DAVIS LOVE WENT to bed before midnight, expecting a restless night. The lineups were in; the speeches had been given. The tears had been shed. All that was left to do was hope his players had one more good day of golf left in them.
He woke up at some point after midnight and found a new text in his cue. It had been sent at 11:51 p.m. and said, “Can’t sleep. Lineups are done. Nothing left for me to think about.”
It was from Tiger Woods. Love laughed.
“Tiger had been obsessing about our lineup, especially the singles, since July,” Love said. “Now it was done and he couldn’t sleep. I cracked up.”
Love knew it was probably going to be his last funny moment for a while.
Sunday dawned exactly the way the first two days had: cold and sunny, the temperature at sunrise barely reaching fifty. The difference was, there were no players in sight, since the first tee time was at 11:04 and everyone had a chance to sleep in.
“Sort of sleep in,” Jordan Spieth said. “I don’t think anyone slept too soundly that night.”
Spieth was actually receiving more attention from those arriving at the golf course early than any of the other players. The rumor that he had hurt himself mid-fiving with Patrick Reed after Reed’s hole-out Saturday afternoon had gone near viral, and there were whispers that he was going to sit out, meaning he and whoever was in Darren Clarke’s envelope would split a point.
“I know the rumor was around,” Spieth said, laughing, several weeks later. “But I was fine. It did hurt when it first happened, but by the time we finished Saturday, I was pretty much pain-free. It certainly wasn’t anywhere near close to me giving any thought at all to not playing.”
Spieth was actually one of the first players to arrive Sunday morning. He drove to the golf course with his caddie, Michael Greller, and left Greller to park the car while he jogged up to the clubhouse. Spieth rarely walks when going from one place to another. On the golf course, when there’s a lengthy distance between a green and the next tee, he runs. When there are stairs, he runs up, then he runs down. This time, though, he wasn’t running (a fast jog) just because it’s what he does.
“I actually wanted to get inside without cameras recording my arrival the way TV likes to do with guys, especially on Sunday at a major,” he said. “So I figured if I kept moving, they wouldn’t find me. I just wanted to go to work.”
There was little doubt that this was a workday for everyone. Even though play started much later, the gates were opened at seven thirty with the music from the 1st tee blaring all over the golf course. As soon as the gates opened, fans began stampeding in different directions to find ideal places to watch. If it had been Augusta, all fifty-five thousand of them probably would have been removed for committing the seminal crime of running. But this wasn’t Augusta.
Nick Faldo was walking behind the 1st tee to a TV set a few minutes after the gates opened, and he saw people sprinting to line up to get into the grandstands there.
“Don’t these people know there’s no golf for another three and a half hours?” he asked rhetorically.
They knew. They didn’t care.
The weather warmed quickly once the sun was up, and the players going off first began arriving. Some of those playing later stayed back at the hotel to try as best they could to relax.
When Spieth got to the range, he was pleased to find he could swing pain-free.
“You okay?” Jim Furyk asked, having heard about the Spieth-Reed slap.
“Fine, all good,” Spieth said, not wanting anyone to doubt for a second that he was ready to go.
Patrick Reed was more nervous than he had ever been. The spotlight was firmly on him, and he knew it. He was, after all, Captain America, and in that role it was his job to slay Captain Europe—Rory McIlroy.
“I was tight on the range,” he said later. “Really tight. I didn’t like the way I was hitting the ball, and I knew it was nerves. I was telling myself to calm down and just get ready to play, but it wasn’t working.”
Tiger Woods was on the range, watching Reed and Spieth—whom he had taken to describing as “my guys,” since they had been in his pod and in his care all week—warm up. He could see that Reed wasn’t quite himself.
“Hey, Patrick,” he said. “Come here a minute.”
Reed walked over to where Woods was standing. As had been the case all week, Woods’s eyes were covered by sunglasses and his cap was pulled down tight. If not for the goatee he was sporting, he could have been a Secret Service agent watching President Obama play a round of golf. He even had the earpiece for the radio all the vice captains carried.
“I thought sure he was going to give me a pep talk, say something about my swing or about just relaxing and not trying too hard,” Reed said. “I walked over there. He had his arms folded. I waited. He looked really serious.
“And then he told me a dirty joke.”
Woods is well known among the players for telling and enjoying dirty jokes. Athletes in general like so-called locker room humor. It is not, however, limited to male athletes. One of the all-time-best dirty-joke tellers among the jock set was Chris Evert, the girl-next-door tennis immortal. No one looked more demure or proper than Evert. No one loved a good down-and-dirty joke more than Evert.
