About a week ago, there was a lot of talk about Justin Thomas’ comments about the 2025 Ryder Cup at Bethpage, which caused a stir when they were interpreted as criticism of the final track construction decisions.
As so often happens in our current information environment,… 85 minute conversation on the No Laying Up Podcast was reduced to just a few sentences, dismembered by others, dismembered again, spread around the world and then debated online. (That’s possible listen to the pod here. It’s worth it!)
Does JT wish he could do those particularly seemingly viral comments again? Maybe. He went on SiriusXM PGA Tour Radio to clarify them. But that is not a point I want to go into now. (At the risk of making a similar mistake.) I’d rather dive into something just as limited, but far more intriguing than the last Ryder Cup: the structure of the next one!
A few sentences from Thomas from that podcast that got lost in the noise of last week’s news cycle, and they’re about synergy. While examining what went wrong in 2025 and predicting how it could potentially change for 2027, Thomas said changes were necessary for Team USA’s success.
“I’m not entirely sure what those specific changes are,” Thomas said. “But there is something [have to change]. There just seems to be more, I would say, synergy, and more similarities, maybe because we have the Presidents Cup. I feel like we have an opportunity, I won’t say that to use that event, but something. There has to be some kind of, like partnership there. There’s no point in her being like this…
“Connective tissue,” NLU host Chris Solomon said as he jumped in. ‘It just has to be more…’
“They have nothing to do with each other at all,” Thomas continued. “They’re run by two different organizations. It feels like there’s only a few things I feel like – we’re just, maybe if it’s… put in a position to be more successful, or just something that’s better organized – to make sure all the demands are met. Everything is – how it’s run, how it should be done, how it should be, to where we’re put in the best possible position to succeed and play well, I guess. I’m not sure that’s really an answer.”
You have to appreciate that Thomas takes the question and shares his feelings, even though he has as much frustration as he has a concrete plan. But the reason he knows the approach can be more coherent is because he looks around and sees the other side, Team Europe, with some undeniably successful strategies.
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One of the biggest differences between Ryder Cup teams is the structures that support them. On the American side, there is the PGA of America, whose mission is to increase interest and participation in golf through America’s vast network of golf professionals.
On the European side, there’s the DP World Tour, formerly known as the European Tour, which caters to professional golfers – decidedly, if confusingly, different from golf professionals – by hosting tournaments around the world. The DP World Tour organizes the Ryder Cup Europe twelve months a year, knowing that the latter’s success underpins the former’s financial solvency.
In other words, while the Ryder Cup is an integral part of the DP World Tour’s grand strategy, it is more of an important one-off event for the PGA of America. This makes it much easier for leading European golfers to completely put their individual desires (and/or differences of opinion) aside for a week or two. They’re playing for the Tour they grew up with, the one that helped launch their careers, and they can help their Tour by hosting and winning an entertaining Ryder Cup. (Their investment in the outcome is part of the reason Americans earn a stipend for playing in the Cup — while the Europeans don’t — not really apples-to-apples.)
The people who run Ryder Cup Europe are the same people who meet Rory McIlroy, Tommy Fleetwood and Viktor Hovland at virtually every non-American tournament they play throughout the year. The media communications staff who organize and moderate McIlroy’s press conferences at the Australian Open in December, for example, are the same staff he hugged just off the 18th green after his Ryder Cup matches in New York. The competition directors overseeing the tournament’s green speeds at the Dubai Desert Classic in January were there moments before his matches with Hovland, sharing updates on the putting green at Bethpage Black. I was lucky enough to be there for both of the above and chatted with David Garland, the Director of Tour Operations at the DPWT, in between Saturday sessions at Bethpage. He was messing around behind the scenes all Ryder Cup week, busy as ever, because that’s his job and he’s passionate about it.
But his compatriot across the pond? That’s probably Kerry Haigh, the Chief Competitions Officer of the PGA of America. Haigh’s course setups are popular with professionals, but he has fewer built-in opportunities to get to know them. He had organic contact with professionals twice a year (when possible), during the Ryder Cup plus the PGA Championship, a major with 156 players in the field. (The fact that 20 of them are club pros is another reminder that these governing bodies have different goals in mind. And for the record, that’s fine! It just creates a lot of synergy on the one hand and a built-in challenge on the other.)
If you look closely at the content released by Ryder Cup Europe, you’ll occasionally see Garland in the background, or eating with McIlroy or other players. The same can be said for Michael Gibbons, once content director for the DP World Tour, the man who originally came up with the idea of Francesco Molinari and Tommy Fleetwood sleeping together after the 2018 Ryder Cup. Gibbons can become obsessed with the details of the Ryder Cup on a more full-time schedule these days, helping to manifest anything that improves the winning trajectory for Team Europe. He will see players in Dubai and in England and Scotland, across the calendar, building the confidence and exposure that the PGA of America simply cannot create one week a year.
Is there the constant presence of the same people doing the same things staff the Europeans make more putts in crunch time? It’s difficult to quantify, making it one of golf’s great, unanswerable questions. But it’s at least a reasonable theory that continuity makes them more comfortable. You can also look into the gym, where the physios and people looking after Team Europe’s bodies during Ryder Cup week are the same people who travel around Europe all season in a big physio trailer. If Viktor Hovland’s neck bothers him, it’s the same people who will help him at Bethpage as he begins his 2026 calendar year in the United Arab Emirates. In terms of structure, this feels like an advantage.
This all brings us back to Thomas’s dream of a certified partnership between the governing bodies that work to launch our similar, but different versions of Team USA every two years. What he dreams of, even if he hasn’t said it directly, is very similar to what the Ryder Cup Europe has.
None of this would be such a big deal if the Americans won the event more often. But in response to each loss – now five of the last seven Cups – the search for answers has only become more urgent.
So…could there be some sort of partnership between the Presidents Cup – run by the PGA Tour, which interacts with pros like Thomas for more than twenty weeks a year – and the Ryder Cup that goes to the PGA of America?
You’d have to hope Thomas sends that request up the ladder.
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