Twenty

THERE WERE NO dark clouds in the sky on Thursday as the players completed their final preparations and got ready for the opening ceremony.

There was no doubt that the European team—Danny Willett aside—was having more fun than the Americans. Which made sense, since they were the team playing with house money.

Most of the players played only nine holes on Thursday. By now they felt familiar with the golf course and wanted to be rested for Friday morning.

“Last thing you want to do is wear yourself out at that point,” Henrik Stenson said. “Most weeks you’re playing for real on Thursday.”

Stenson, Justin Rose, Rory McIlroy, and Andy Sullivan were the first group out for Europe on Thursday. There was little doubt they were going to be two of the four Euro pairings the next morning: Stenson and Rose; McIlroy and Sullivan. The four of them were playing a friendly match and, when they got to the 8th green, after their real putts, they began trying putts from various spots on the green.

After Sullivan had missed a 10-footer, McIlroy tried it from the same spot. He missed too. Then he tried again. After another miss, a voice could be heard clearly from the crowd, “Hey, I could make that putt.”

Stenson, never one to pass on a potential laugh, walked over to the ropes and motioned for the heckler to come out and see if he could make the putt. The heckler agreed. McIlroy handed him a putter and, “just to make it real for him,” Rose put down a hundred-dollar bill next to the ball.

The guy’s name was Dave Johnson, and he had come over from his home in North Dakota to see the matches. He was wearing a red pullover, blue jeans, boat shoes, and sunglasses. He looked the putt over briefly, then stabbed it at the hole. “If it doesn’t go in, he’s chipping,” Stenson said later.

Except that it went in—banging the back of the cup. The crowd went nuts; Johnson went nuts too with an old Tiger Woods fist pump, and the players and caddies hugged Johnson and high-fived him. Stenson picked up the hundred-dollar bill and handed it to Rose, who presented it to Johnson.

Johnson got Rose to sign the bill and then went off to have his fifteen minutes of fame as a wave of print reporters descended on him to find out who he was. The case could be made that Johnson had just made the most lucrative putt in Ryder Cup history, since he made $100 and none of the players are paid once the matches begin.

Now, though, the fun was over. It was time to get serious.

—

The opening ceremony of the Ryder Cup has become a TV show. In fact, the Golf Channel actually had a thirty-minute pre–opening ceremony show. Not exactly the endless all-day Super Bowl pregame shows, but somewhat mind-boggling nevertheless.

Once the various singing groups and bands had been introduced and had performed, Jack Nicklaus and Tony Jacklin came out for their scripted remembrance of the 1969 “concession” match.

Then, finally, came what the roughly thirty thousand people who had packed every inch of available space at the back of the driving range around the seating area and the stage had come to see.

The players and the captains.

They marched in, solemnly circling the seating area to get to the stage. The wives and partners didn’t get to walk in with them. They simply stepped out from behind an onstage curtain and took their seats in the back row. This was a long way from the 1993 opening ceremony, when the wives had been introduced at the Belfry with as much fanfare as the players.

When the American wives marched in that day, two by two in their matching outfits, Lewine Mair, the talented longtime golf writer for the London Daily Telegraph, gasped and said, “My God, they’ve all married the same woman.” It appeared the American wives were all five-foot-ten-inch blondes, except for Melissa Lehman, a five-foot-ten-inch brunette.

The teams came last. Then came the speeches from various golf officials and—finally—the captains. Both Darren Clarke and Davis Love were eloquent, talking about their respect for each other, for the traditions of the Ryder Cup, and about Arnold Palmer—an add-on at the start of the week to each man’s speech. Then they introduced their players—many wearing sunglasses that seemed out of place but were necessary to block the direct blaze of the sun.

And finally, just when everyone was pretty much ready to go home, the Friday morning matchups were announced. The players knew beforehand whom they were playing with and in what order, but they didn’t know who their opponents were until they were actually announced by NBC’s Dan Hicks, the MC for the ceremony.

When Hicks announced the second match, McIlroy and Sullivan against Mickelson and Fowler, McIlroy jumped from his seat, put his fists in the air, and high-fived Sullivan.

“I was hoping to play against Phil,” he said later. “We’d played twice before [in four-ball/foursomes but never in singles] and he’d won both. I wanted a crack at him right out of the gate. Plus, I wanted to show the guys I was ready to go emotionally, that if they wanted to look to me to lead, I was ready to go.”