Woods is similar—he just looks a lot different from Evert. When he told Reed the joke, his face never changing expression, Reed broke up.
“It was actually the perfect thing to do,” Reed said later. “It just broke the tension. I went back to hitting balls, and all of a sudden I was loose as could be. I was ready.”
So was McIlroy. He knew exactly what was at stake in the leadoff match, that it was about far more than one point.
“I needed to get out there in front and put that blue in front of everybody—on both teams,” he said. “It wasn’t just about closing the gap by winning the first point. It was also about taking Reed down and making everyone think, ‘We can do this. We’ve done it before, we can do it again.’
“Reed was playing so well, and he’s so passionate about the Ryder Cup. I just felt if I could find a way to beat him, it might crack the Americans’ confidence a little bit.”
McIlroy certainly gave it his best shot. But every time he threw a punch, Reed had an answer.
Not surprisingly, both men were a little tight on 1: Reed hooked his drive left into the trees; McIlroy missed the fairway right. Both missed the green, but McIlroy pitched to three feet. Reed had to pitch out of the trees and had a 20-footer for par. He nailed it. That set the tone for the day.
“Getting out of that hole with a halve and making a long putt to do it got me pumped all over again,” he said. “I kind of looked at Rory, saw how intense he was, and thought, ‘This is on.’
It was. McIlroy was one up through four holes before the two men played, arguably, the four greatest holes in Ryder Cup history.
McIlroy made four straight birdies on 5 through 8. And lost ground.
Kerry Haigh had moved the tee up on the short par-4 5th hole. On the scorecard, the hole was listed as 352 yards—from the back tee. In fact, the shortest it was listed was 310 yards. Haigh had it set up at 303 yards, a risk/reward tee shot through a narrow chute to what was a reachable green.
McIlroy laid up and pitched to three feet. He never got to putt, though, because Reed laced a driver to eight feet and rolled in the eagle putt.
“That was a wow moment,” McIlroy said. “He gambled and just hit a brilliant shot. Then he made the putt.”
They both birdied the par-5 6th and the 7th. That brought them to the par-3 8th, all square. Both found the green, but neither really had a makeable birdie putt. McIlroy was on the front of the green, 40 feet shy of the pin; Reed was about 25 feet left of the flag.
And then, McIlroy made the putt of the week, draining his birdie putt from the front of the green. When the putt went in, McIlroy was as pumped as he could ever remember being. He shook his fists, then his entire body in a sort of solo shimmy. Then he held his hand to his ear in an “I can’t hear you” gesture, clearly saying, “I can’t hear you!” to the crowd.
“Part of it was just pure adrenaline, raw emotion; the putt going in, the importance of it,” McIlroy said. “But part of it was just fun. I was having a great time out there. The Ryder Cup is the only event in golf where you would even think to act that way. It’s the only event where you’re going to get a crowd response—one way or the other—like that.
“It was all just very cool. The quality of the golf at that point was off the charts, and I was just, as they say, in the moment.” He laughed. “Very much in the moment.”
Reed was just as in the moment. He calmly stepped up to his putt and, just as McIlroy had done, rolled it dead center. He turned to McIlroy, pointed, and wagged his finger at him as if to say, “Not so fast.”
All McIlroy could do was laugh as the crowd went absolutely crazy.
“The roar on 6 on Saturday when I made the eagle was, without doubt, the loudest I’d ever heard,” Reed said. “The roar on 8 on Sunday had to be four or five times louder. It was beyond belief. There was no point in even trying to talk. No way could you hear anything.”
Matt Kuchar, who didn’t tee off until after one o’clock in the eleventh match, was sitting in the team room watching all this unfold. For a moment, what was happening on the 8th green made him a little nervous.
“When Rory made his putt, I thought he might rip his shirt off and do the Hulk thing,” he said. “Then Patrick makes his and he’s pointing his finger at Rory. I thought, ‘Whoa, this is getting really tense.’ Then Rory went over and bumped fists with him and they both smiled. I kind of breathed a sigh of relief when he did that.”
McIlroy had started to walk off the green, then stopped, turned, and held up a fist to Reed. They fist-bumped, patted each other on the back, and began the long walk to the 9th tee together.
