in the Presidents Cup? Do you support the Internationals as you might the Wanderers, Waratahs or Bulldogs of both stripes? Do you support – can you support – a 12-man team of golfers representing a claque of disparate nation states?
Europeans seem to care, of course, for their continent in the Ryder Cup. That is a hoot, the Ryder Cup, with great gaggles of Irish, French, Italians and Swedes painting faces, chanting in unison and creating all that great “colour” beloved of Big TV and the advertisers thereon. Certainly looks like they’re having fun.
And Americans care, of course, for their team in the season-ending team events named for
their Presidents and anfterdSamuel Ryder, who was born in Lancashire in 1858 and who took up golf at the age of 50 and who invented the Ryder Cup in 1926 in which the 10-man team of professionals from the United States included four Brits and Joe Kirkwood from Manly.
And why not? They are supporting their country as it takes on all-comers in events showcasing the greatest players in the world. To be American and follow the United States of America means flags and star-spangled action, and all the unbridled noise of our slightly leftfield cousins, the mashed potato people.
Greg Norman tried to create, let’s call it, “Aussie spirit” in the Presidents Cup of 2011 at Royal Melbourne when he literally rented a crowd, The Fanatics, a supporter squad of flagwearing “Oi-oi-oi” types, enamoured of their own wit, bathing in celebrity by association, using the national flag as capes, and deeply irritating many, let’s call them “old people”, such as The Australian’s Patrick White, who wrote they should be locked out of the grounds, release the hounds.
The Fanatics brigade stayed put (and not, unfortunately for Paddy, on mute), yet no matter the happy-clapping from the greenand-gold malaria – and no matter the heavy Aussie presence in the playing group – the Americans flogged the Internationals, on our patch, on our sacred ground, the composite at RM, for most of the four-day bender.
By the Sunday afternoon, when Tiger Woods sti£ed a brilliant shot from the sand and beat Aaron Baddeley four-and-three, it was all over Lucas Glover, 19-15, and there followed atmosphere akin to a kegger party around the 15th green, all red-white-and-blue, the united colours of Benneton, shirts with the little horse on them, Richie Cunningham and Ralph Malph cavorting in the lettermen cardigans of Je£erson High School, as the American players hugged their wives for a long time in a manner that Craig Parry, say, or Peter Lonard would not.
Regardless, they were right into it, the Americans, and their smattering of backpacking fans were also. And this year at Royal Montreal, as they do at the Ryder Cup, Americans will be barracking for their country and their countrymen.
But “us”? By which I mean our Canadian friends? Will they be as into it? They tend to be less demonstrative than the folks from the Lower 48. Yes, the Canadian fans will be out in force, because it’s world-class golf. But viscerally, vocally supporting the team of Australians, South Africans, Koreans and representatives of all the other continents and land masses that form the 12-man “International” team? Will they really give that much of a stu£ ? Even with a handful of wildcard Canadians in the mix, cough, making up numbers?
And what about those players? Can they get themselves into the emotional position where they’re playing for something bigger than themselves? Can they channel su§cient adrenaline-driven emotion, passion, mojo, juju, for Team Rest-of-the-World-OutsideAmerica-and-Europe? What do they represent? And how do you, sports fan, follow them? Go, claque of disparate nation states outside the United States and Europe. Go.
But do we really care if the Internationals win? And if we don’t, is it not almost like … what’s the point?
...
Well! Isn’t that a cheery way for the writer to begin a Presidents Cup preview piece. Some may question why a fellow whose employment depends upon the great game would run it down so. Some may wonder: Isn’t it in this gibberer’s interest to pump the tyres of golf? Why work in a game he has such apparent disdain for?
And those folks would be wrong. Because they are not, necessarily, in media, and would not perhaps understand that all we little wannabe Woodward and Bernsteins (Google ’em, kids) want our stories to Make A Di erence. Even if they rarely do.
For no matter our bleating, the Olympics remains four rounds of stroke-play, the PGA Championship is only in America, and the Presidents Cup International team only plays against the United States and not against Europe, too, because Big TV rules the world. Big TV’s money dictates what we watch and when. And four days of stroke-play across 30-odd hours of broadcasting, upon which ad sales-folk can sell ad space, remains, apparently, the sexiest attraction for the eyeballs of American consumers, of which there is a veritable motherlode.
And here we are.
Yes, of course – the Presidents Cup will be a cracking spectacle and an exhibition of super world-class golf. The format is cool – there should be more team events, and more matchplay in world pro golf. And while we’re there, more mixed events, and didn’t the Olympics miss a trick there.