Mickelson was far more controlled. In fact, when Love had introduced him, he had stood up quickly, keeping his sunglasses on, waved briefly, and sat back down.

“The opening ceremony is the moment when your stomach really begins to churn,” he said later. “The talk’s over. It’s time to get serious. You know the golf course and now you know who your opponents are going to be. For me, this time around especially, I was feeling the pressure that I knew was coming the next day. I’d put myself in a position where I was going to be the guy looked at and examined and either praised or criticized when the matches were over.

“I wasn’t afraid of it. I’d done a lot of it on purpose. But I would have been crazy to not be aware of it.”

The two U.S. rookies—Brooks Koepka and Ryan Moore—would sit out in the morning. Europe would play all six of its veterans and two rookies—Sullivan and Pieters. The other four would get their first taste of the Ryder Cup later.

One person who was convinced the Americans were ready to play was Butch Harmon. He had three of his pupils—Brandt Snedeker, Jimmy Walker, and Rickie Fowler—on the U.S. team, in addition to Mickelson, with whom he had worked for almost nine years.

“I first went to the Ryder Cup as a kid in 1959,” he said. “I’ve done the last eleven on TV [for Sky, the U.K. carrier of the matches], and I’ve always had the chance to be around the guys. The whole week felt different this time.

“I don’t think there’s ever been a U.S. team under the pressure these guys were under because of everything that had happened dating to Gleneagles, and you know what, I think they liked it. They thrived on the pressure. They all said the same thing to me on Wednesday and Thursday: can’t wait to get started.”

There was one other thing Harmon sensed. “This really was a team. It wasn’t twelve guys playing golf, it was one team playing golf. That was different.”

Harmon and others noticed one other thing: almost no one was playing Ping-Pong in the team room and no one was talking about it. In the past, the Ping-Pong table and talk about who won and who lost were about the only thing all the American players seemed to have in common. Now the two tables stood empty most of the time. Everyone was genuinely enjoying themselves with one another.

That night, after everyone was finished eating dinner in the team room, Jordan Spieth stood up and asked for everybody’s attention.

Even though he was playing in his second Ryder Cup and his fourth international match (two Presidents Cups) as a pro, Spieth was still the youngest player on the team, having just turned twenty-three at the end of July. Patrick Reed, who was twenty-six and whose birthday was in August, and Brooks Koepka, twenty-six in May, were the next youngest.

And yet Spieth understood that, because of his place in the game and his past experiences, he needed to be one of this team’s leaders. Others had played more often—Mickelson was in his eleventh Ryder Cup, Zach Johnson was in his fifth, and no one else had played in more than three—but Spieth knew that he and Reed were being looked at by their teammates as leaders on this team.

Mickelson was still the grand old man, but he was forty-six and was a lot closer to being a captain than he was to being the pissed-off rookie of 1995 who couldn’t believe that Lanny Wadkins sat him down on Friday morning.

Now Spieth was standing in front of his teammates and basically saying, “I get it, I know I have to be one of the guys, not just a guy, this time around and in the future.”

He would never describe what he said that night as “taking leadership” in the team, but that was the way the others took it—and wanted to take it.

Spieth is not a spur-of-the-moment kind of guy. Unlike McIlroy, who often transfers his thoughts to his mouth quickly, he thinks most things out before acting. He knew that both Mickelson and Love wanted him to put himself into a leadership role, and he had been thinking about it during the week, even voicing to his girlfriend, Annie Verrett, that he felt he should say something at some point.

The question was, when?

“I waited a couple of days because I wanted to get a feel for the mood of the team, for the golf course, for everything going on around us,” he said. “I’d heard all the talk about how the Americans had to win this time and the pressure we were all under. I wanted to say something that might relieve the pressure a little bit, maybe give the guys some confidence.

“Things had gotten quiet in the team room on Thursday, and we were all going to bed early since we had such an early start, so I decided, ‘This is the time,’ and I just stood up.”

Spieth wanted his teammates to know how much confidence he had in them—“because I really did,” he said. “I wasn’t trying to give anyone a pep talk. I was just telling them how I felt.”