“You realize, don’t you, that imitation is the most sincere form of flattery,” McIlroy said to Reed as they walked to the tee. He was remembering Reed’s Sunday act at Gleneagles.
Reed grinned. “This is fun, isn’t it?” he answered.
Behind Reed and McIlroy, Europe had gotten off to the kind of start that Clarke had hoped for. The first seven matches were all close, but Europe had a slim lead in Stenson-Spieth, Pieters-Holmes, and Cabrera-Bello-Walker. Mickelson and García were throwing birdies at each other, and Rose and Fowler—in match four—were dueling back and forth. There wasn’t much daylight between leader and trailer in any match.
Which was why both McIlroy and Reed understood how important the outcome of their match was going to be.
Almost inevitably, both lost a little bit of steam after the stunning exchange on the 8th green.
“I think we were both a little drained at that point,” McIlroy said. “We were both playing in our fifth match, we’d both been trying to kind of carry our teams emotionally. The intensity of the first eight holes was off the charts. I definitely felt it on the back nine. Unfortunately, he felt it just a little less.”
McIlroy was still riding a little bit of a high from the 8th green theatrics when he walked onto the 10th tee. Among those standing there was Courtney Holt, the senior director of player relations and booking at Golf Channel. In English, that means she coordinates almost every major interview Golf Channel does with a player. Which means she knows McIlroy well.
Spotting her, McIlroy walked over to the ropes, grabbed her shoulder, and said, “How great is this? I mean, how great is this?”
McIlroy was riding on adrenaline and exhaustion at the same time. He simply couldn’t stay at that level playing his fifth match in a little more than fifty hours. Reed was tired too, but just a tad less tired, as it turned out.
Reed took the lead on the long par-4 12th hole when both players missed the green but he got up and down, making a 10-foot par putt, and McIlroy failed to match him, making his first bogey of the day. By now, all the players were on the golf course and could all see the red “1” on the scoreboard in between Reed’s and McIlroy’s names.
“Seeing that was a huge boost,” said Brandt Snedeker, who had gone off ninth in Love’s lineup. “We knew how much they were counting on Rory, and we were counting on Patrick just as much.”
Phil Mickelson, playing sixth, agreed. “Honestly, I wasn’t looking that closely at the boards because I had my hands full,” he said. “But when I saw that Patrick had taken the lead, I definitely felt a little chill go through me.”
By now, the two players were like Rocky and Apollo Creed in the final rounds: reeling with exhaustion but refusing to go down. Reed birdied 16 and was 2 up with two to play. McIlroy, though, wasn’t finished. He won the 17th and came to 18 knowing he had to make birdie to steal a half point.
“By then, a halve would have been a victory,” McIlroy said. “I’d given Patrick everything I had on the front nine, and he stayed with me. Then he outplayed me on the back nine, even though he was tired.”
The 18th hole at Hazeltine—normally the 9th—is a not-too-difficult 432-yard par-4. Kerry Haigh had the pin—as with most of the pins that day—in a relatively easy spot, toward the back of the green but not tucked near any of the bunkers.
McIlroy, with the honor, hit a perfect drive down the middle. Reed did the same.
Davis Love was now following the match, knowing how crucial it was. After Reed’s tee shot, he walked quickly onto the tee and scooped up Reed’s tee, which Reed had not picked up. “I just wanted to have it,” Love said. “Either way, it had been one of the great Ryder Cup matches in history.”
Reed, charging up the fairway with the crowd screaming, happened to look over his shoulder as Love was picking up the tee and saw him do it. “Put a big smile on my face,” he said.
Later, Love was stunned when Reed told him he’d seen him pick up the tee, since Reed was already 30 or 40 yards up the fairway when he did it. “Eyes in the back of my head,” Reed told him.
Love believed him.
When Reed got to his ball, he wasn’t at all surprised to find himself 140 yards from the flag, which was 24 feet from the front edge of the green and eight feet from the right edge. He was, however, a little surprised to see McIlroy’s ball 30 yards past where he was standing. “Trust me, I hit mine great,” he said later, laughing. “Fair to say he was a little pumped up.”
McIlroy was pumped up. He also knew he had to make birdie to give himself a chance. But when he saw Reed’s second shot—a pitching wedge—flying at the flag, he knew birdie might not be good enough. “I figured if he got it anywhere inside 20 feet, he’d probably make it the way he’d putted under pressure all week,” he said. “I actually stood over mine, thinking if I wanted a halve in the match, I might have to hole it.”
