If the U.S. Wants to Win This Ryder Cup, the Team Should Be 11 PGA Tour Players Plus Brooks Koepka
The U.S. Ryder Cup team should be 11 PGA Tour players and a single LIV tour golfer: Brooks Koepka. If captain Zach Johnson wants to tweak that ratio, then fine—choose 12 PGA Tour players and nobody from LIV.
This will strike some as unfair, needlessly political, or an attempt to discredit the quality of play on the LIV tour. Forget all that.
This is not about right and wrong. It’s about winning.
Have we learned anything about the Ryder Cup in the last few decades?
World rankings do not win Ryder Cups. World Golf Hall of Fame credentials don’t mean a whole lot.
This is what wins Ryder Cups, time and time and time again: Talented, tight teams that are completely committed to proving something together. The better players don’t necessarily win. The better team does. Two generations of evidence prove the point.
From 1995 to 2021, Americans won 66 majors. Europeans won 21.
But in that same span, Europe won nine Ryder Cups. The U.S. won three.
For most of that time, American stars wanted to play in the Ryder Cup—but Europe’s best lived for it. The Americans tried to win, but the Europeans needed to win, to show they were just as good as the U.S. players. Americans tried, with varying degrees of effort, to fit into their team. But Europeans felt empowered and protected by the team.
The best way to galvanize the American players—and they always need galvanizing—is to convince them they are making a statement on behalf of the PGA Tour: Whether the PIF deal goes through or not, they don’t need LIV. They are the best players in the world, period. (I do believe Johnson can add Koepka and still build that mission, for reasons I will explain.)
A mix of PGA Tour and LIV players would create problems that would far outweigh any potential upgrades in skill. Publicly, every American would probably get along. But do you want players who say the right things in press conferences, or players who wake up every day determined to show they and their teammates are the best golfers in the world?
Johnson will have plenty of talent no matter how he uses his six captain’s picks. (Scottie Scheffler, Wyndham Clark, Brian Harman, Patrick Cantlay, Xander Schauffele and Max Homa qualified automatically.) Johnson’s biggest challenge is putting together a team that can thrive at Marco Simone Golf and Country Club in Italy under the most nerve-rattling conditions in men’s golf. The U.S. has not won a Ryder Cup at a European course since 1993.
The golf world remains divided. The U.S. Ryder Cup team should not be.
The idea of golf as an individual sport is deeply ingrained in the game’s culture. That is why there was some blowback at this year’s Masters when Koepka’s caddie appeared to tell Gary Woodland’s caddie which club Koepka had just hit. The challenge of the game is that you have to figure it out yourself.
So it is easy to see the Ryder Cup scoreboard as a compilation of individual performances. But that’s not the case. Players lift each other, inspire each other, put each other in bad positions and get each other out of them. The top players in the world are all so good that a psychological edge on any given day can make the 80th-best player better than the eighth-best, and the Ryder Cup is all about psychology.
Suppose you were an inveterate gambler who was excited about the 2012 Ryder Cup and wanted to bet, say, $400,000 on the U.S. to win. It would seem like a smart play! The U.S. had a much deeper team. But Europe was not just playing for the Ryder Cup; it was playing for the team’s recently deceased godfather, Seve Ballesteros.
Yes, that stuff matters. In the Ryder Cup, Sergio Garcia is a better golfer than Tiger Woods and Ian Poulter is a better golfer than Phil Mickelson. Buddies Francisco Molinari and Tommy Fleetwood have won one major between them, but put them on a Ryder Cup tee together and they become Moliwood, a dominant force.
In 2004 and 2014, the Americans were a disjointed mess. In 2018, they arrived in France hung over, literally and figuratively, from Tiger Woods’s first PGA Tour win in five years. That team wasn’t emotionally ready for the Ryder Cup. Europe is always ready.
A cast of U.S. stars did romp in the last Ryder Cup, at Whistling Straits in 2022. But they did it because their resolve finally matched their talent. The pressure was on them after losing at Le Golf National in 2019, and they fully embraced it. The home crowd helped, too.
If Johnson wants to recreate that kind of team, he should not try to recreate the roster itself. Talent is easily replaceable. The mental state is more important. To understand why, look at two players from that team: Justin Thomas and Bryson DeChambeau.