Long after the matches had ended, he could repeat most of what he had said, almost verbatim: partly because it meant a good deal to him, partly because he has a steel-trap memory, especially when the subject is golf.

“I just want you guys to know that even though this is only my second Ryder Cup, I’ve played with all you guys quite a bit,” he began. “And I’ve played with everyone on the European team a good deal too. I feel like I know your games and I know their games, and here’s what I think: We’re better than they are. We’re just better players. I believe we can win all the matches, not just win the Cup, win all the matches. There’s no reason why we can’t go out tomorrow morning and sweep them, 4–0. Patrick and I will get out there and set the pace, and the rest of you guys follow us. And when we’re up 4–0, there’s no reason to stop. Just keep on going, keep on winning.”

He reminded them of something Tiger Woods had said to him before the week. “Tiger told me when he was playing his best golf, he always played every hole backward in his mind, from green back to the tee. He could see his putts going in the hole every time. If Tiger says that works, it gets my attention. We all know this golf course now, and we know if we play with them from tee to green, we’re better than they are on the greens.

“We should go out there with the mind-set that we’re going to kick their ass, because there’s no reason not to. We should think we’re going to be perfect against these guys—perfect. Don’t be scared to sweep them in any session; in every session. They don’t have to win any matches.”

Spieth had everyone’s attention before he finished. “I’d heard all the noise all week,” he said. “I knew some of it was rhetoric, but I really wanted everyone to be thinking, ‘Let’s go out there and trounce these guys.’ If I had thought we weren’t good enough to do that, if I had doubts about the team, I’d have said something different. I’d have talked about being patient and not getting down if things went wrong.

“But I didn’t feel that way. I really thought we were ready to go out and beat them, and I wanted them to know I felt that way. I wasn’t trying to insult the Europeans at all. I knew they had great players—we all knew that. But I honestly believed we were better, that there wasn’t one match we couldn’t stand up on the 1st tee and not have a chance to win. So why not go ahead and win each one?”

When Spieth finished, his teammates came up to tell him how much they appreciated what he’d said and the way he’d said it.

Mickelson put an arm around him and said, “That was perfect. Absolutely perfect.”

Later, Mickelson said there was no moment that meant more to him during the week than Spieth’s Thursday night talk.

“It wasn’t so much what he said but how he said it,” Mickelson said. “In many ways it was typical of Jordan—wise and understanding beyond his years. He’d clearly thought about what he was going to say, and the message was ‘Follow me. We’re all in this together, but I can handle being the leader.’

“It was important for someone who wasn’t me to stand up and say that. It was important it be one of the younger guys because, let’s face it, we older guys only have so much time left in Ryder Cup. It was best that it was Jordan because, regardless of how old he is, he’s already a great player, an important player, and a guy everyone looks up to.

“Of all the moments I remember about the week—and there were a lot of them—that’s the one that stands out the most. It was like a passing of the torch. And it came at exactly the right moment.”

Love and Mickelson had both been pushing Spieth all week to say something to the team. They both knew that, in spite of his youth, the other players already looked up to him because of his play and because of his smarts and maturity.

There were no more speeches when Spieth finished. It was time to get some sleep and go play golf.

—

Sunrise on Friday morning in Chaska, Minnesota, was at 7:12 a.m. Hazeltine National Golf Club was alive with noise and nerves long before the sun showed up.

Spieth and Reed were the first two players to arrive, both on the putting green an hour before their 7:35 tee time. The forecast was for more perfect weather, including an afternoon high of about seventy, but with the sun not yet up and the practice areas lit only by temporary lights put in for the week, it was quite brisk—to put it mildly—when the two players ventured outside. Spieth was bundled up. Reed was in short sleeves.

He had adopted this approach in Scotland, partly because he just didn’t feel right wearing extra clothing, partly because he knew it had a psychological effect on his opponents. Much like the pitcher who shows up on a forty-five-degree day in April in short sleeves or the football player who goes bare-armed in subfreezing temperatures, Reed wanted his opponents to know that he was tougher than they were.

“I actually tried wearing a sweater for about two holes at Gleneagles,” he said. “I didn’t like it, so I just pulled it off and went from there. It was freezing most of the time there, but I was actually hot a lot of the time in my short sleeves. I never really felt the cold.”