He didn’t, although he hit a superb shot, right over to the flag, the ball stopping eight feet behind the hole. Reed had 10 feet left for birdie.
“I knew I had to make it,” Reed said. “And I knew I was going to make it.”
Sure enough, his putt rolled dead center, just as so many others had in the previous three days. McIlroy wasn’t surprised even a little. He congratulated Reed, saying simply, “I enjoyed the match. Great playing.”
He walked away feeling miserable. He knew that his loss was going to make it very difficult for his team to rally. He was also saddened because one of his career goals—one he hadn’t talked about publicly—had been to retire having never lost a Ryder Cup singles match.
“I had a selfish moment there,” he said. “I did think about that. I think in a way I was looking at that as a consolation prize in case we didn’t win the Cup. Then I realized that, in the big picture, it didn’t mean that much. I had played about as well as I could have hoped for three days; I’d done some good things, but it wasn’t quite good enough.
“Patrick was unbelievable. The passion and energy he brings to the Ryder Cup is incredible. I really believe if he cut his schedule to twenty or so events and focused that energy on winning majors, he’d win multiple times—he’s that talented.”
Three weeks later, Reed played in Malaysia. McIlroy checked the leaderboard on Sunday night and saw that he had finished tied for fifty-first. “How can that be the same guy I played at Hazeltine?” he wondered. “Hardest thing in golf is to keep your energy level high. We all have down weeks. When he’s up, he’s as good as it gets.”
Reed was as up as it gets at Hazeltine. His win was critical—especially given the timing. Just behind him, Stenson and Pieters were both winning against Speith and Holmes; Rose and Fowler were deadlocked; and Cabrera-Bello was leading Walker.
“I think it gave us all a boost to see Patrick’s win go on the board,” Mickelson said. “We knew the back half of our lineup was very strong and if we even came close to holding our own on the front half, we were going to win. That first point meant a lot.”
The second point, as it turned out, came from Fowler. Neither he nor Rose played especially well, combining for a total of five birdies—as opposed to Mickelson and García, who would combine for nineteen birdies—but Fowler made the last one, on the par-5 16th, to take a one-up lead that he hung on to as both players parred the last two holes.
“I guess you could say it wasn’t pretty,” Fowler said. “But I’d never won a singles match [0-1-1], so it was nice to chip in a point when we needed it.”
Rose has a temper, which shows up occasionally on the golf course and in private moments right after a round. But he’s a genuinely nice man, one who rarely says anything controversial in public. But after a less than sterling weekend, capped off by less than sterling play in the singles, Rose showed his frustration later in the day during Europe’s press conference, calling Kerry Haigh’s hole locations “ridiculously easy.”
The hole locations were not very difficult—the 18th, with plenty of room to the left of the flag and far enough back that the players could, to quote Harvey Penick and Robin Love, take dead aim. That was the way Love wanted it because the stats people had said to him, “Your guys are better putters than their guys are. The more you make this a putting contest, the better.”
“If we know we’re better putters than they are, why wouldn’t we set the golf course up to give ourselves a chance to make some putts?” Mickelson said again, after hearing Rose’s comments. “It would be stupid to do otherwise. They like tighter fairways and more rough. They like tucked pins that require more precise iron shots because they’re great iron players. So why would we set up the golf course to their advantage and not ours? What’s the point of being the home team if you don’t give yourself the best possible chance of winning?”
The Europeans didn’t disagree with that way of thinking. “When we get to Paris [in 2018], you’ll see tighter fairways, more rough, tougher pin positions, and slower greens,” Clarke said. “That’s the way the Ryder Cup is.”
His players got that. They knew even before they landed in Minneapolis that Haigh’s definition of “Ryder Cup” green speeds would be in the 13-to-14 range on the Stimpmeter, give or take a half foot—as long as the golf course was dry. In Europe, the greens would be closer to 11 and the pins harder to attack. Rose—no doubt upset with his performance—just thought it went too far.
“The golf course was set up that way to one degree or another all week,” he said. “But I just think on a Sunday in any major event, you want to test the players. You’ve got twenty-four of the best players in the world here, don’t you want to try to bring out their best, especially the last few holes? Force them to perform under pressure? See what great golf they can produce when the most is at stake?”
The answer, from the Americans’ point of view, was no. They wanted to win. Period. If putting every flagstick dead in the middle of the green would help them win, they were all for it.