And, of course, because we’re Australians, golf fans and discerning consumers of glossy sports magazines, we’ll wake early, as we do for the Masters, and tune in, and hope our team knocks over their team, particularly if our guys – the Chef, J-Day, Scotty – stick it right up ’em.
But we’re being sold a pup. Half a one, anyway. The International Team is made up of the top six players on the Ocial World Golf Rankings, and six picks by Mike Weir, and nobody from
LIV Golf. And thus, the International team, which has one win and one tie in 30 years, cannot call upon Abe Ancer, Dean Burmester, Branden Grace, Lucas Herbert, Danny Lee, Anirban Lahiri, Marc Leishman, Sebastien Munoz, Louis Oosthuizen, Mito Pereira, Carlos Ortiz or those funky Vincent brothers with the hippy haircuts.
“It is just an unfortunate situation that we’re in right now, and they are not eligible as of now,” Weir said. “I have been told they’re not eligible; they’re not going to be eligible. Hopefully going forward, maybe in Chicago in 2026, they are. It is a shame. I mean, we want the best players.”
On the other side, the U.S team isn’t a true representative of the United States, being drawn only from eligible players from the U.S PGA Tour. And thus the Americans won’t be calling upon Brooks Koepka, Talor Gooch and, you know, U.S Open champion Bryson DeChambeau.
Because the PGA Tour owns the Presidents Cup, no one from LIV Golf is allowed to play. The Tour writes the rules
DO YOU CARE ABOUT THE INTERNATIONAL TEAM IN THE PRESIDENTS CUP? DO YOU SUPPORT THE INTERNATIONALS AS YOU MIGHT THE WANDERERS, WARATAHS OR BULLDOGS?
in the Tour’s interest. And, as they kiboshed Greg Norman’s “world tour” in 1994, the Presidents Cup was founded, in part, so they could keep writing those rules, and thus preserve the Tour’s hegemony against perceived external threats.
...
According to veteran commentator Peter Kostis, the Presidents Cup was the brainchild of Big TV, or at least of the legendary television producer Frank Chirkinian, who in consultation with PGA Tour Commissioner Deane Beman, came up with the idea to showcase players from outside Europe and the United States.
At the time, there were some really good ones. Nick Price of Zimbabwe and Greg Norman of Australia were jockeying for the world number-one spot. Price’s fellow Africans, David Frost, Mark McNulty and Ernie Els, were on the up. So was Vijay Singh. So was Frank Nobilo. Steve Elkington would soon win the PGA Championship. Jumbo Ozaki was the biggest thing out of Japan since Yoko Ono.
The idea was later fleshed out by Beman and his chief operating ocer, and subsequent successor, Tim Finchem, early in 1994, who “sat down and kicked around the general idea and notion of it” Finchem told the PGA Tour’s website. “We determined that we would give it a shot. We didn’t sort of run around and take a poll.”
What he didn’t say is this: they were in a bit of a hurry.
While the Cup was originally slated for 1996, in Alan Schupak’s book, Deane Beman: Golf’s Driving Force, it is written that Beman and Finchem rushed the concept into existence to ward o the threat posed by International Management Group (IMG), which had conceived something called The Hemisphere Cup, which would pit the winning Ryder Cup team against a team representing the best southern hemisphere players – Norman, Price, Jumbo, et al.
Four months after Finchem and Beman decided to pull the trigger on the Presidents Cup – the format of which bore a remarkable resemblance to that of the dead Hemisphere
Cup – honorary starter Byron Nelson set the U.S and International teams free at the Robert Trent Jones Golf Club in Virginia.
The course was chosen because they were calling it the Presidents Cup and they had to bestow sucient gravitas upon the event. And because Virginia is next to Washington, D.C where the Presidents live, that golf course it was.
They never did get the incumbent President, Bill Clinton, along – he was busy signing a bill that would condemn drug kingpins to death – but he did host the teams for a black-tie dinner at the White House, and went jogging with Finchem, by then the new boss.
Instead of Clinton, Gerald Ford, a mate of U.S captain Hale Irwin’s, was invited to be honorary chairman. And regardless of what an honorary chairman does – one might posit nothing very useful – Ford was, and remains, the 38th President of the United States. So he had that going for him.
While the first event lacked a little star power – Norman was ill with the flu, Els had committed to the British Masters, and Jumbo
had something else on – it didn’t lack for controversy when The Shark suddenly got better and turned up anyway.