Reed and Spieth were the perfect pairing for a lot of reasons. They’d known each other since junior golf in spite of the three-year age difference, because Spieth had been so precocious as a young player. They were both intense on the course, though in different ways. And their off-course personas were perfect fodder for the media.

“He’s the golden child,” Reed said, laughing. “I’m the villain.”

Reed’s “villain” persona had changed in the eyes of many after Gleneagles. He’d gone 3-0-1, and a lot of players on the team had come away with a different feeling about him, having spent time with him in the team room. There was never much doubt in anyone’s mind that he and Spieth should lead off for the U.S. As Mickelson said, in many ways this needed to be their team.

When Reed and Spieth appeared on the putting green, they were cheered lustily by the fans who were already beginning to pack the grandstands around the 1st tee. The gates had been opened at six thirty, and many fans had sprinted in the direction of the 1st tee as soon as they cleared security and were on the property. This wasn’t Augusta. There were no rules against running, and a lot of people set off at a dead run to grab a spot.

Jeff Hintz’s music—complete with a DJ—was already cranking up. When there was a break, fans from both sides burst into song on their own. The Americans far outnumbered the Europeans, but the “Olé” song was getting a good workout from the Euro fans before a ball had been put into the air.

The fans could actually see Reed and Spieth even though they were behind the grandstands, because there was a giant screen showing them as they arrived to start warming up—literally and figuratively. The other players began making their way to the practice areas soon afterward—McIlroy the last of the eight players in the first two groups to show up, not because he didn’t know what time zone he was in but because he’s never been big on lengthy warm-ups.

“Especially when it’s cold,” he said.

Shortly before seven thirty, the four players scheduled to play first began the most stressful walk in golf: from the practice area to the 1st tee on the first day of the Ryder Cup. It was 114 steps from the edge of the putting green, across the range, and down the path to the fifteen steps that led up to the tee. The PGA of America’s new slogan for the Ryder Cup—“Where Legends Are Forged”—was emblazoned on each step.

Reed remembered feeling as if all the oxygen had been sucked out of the air on the 1st tee at Gleneagles. One of the reasons for feeling that way at Hazeltine might have been how packed the teeing ground was with people. The captains were there; vice captains too. Officials from the PGA of America and the European Tour were there, as were the eight players sitting out the morning matches, who were there to observe and feel the atmosphere. TV crews were everywhere.

The sun had been up for only a few minutes and the chill was still very much in the air. No one seemed to feel it—especially the players.

The only time the tee got quiet was for a moment of silence in honor of Arnold Palmer. On the back of the tee, where everyone could see it, was Palmer’s bag from the 1975 Ryder Cup when he had been the U.S. captain at Laurel Valley.

Both teams loved seeing Palmer’s bag. Ian Poulter was the first to cross the tee to take a picture of it. Others—not those playing—followed suit.

“I was just drinking it all in,” Spieth said. “Arnold’s golf bag being there was so cool. The whole thing was cool. I actually felt bad for Patrick because he had to get ready to hit. I could just kind of take it all in.”

Finally, the four players were introduced and Rose, teeing off on the odd holes for Europe, hit the opening tee shot of the competition. Reed followed for the U.S. Rose just missed the fairway, Reed found it. Spieth and Stenson both hit solid second shots onto the green.

The 1st was a long par-4—490 yards—but fairly straightforward with an uphill second shot to the green. Spieth’s shot drifted about 15 feet left of the hole; Stenson’s was 10 feet behind it. Birdie chances for both teams.

Reed missed, the putt drifting just low on the right side of the hole. That left Rose with a chance to give Europe a quick lead, exactly the kind of crowd-quieting start that Pete Willett had said was imperative.

He missed, the putt veering right at the last possible second. A huge cheer, more of relief than anything else, went up from the crowd.

At the 2nd, a shorter, easier par-4, Reed hit his second shot to 10 feet. After Stenson had failed to make his long birdie putt, it was Spieth’s turn; the best putter in the world had a makeable birdie putt. The Ryder Cup had been under way for twenty minutes and already the crowd was holding its breath.

It was one of those “every hole is like the back nine of a major” moments. Or, as Spieth might describe it, one of those “knock that shit in” moments.

Spieth knocked it in.

“I really didn’t think that much of it at the time,” Spieth said. “It was nice to see red go up on the board early like that. I knew that would be good for the guys behind us to see.”