Rose is one of the best ball strikers in the world, and he had beaten Mickelson to win the 2013 U.S. Open at Merion with a classic display of remarkable play, tee to green. The irony, though, was that he had also made one of the great putts in Ryder Cup history: the 50-footer on the 17th green at Medinah on Sunday, leading to his critical victory that day.
Fowler’s win made the match score 11½–9½. Stenson, Pieters, and Cabrera-Bello had all wrapped up their matches on the 16th hole, each of them winning 3 and 2. The Stenson-Spieth match had a fairly bizarre ending. Two down playing 16, Spieth had to take a shot at reaching the green in two after Stenson found the green with his second shot. He pulled the ball a little and ended up in the water to the left of the green.
The water was just shallow enough to allow Spieth to at least think about taking a swing from there. He took off his shoes and socks, rolled up his pants leg, and stepped into the muddy water.
But as he addressed the ball, he saw it move under the water. He had to penalize himself. Realizing that, even if he could somehow get a club on the ball without it moving again, holing out was an impossibility. He pulled himself out of the water, walked over to Stenson, took off his cap, and shook his hand.
“I actually played well,” Spieth said later. “I think I would have won against most guys that day. But Henrik was finishing off an amazing year. I think he had seven or eight one-putts in a row at one point. I said that to him, ‘What’d you have, seven, eight one-putts?’ He laughed and said, ‘Talk about the pot calling the kettle black.’ I had to laugh at that. I did make some putts on him in the past.”
Spieth knew that Stenson had won the match far more than he had lost it. Still, he felt as if he had let his teammates down. “If I back Patrick’s win up with a win, it’s just about over,” he said. “At that point, I thought to myself, ‘Okay, you didn’t win, find a way to go help the guys still playing.’ ”
Spieth was tempted to circle back to give Fowler—two matches behind him—encouragement, but he decided to stay out of sight and wait for the match to finish.
“Rickie doesn’t really like to see people following him like that when he’s playing,” Spieth said. “A lot of guys want a vice captain or guys who are done playing to be out there with them. Rickie doesn’t.”
In fact, Love had specifically not assigned a vice captain to walk with the Fowler-Rose match for just that reason.
The best-played match of the day for all 18 holes was Mickelson and García. Although there was plenty of very public negative history in the García-Woods relationship, he and Mickelson weren’t exactly buddies either. Their match was played with very little talk or “nice shots” between them, even though there were plenty of nice shots.
Mickelson had found his swing while partnering with Kuchar during the Saturday afternoon match and was driving the ball about as well as he ever had. García was still smarting from his loss with Kaymer the previous afternoon and matched Mickelson shot for shot, putt for putt.
“I’d been upset Saturday because I thought Martin and I losing and then what happened with Lee at the end really killed our momentum,” García said. “I knew we had to have every point possible, and I could see the board was pretty mixed and that wasn’t good enough.
“I was playing really well by then. But so was Phil; I had seen that Saturday afternoon. We didn’t talk much because of what was at stake, but it’s true, we’ve never really been friends. Different personalities. Some personalities just don’t match up. It’s as simple as that.”
Like Rose and the other Europeans, García was surprised by how easy the pin placements were.
“On the one hand, you understand it, of course,” he said. “But you would think the last few holes they’d want to challenge you a little. It was fun to make all those birdies, it’s always fun to make birdies. But I was a little bit surprised.”
Mickelson and García made a jaw-dropping nineteen birdies between them: ten by Mickelson and nine by García. Mickelson made the only bogey, three-putting the par-5 11th. That gave García a one-up lead, but Mickelson promptly birdied the 12th and the 15th to go back into the lead. Neither player ever held more than a one-up advantage.
García drew even again with a birdie at the par-5 16th. Remarkably, Mickelson shot 63 while playing the four par-5s in even par. With the match tied again, both men birdied the last two holes. When Mickelson rolled in a 22-footer for birdie on 18, he performed a leap reminiscent of his gravity-challenged jump after he made his birdie putt to win the Masters in 2004.
“I think I got a little higher in ’04,” he said, laughing. “I was a lot younger. But this one felt just about as good.”
The putt meant that the best García could do was halve the match, and he had to make a 15-footer of his own to do so. He rolled it in coolly, and the two men shook hands and—briefly—congratulated each other on their sterling play.
“It was kind of heartbreaking, to tell you the truth,” García said. “I threw everything I had at Phil, and he kept making putts. It was a great match, but what you remember is that you didn’t get the point.”