Rather than be chu ed that his fellow Australian and two-time major champion would grace the event and support the team, Internationals captain David Graham said to Norman, according to USA Today, “What the hell are you doing here?”
Norman replied that he was there to support the team and that he would like to wear a microphone following a request from CBS producer Chirkinian.
Graham was not having that.
“Not if I have anything to do with it,” he said. “You’re not going to take anything away from these players who did all the dinners, all the practice rounds, all the meetings. You want to come riding in here and go on national television and tell everybody how great you are? That is not going to happen.”
According to several sources of respected golf writer Jaime Diaz, Graham’s exact words to Norman included the statement, “This isn’t going to be the f***ing Greg Norman show.”
Graham later backed it up publicly: “The Presidents Cup is not Greg Norman’s golf tournament. It is a 12-man team. It is not Greg’s team,” Graham said.
Norman seethed, as Norman would, and ate his revenge cold. Ahead of the 1996 Open Championship at Royal Lytham and St Annes, he called a meeting of the players in a function room of the Grand Hotel, a luxury seaside spa, to discuss the Presidents Cup, which would be contested at that same Robert Trent Jones course in Virginia.
Norman told press: “I’ve talked to all the players, and none of us know what’s going on; not a clue. I don’t even know when I have to be there or what I have to do. We haven’t heard from our captain. I am very concerned about it, from a team point of view. You have got to get the camaraderie going.”
Graham countered that he had organised a team meeting before The Players at TPC Sawgrass in March, but that only Parry and Nobilo had turned up.
It is thus ironic – though Parry might have another word for it – that following the Lytham seaside spa meeting (which had voted unanimously, with only Michael Campbell abstaining, to oust Graham as captain) it was Parry who took a post-meeting phone call from Graham.
According to Diaz’s piece in Sports Illustrated, Graham hadn’t known his tenure was on the meeting’s agenda. And the conversation went like this:
“Hello, Craig,” Graham said cheerfully. “How did the meeting go?”
Parry swallowed hard. His first thought was tear o the Band-Aid. Don’t lie. Don’t keep it from him. Just tell him.
Parry took a breath and said: “The players would like a new captain.”
Parry was told by PGA Tour ocials that it was meant to be a secret, at least for a while. Parry countered that Graham was a mate, that he’d called him. He wasn’t going to bullshit the man.
Regardless, Graham was humiliated, threatened legal action. The players came across as privileged, pampered. Finchem looked bad, too. The Tour owns and operates the whole show. How did the commissioner not know his team didn’t like his team’s captain?
Wrote Diaz: “The reputations of all the players who voted to dump Graham – Robert Allenby, Steve Elkington, Ernie Els, David Frost, Mark McNulty, Frank Nobilo, Norman, Parry and Nick Price – were damaged. At worst, they lived down to the stereotype of the selfish and stupid modern pro. At best, they behaved like sheep.”
“We regret the way it happened,” Parry said. “If we could get in that room again and do it over, David would still be captain.”
...
What Greg Norman calls “camaraderie” has long been an issue for the Internationals, given the cultural, language and geographical di erences between its members, according to team member in 2005 and 2007, Nick O’Hern.
“One of the toughest things for the Internationals to do is bond and gel like a team because everyone comes from a di erent country,” O’Hern says.
“When I played, there were plenty of Aussies on the team, so that certainly helped. It was Michael Campbell, a Kiwi. You had South Africans. You had Vijay [Singh] from Fiji … we had Angel Cabrera, who didn’t speak much English and KJ [Choi] didn’t either, although, you know, they understood a lot.
“But Ernie Els a few years ago [in 2019] at Royal Melbourne did a great job of getting everyone on the same page. And I think Trev Immelman continued that last time [in 2022]. So hopefully Mike Weir can certainly rally them around.”
Former International team vice-captain Ian Baker-Finch says the International team won’t ever engender the support Europe and United States does.
“Will the International team ever be supported like the U.S team is? No, we can’t ever have that. We will never have something chanted like ‘USA, USA’. Where the American team goes, that follows.
“And Europe, historically, it was always their tour versus the PGA Tour. So they were the underdog. It is a bit like following Queensland in State of Origin. We wanted to beat them because we hated them.”
Gary Player was Nick O’Hern’s captain at Royal Montreal in 2007 while Baker-Finch was vice-captain. Player’s job was, e ectively, be Gary Player. A counter-punch to Jack Nicklaus. Player did the front-facing media side of things. In team meetings, he played the part of motivator. Baker-Finch’s gig was nuts and bolts.