The early birdie set a tone for the morning, one that the U.S. desperately needed. After all the talk about the “best team ever assembled” and how the task force and Love had given the players the input they needed to be prepared to succeed, a quick European start might have deflated everyone on the American side.

Instead, it was Europe that struggled all morning. Mickelson, clearly tight, had trouble finding fairways throughout, but Sullivan wasn’t much better. Mickelson and Fowler, 2 down through fourteen holes, rallied to win one up. Sullivan had actually played solidly the first fourteen holes. He’d holed a 12-foot par putt at the 11th hole for a halve and set McIlroy up for a birdie at the par-3 13th.

But he hit a poor chip on 15 that led to a door-opening bogey. After the Americans birdied the 16th to tie the match, Sullivan’s tee shot found the water on 17. That gave the Americans the lead. When McIlroy missed a long birdie putt at 18, Mickelson and Fowler had a surprising win.

That was the only match that went to 18. Spieth and Reed never let up on Stenson and Rose and won 3 and 2. Sergio García and Martin Kaymer were one up on Zach Johnson and Jimmy Walker through eleven holes before they bogeyed the 12th to open the door for the U.S. to win five straight holes and close out the match on 16. The fourth match was a virtual walkover. Westwood and Pieters bogeyed the first two holes and never got into the match, getting whipped, 5 and 4, by Dustin Johnson and Matt Kuchar.

Not surprisingly, Pieters was fighting first-time Ryder Cup nerves. But he really had no chance, because Westwood couldn’t find the planet. Neither player hit a fairway on the front nine. The Americans probably could have both played left-handed and had a decent chance to win.

Since it was the only match to go the distance, Mickelson-Fowler versus McIlroy-Sullivan was the last match to finish. As McIlroy was lining up the birdie putt he needed to make at 18 to steal a halve, he heard someone yell out, “Get an American.”

After missing the putt and shaking hands, McIlroy bolted quickly to the team room to cool down a little.

“I wasn’t that upset about the heckler,” he said later. “It was annoying, but a hostile crowd is part of playing on the road in the Ryder Cup. What I was really upset was that we let that match get away from us. Honestly, the way Phil played, the places he hit some shots, we never should have lost. Rickie did it for them.”

That match was a huge boost for the Americans: they’d won even though Mickelson didn’t play very well, Fowler had won his first full point in nine Ryder Cup matches, and—most important—they had a 4–0 lead.

No one was more thrilled with the morning matches than Fowler. “Finally,” he told Butch Harmon later. “Finally I won a full point. It felt so good to do that.”

What’s more, Fowler had been largely responsible for winning that point—which Harmon pointed out to him.

It was the first time the U.S. had led 4–0 since 1975, when their captain had been Arnold Palmer.

Karma?

“I think wanting to win for Seve’s memory gave us a boost in 2012,” Ian Poulter said. “I think, as much as all of us on both teams loved Arnold Palmer, his death gave the Americans a little something extra to play for.”

—

Not long after the last of the four morning matches had teed off, Mark Windschitl, having watched the opening shots on the 1st tee, walked inside for a cup of coffee. He was scheduled to head to the 6th hole later in the morning to work there as a marshal.

In a sense, Windschitl was the host for everyone on the grounds at Hazeltine, since he was the mayor of Chaska, Minnesota. Chaska, as a sign on I-12 East told people, had a population of 23,770 as of the 2010 census. “Probably closer to twenty-five thousand now,” Windschitl said. “We’ve grown since the census.”

Windschitl had become mayor in 2010. He had just retired after working for twenty-seven years as a firefighter in nearby St. Louis Park. “Never been in politics in my life,” he said, laughing. “I’m not a Democrat or a Republican. Don’t get into the partisan stuff at all. Just threw my hat in the ring because I’d retired [as a chief] and figured why not? I’ve lived here almost my entire life.”

Four years later, Windschitl and several members of the city council had flown to Gleneagles to get a feel for the Ryder Cup and to let people know about Chaska—and Minnesota. They’d set up an information booth and had been stunned at the number of people who thought the nearest major city to the golf course was Chicago—six hours away by car.

“People kept saying, ‘Really, Minneapolis has an airport?’ ” Windschitl said with a smile. “I think we were actually pretty helpful to quite a few people.”

