Farmingdale, NY – it doesn’t matter what they have done as juniors, regardless of what they have done as pros, there is something strange thing that most Ryder cuppers feel during their first team event:
That they don’t belong.
The more players you speak, the Waarder it seems. Some malignant Ryder Cup comparison between the two-year break, the individual, struggle the nature of their seasons, too much passion and discomfort that makes the biggest golfers on the planet … a little sheepish for their peers.
“I think the first year was a lot of discovery for me,” Cam Young started, “only in terms of just accepting that I fit here at Golf. And that I have to be here and this is what I want to do. You know, I am qualified to be in these teams.”
Young is a Ryder Cup -smokie but spoke about the Presidents Cup, where he played all five games in 2022. Less than a year before he was in that team, he had viewed the PGA Tour as a fan, he said.
“You keep me in the team room 10, 11 months later, and I am still a bit uncomfortable there, just because I don’t know anyone very well,” Young said. “There are a few boys in the team I had known from Junior Golf, but there had been a gap – six, seven, eight years – where I hadn’t really seen them much.”
Young was a top 20 player in the world, but “I still got my feet below me, and I think I’ve been here for some time, I feel much more comfortable.”
He’s not alone.
“I learned that I can compete at the highest level of golf,” said Bob Macintyre on Wednesday. That is for Bob, who repeated the thought a moment later. He changed all his equipment after that Ryder Cup, in the conviction that he could reach a new level. And yes, he has found it in the years since then, won twice and becomes a top 20 player in the world.
He feels different about the presence he now has in the world of Golf. It all started with the Ryder Cup.
You could say the same thing about Scottie Scheffler, the world no. 1, who was the 12th and last man in the American team of 2021. Nothing is offensive about that, Scottie knows it. He had not yet won a PGA Tour event, but earned an enormous approval from Steve Stricker and his colleague teammates. Just the phone call got him “very emotional,” he said. Then he defeated Jon Rahm 4 and 3 in a singles competition and has actually won the other since.
Even Rahm himself was not entirely certain whether the role he could play during his first Ryder Cup.
“I was high in the world ranking, yes, and I had played great wave,” said Rahm. “But as soon as I got into that dressing room, it was very, very clear to me that I was much lower when it came to Ryder Cup, only because of how comfortable some players were and how different the dynamics of the week is.
I heard? Yes. But the presence – nowadays they will say the aura of some players – as soon as you walked in the dressing room in Paris, Sergio [Garcia] And [Ian] Poulter was very big. Only the gravity of their presence was immediately clear. ‘
Rahm called it intimidating and humiliating. But similar to Scheffler, a few days after he was in a crucial singles match … against Tiger Woods.
If he hadn’t heard yet, he would do a few hours later when he won 2 and 1.
“The pride I feel now,” said Rahm that day. “It cannot be described.”
#important #reason #Elite #Golfers #Ryder #Cup