Mickelson admitted it was “probably” the best Ryder Cup match he’d ever been involved in but didn’t want to go much further than that. He didn’t want to give García credit for pushing him the way he had.
Mickelson’s half point gave the U.S. a 13–10 lead. A few minutes before he and García shook hands, Brooks Koepka had closed out Danny Willett, 5 and 4, ending a dreamlike Ryder Cup debut for Koepka (3-1 record) and an absolute nightmare (0-3 and “Pete-gate”) for Willett.
The board was now filled with red: Brandt Snedeker was leading Andrew Sullivan; Dustin Johnson had a comfortable lead on Chris Wood; and Zach Johnson was well ahead of Matthew Fitzpatrick. The U.S. needed to win only one and a half of those three points to clinch the Cup before the final matches played out.
By now, Love wasn’t thinking about winning all twelve matches or getting to 20 points. Clinching the cup was all that was on his mind.
“Once Brooks won and Phil and Sergio halved, it was obvious we were in pretty good shape,” he said. “But I didn’t want to relax, didn’t feel like I could relax until it was actually done.”
Love was sending various vice captains out to pick up the later matches as they neared conclusion. No one had been with Zach Johnson—playing the last match—all day, so Love sent Jim Furyk out to follow him. By then, Johnson was 3 up with four to play.
Snedeker, who had played wonderfully all weekend, came to the 17th hole 2 up on Sullivan. He had lost two of the first three holes at the start of the match, but had come back to take control. His charge had started when Bubba Watson came out to check on him on the 5th tee.
“I birdied that hole,” Snedeker said. “I turned to Bubba and said, ‘You aren’t going anywhere. Stay with me.’ He did—until the end of the match.”
Snedeker birdied four of five holes to take a 2-up lead. That was still the margin with two holes to play.
Standing on the 17th tee, hearing the roars all around the golf course, Snedeker knew victory was at hand. A chill went through him and he thought about Arnold Palmer.
He had 173 yards to the flag and 165 yards to make sure he covered the hazard to the right of the green. He had an eight-iron in his hands. He looked at Scott Vail, his caddie.
“What do you think?” he asked.
Knowing how pumped up his player was, Vail said, “I think it’s a nine-iron.”
At that moment Snedeker thought, “What would Arnold Palmer do right now?”
He knew the answer. He grabbed his nine-iron, did everything Palmer would do except hitch up his pants, and hit a “sling-hook” that flew over the hazard and ended up six feet from the flag. “Maybe the best shot of my life,” he said later.
Sullivan had to make birdie to have any chance at all. He missed the green right, then tried to chip in, the ball sliding 10 feet past the hole. Unless Snedeker, one of the best putters in the world, three-putted from six feet, the match was over. Sullivan took his cap off and offered his hand.
The U.S. led 14–10. The only question left was who would have the honor of clinching the Cup. Both Johnsons—Zach and Dustin—were closing in on wins. But just as he had come more or less out of nowhere to make the team, here came Ryan Moore.
Lee Westwood had played well again, not letting his late-Saturday failures affect him on Sunday. Through fifteen holes, he was 2 up, and it looked as if he would score a consolation point and leave the clinching to one of the Johnsons.
Except that Moore hit two excellent shots to reach the 16th green in two and then made the putt for eagle. He was one down. Then he hit an eight-iron to 15 feet on the 17th and drained that putt for a birdie. The match was even.
“I was back on 16, thinking Dustin was going to get the clincher,” Jim Furyk said. “All of a sudden I looked up and Ryan had birdied 16 and 17, and all he needed to do was halve the 18th for us to win. I began sprinting in the direction of 18.”
Most of the players on both teams who had finished their matches and the captains and vice captains were doing the same thing.
Moore, pumped up perhaps as he never had been, drilled his tee shot at 18 down the middle. Westwood’s shot drifted right, into the fairway bunker. His second shot found the bunker to the right of the green. Moore’s pitching wedge found the green, about 20 feet short of the flag.
It was ten minutes after four o’clock Central time on what was now a crisp, spectacular early fall day. Westwood had to hole his bunker shot for a birdie and hope Moore missed his putt, or the Ryder Cup would be over.
Westwood didn’t come close. The only way for Moore to lose was to three-putt from 20 feet. That wasn’t going to happen. He cozied the putt to within a foot of the flag. Westwood walked over, took his cap off, and put out his hand.
It was 4:11 p.m. The Ryder Cup was coming back to the United States.