Windschitl and his four-member council wanted people to remember that Chaska was where Hazeltine was located and for it not to be, as he put it, “a forgotten city.”

So they came up with an idea to remind people coming to the golf course exactly where they were: painting a sign on the footbridge across I-12 just before the exit for the course. The problem was, the Minnesota Department of Transportation wanted nothing to do with the idea.

“They said, ‘If we give you a permit, we’ll have to give one to everyone who wants one,’ ” Windschitl said. “We said, ‘How many other towns in Minnesota are likely to host the Ryder Cup?!’ ”

Just when it appeared the idea would die on the vine—or in red tape—Windschitl attended the “year out” event in downtown Minneapolis.

“We were standing there before everything started and someone said to me, ‘Look, there’s the governor,’ ” Windschitl said. “I turned around and, sure enough, there he was—standing by himself. I figured I had nothing to lose.”

And so Windschitl walked over to Governor Mark Dayton, introduced himself, and told him about what he and the Chaska council wanted to do.

“That’s a great idea,” Dayton said. “You should do it.”

Windschitl explained the problem with the Minnesota DOT.

“Within a couple of days, the permit was in the works,” Windschitl said. “Not sure it would have gotten done if I hadn’t run into the governor.”

The sign went up about two months before the matches began. It read, “Welcome to Chaska, Host of the 2016 Ryder Cup.”

The permit the Minnesota DOT issued was a temporary one, meaning the sign was supposed to come down when the matches were over.

“We’ll deal with that when the time comes,” Windschitl said. “It should be permanent.”

In the meantime, he was marshaling, helping out in the “Welcome to Minnesota” booth, and watching as a fan. Best of all, at the last possible moment, the PGA had come through with a coveted parking pass.

“A ticket I could get, no problem,” he said with a grin. “The parking pass was gold.”

—

By the end of the morning, the U.S. team was brimming with confidence, which was understandable. But there was no panic in the European team room during the lunch break, only some frustration at letting at least a point or two get away that could have been—should have been—winnable.

As soon as Westwood and Pieters shook hands with Johnson and Kuchar, Westwood sought Clarke out and told him he shouldn’t put him back out to play in the afternoon.

“I needed to get on the range with [teacher] Pete [Cowen] and figure out what was going on with my swing. I didn’t want to go back out there until I had found something that would work. I told Darren I’d let him know when I thought I could help by being back in the team.”

A number of players wondered how Clarke would react to the poor start. They knew how important the captaincy was to him. And they’d all been witness to his temper at different times.

“I was, honestly, pleasantly surprised,” McIlroy said. “Darren has a temper, everyone knows that. And there we were after the first morning down 4–0, at least in part because we hadn’t played well. I thought he might lose it—which, actually, would have been justified.

“But he was completely calm during the lunch break. Maybe it helped that there isn’t much time before you have to turn around and go play again, but he just said, ‘Early days, boys. Okay, we’ve dug ourselves a hole, but there’s a lot of golf yet. Let’s just try to win each session and work our back into this. And, in truth, that’s what we did.”

With Westwood out of the picture, Clarke decided to pair Pieters with McIlroy. He put Rose and Stenson back out as his leadoff team, convinced they would play better in the four-ball than they had in the morning foursomes. Both were capable of making a lot of birdies. He decided to pair García with countryman Rafael Cabrera-Bello, the most experienced—at thirty-two—of his rookies, and get Willett onto the golf course partnering Kaymer. His hope was that Willett’s enthusiasm would get Kaymer going.

Love might have been tempted to stick with what was working, but he knew that four-ball was a very different game than foursomes and he wanted to be sure that all twelve of his players had a match under their belts by sundown on the first day.

Having won his gamble by putting Mickelson and Fowler out in foursomes, he decided not to push his luck and gave them the afternoon off. This wasn’t a huge surprise, since Love and Mickelson had talked often about Mickelson not playing five times—perhaps not even playing four times, depending on how the matches were going. At forty-six, he was six years older than anyone else on the U.S. team and twenty-three years older than Spieth.

Love also decided to rest Zach Johnson and Jimmy Walker in order to make sure all four players who had watched in the morning—J. B. Holmes, Ryan Moore, Brandt Snedeker, and Brooks Koepka—would play. He paired Holmes and Moore, the strong, silent types, with each other—and sent Snedeker, who could relax almost anyone, out with Koepka.