“Finchy was awesome for that,” O’Hern says. “He really looked into the pairings, the match-ups, things like that. Gary was more about fire-up speeches: ‘Come on, boys, we can do it’ type stu .
“But Finchy was great. It was a shame he never got to be captain because he certainly deserved it.”
Baker-Finch tells Golf Australia magazine his time involved with the Internationals is over. “I am too old!” he jokes. “I think they’ll be looking at someone else, and that’s how it should be.”
Yet Mike Weir could do worse than consult the 64-year-old “Sparra”. Baker-Finch reckons pairings are key for the International team. He likes the simple idea of pairing men from the same country together.
“Jason Day and Min Woo Lee would be a good pairing. Adam Scott and Cameron Davis would be good. The Korean guys might go together, Tom Kim, Sungjae Im, Ben An.
“Hideki [Matsuyama] could play with anyone. He has a really strong and quiet presence about him. There is leadership in him.”
If Weir isn’t sure how to pair his players, he could do what Baker-Finch did: ask them.
“Before each event, we asked every player who they wanted to play with and who they didn’t want to play with,” he says. “Today, it’s very much in the data. But back then it was as simple as what ball they use and who they are comfortable with around 18 holes.” O’Hern says Weir is a “Finchy-type guy”. “He is pretty methodical and technical about things. But number-one, he’s a great bloke.
“It is a very big ask for the Internationals to win, especially in Canada. But, you know, Mike is a good guy and he’ll have figured out all the angles to work around.”
...
Nick O’Hern says one of his most distinct memories of Royal Montreal in 2007 was of Woody Austin playing a shot, then falling in a pond. The next day Austin walked the hole wearing goggles and a snorkel.
Ian Baker-Finch, who won’t be on site working for the broadcaster, but rather in his “kissing babies” role as Chairman of Australia’s PGA, reckons the course will be a brilliant host of the Presidents Cup.
“It is a really big property and a great tournament venue,” he says. “The clubhouse is amazing. They are very proud of the course
and it will be in wonderful condition. And it’s great for spectators.”
Whether they get behind their team, remains to be seen. “When we were there in 2007, the only players the fans really knew from our team, outside obviously Mike Weir, were Ernie [Els] and Vijay [Singh],” BakerFinch says.
“And the American team had Tiger, Phil, Zach Johnson, Jim Furyk – they were the superstar players.”
According to O’Hern, “the only downside I found from Royal Montreal, because it’s in North America, is that it didn’t really feel like a home game for us.”
“It seemed as though almost half the spectators were still barracking for the Americans,” O’Hern says.
“Whereas if you go to somewhere like down here in Australia, you really feel as though we got 90 percent of the support.
“But hopefully the Canadians get behind them and the rest of the world.
“But they’re very much a long shot again.”
...
As Eddie Murphy once said, things sound better in French. And the Instagram post by the Presidents Cup’s social media team is no exception. Would viewers like to see Des moments incroyables d’Adam Scott au Royal Montréal, ça vous dit?
And the answer is oh, oui, baby. Oui bloody oui. The vision shows a 27-year-old Adam Scott peppering flags with that silky, “perfect” swing. And the comments on the social post agree. “Idol,” says one. “Ouiiii,” says another. “He’s so hot,” comments a third. And you think, it’s ever been this way for the 44-yearold Queenslander.
For while Scott has disappointed those of us who believe his one major championship, one Players Championship and one Australian Open are meagre returns for a player of such ability, there’s no doubting the man’s longevity is borne of desire. He’s pretty. But there is steel in Adam Scott.
He has the second-most Presidents Cup appearances (11) behind Phil Mickelson (12). He debuted in 2003 in the tied event in George, South Africa. In 49 matches he’s had 18 wins, six ties and 25 losses.
Following his one-shot loss to Keegan Bradley in the BMW Championship, Scott said that “qualifying for 11 straight Presidents Cups is certainly a highlight in the career”.
“It is not something that is focused on so much, but at this time of the year, it really feels like a great accomplishment to make this team and I’m really determined to keep making this team while I’m out on tour, being competitive and making sure the Internationals get another victory,” Scott said.
Jason Day, Australia’s top-ranked player, will be making his first appearance since 2017.
“I will hopefully bring more experience to the team,” Day said. “I know we are going to have a pretty experienced team. It is something we’ve struggled to win in the past and looking at the team currently, we’ve got guys that can go out there and compete, and play well to win the matches when they need to.”