Clarke’s calm demeanor at lunch paid off for Europe in the afternoon. The opening match was the same as it had been in the morning: Spieth and Reed against Stenson and Rose.

Spieth and Reed played well—they were a combined six under par. But they had no chance. Stenson and Rose combined to make ten birdies in fourteen holes, made no mistakes, and turned the tables from the morning with a 5-and-4 win.

Seeing the blue up on the board early had much the same effect on the Europeans that the red had on the Americans in the morning.

“We knew we hadn’t played well in the morning—none of us really,” Stenson said. “We knew though that we were good enough to come back. It isn’t as if we hadn’t had to come from behind in the past.”

With Cabrera-Bello playing very well, he and García built a big lead on Holmes and Moore and held on for a 3-and-2 win.

The only match that went well for the Americans was the last one. Snedeker and Koepka were brilliant; Kaymer and Willett were not. Willett didn’t play especially well, but he played better than Kaymer, who failed to make a single birdie.

Not surprisingly, the match was sullied by the behavior of a few fans. Willett was booed on the 1st tee—which he’d expected—and promptly pumped his opening drive down the middle.

“That was a good moment,” he said later. “One of the few.”

But the “one percenters,” as Jordan Spieth later dubbed them, wouldn’t let up. They yelled profanities at Willett’s family—his wife Nicole and his parents were walking inside the ropes—and often yelled things like “Put it in the bunker” or “Go home, Danny, we hate you” at Willett while he was trying to address his ball. Finally, on the 6th tee, Snedeker and Koepka turned to the fans to try to quiet them. They did—briefly. When Willett duck-hooked his drive a moment later, a huge cheer went up.

The shame of it was that the heckling overshadowed how well Snedeker and Koepka played en route to an easy 5-and-4 win. Their victory gave the U.S. a 5–2 lead with one match still on the golf course.

That was McIlroy and Pieters versus Dustin Johnson and Kuchar. Pieters had gotten past his rookie jitters and was clearly a lot more comfortable playing with a hot McIlroy than a cold-as-ice Westwood. Both men poured in one birdie after another and built a 4-up lead after thirteen holes. But Johnson and Kuchar hung in and won the next two holes to close the gap to 2 up with three holes to play.

By now, all the other players, the captains, the vice captains, and the wives and partners were following the match. If the Americans could rally to pull out a halve, it would be huge psychologically and would give them a solid 5½–2½ lead. If Europe hung on to win, the margin would be just 5–3 and the momentum going into Saturday would be on their side.

McIlroy made certain his team went home Friday night feeling good about itself.

The 16th—normally the 7th pre–Ryder Cup—is a 572-yard par-5, a true risk/reward hole, with water down the left side of the fairway and left of the green. McIlroy, perhaps the only player in the world who can come close to matching Dustin Johnson off the tee, hit a massive drive and—unlike Johnson—found the fairway. After Johnson and Kuchar both failed to find the green, McIlroy, with 228 yards to the hole (meaning his drive had traveled almost 350 yards), hit a four-iron to 18 feet, making him the only player in the group with a chance to make eagle.

Worst case, he’d make a birdie and the Americans would have to come up with a birdie themselves to get a halve and keep the match alive. McIlroy removed any suspense by draining the eagle putt.

Match over; U.S. lead down to 5–3. But McIlroy wasn’t finished.

As soon as the putt went into the hole he let out a primal scream, both arms in the air. He turned and bowed to the crowd. Then he did it again, clearly mouthing a not-nice word as he did so.

“We’d been hearing from them all day—certainly not all of them—but some of them,” he said later. “I wanted to let them know we weren’t going to be intimidated, that we were here to compete regardless. I was a little bit wired, sure, but I also wanted my teammates to feed a little bit off my emotion.”

They did, charging McIlroy and Pieters to congratulate them.

“I’d rather be ahead 5–3 than behind 5–3,” Clarke said. “But this feels like a pretty good 5–3, even though we’re behind.”

Love knew exactly what he meant. He pointed out to the media that a 5–3 lead was a good start for his team. He also knew that Clarke’s words to his team at lunch had been accurate: there was a lot of golf left to be played and a lot more work still to be done.