Even the angriest and most irrational LIV-hater can see that DeChambeau has played better this year. Thomas has had a nightmarish year. DeChambeau shot a 58 to win a recent LIV event. Even if you think LIV is a silly no-pressure exhibition, do you really think this version of Thomas could shoot 58 in a silly, no-pressure exhibition? There is no way.
And yet: given the choice between the two in this Ryder Cup, I would need one eighth of a second to take Thomas, and yes, I do believe DeChambeau would time me with a stopwatch.
This is not breaking news, but DeChambeau can drive people nuts. We can argue about whether this is because DeChambeau is insufferable or just unusual, but that isn’t really the point. What matters is the effect on the team, and it’s not just his personality. His entire approach to golf is unlike everyone else’s.
Good luck to any American who tries to convince DeChambeau to take a conservative line off the tee. DeChambeau studies the game intensely, questioning every convention—and once he arrives at a belief, he clings to it stubbornly. That has worked for him, and it is what makes him such an interesting player. But it’s a tough approach to blend into a team.
DeChambeau is also a creature of routine who struggles with entropy of any kind. This is why he has never contended at the Masters, despite having the length and putting touch required to win it. Augusta National requires imagination, vision, feel and patience. It is a tough place for a player who wants to control everything.
DeChambeau was part of a Ryder Cup-winning team two years ago. But U.S. Captain Steve Stricker wisely sat DeChambeau for both of the foursomes sessions. That way, DeChambeau did not have to play anybody else’s ball, and nobody else had to play his. On that note: DeChambeau has been playing the very-low-spinning Titleist Pro V1x left dash ball this year. Only four other Tour players play that ball, and none are candidates for the team. Asking DeChambeau to switch balls before a big match is like asking a nervous groom to wing it with his vows—and asking another American to switch to accommodate a guy who sued the PGA Tour is a terrible idea. DeChambeau would likely sit during foursomes again.
Thomas, meanwhile, was the soul of that 2021 team. He loves the Ryder Cup in the way Garcia loves it, and players love playing with him. Picking Thomas over DeChambeau makes everybody else more likely to succeed.
Johnson does not have to pick Thomas; he has plenty of good options. But Johnson does need the best version of Jordan Spieth, and Thomas is the guy who is most likely to bring it out. He fires up teammates. He gets in opponents’ heads. He is, basically, the player who brings a European mindset to the American team. When the U.S. won at Whistling Straits, Thomas egged DeChambeau and his then-enemy Koepka into a Sunday-evening hug. He was the most likely to get them to do it. And speaking of Koepka …
Koepka nearly made the team on points, but two players passed him on the last weekend. He needs a captain’s pick. This is why I think he should get one.
First, his presence would also take a little of the pressure off his teammates. Leave Koepka home, and any captain’s pick will face questions about why he was chosen over Koepka. Put Koepka on the team, and that conversation changes.
Zach Johnson's mission is to build a Ryder Cup team that can win, and the best possible one would include Brooks Koepka.
Kyle Terada/USA TODAY Sports
Remember: Johnson’s mission as captain is to win the Ryder Cup, not to destroy LIV. If he leaves Koepka off the team, it would seem like he is more worried about the PGA Tour beating LIV than the U.S. beating Europe. But selecting Koepka would validate all of Johnson’s other choices. He can say: “Hey, I chose the 12 players I wanted on my team.” That confidence from the captain would help the Americans.
And then Johnson can elaborate by saying Koepka was the only LIV player who proved himself in a major. This would please Tour players, who like to believe majors are the only real tournaments that LIV golfers play—and it would please Koepka, who firmly believes that the majors are what separates him from his peers. In the argument about PGA Tour vs. LIV, Koepka is the exception that proves the Tour’s point.
Koepka would also fit in just fine on a team of 11 PGA Tour players. They know that while Koepka plays on LIV, he does not play for LIV. He doesn’t really wave that banner. He has not sued the PGA Tour or argued that LIV has a better product.
Koepka grabbed the cash when he was worried injuries would wreck his career. When he was asked in April if the decision would have been harder if he had been healthy, he said “honestly, yeah, probably, if I'm being completely honest. I think it would have been.” The next month, Koepka won the PGA, and somebody asked him if the win validated LIV. Koepka’s reply: “I definitely think it helps LIV, but I'm more interested in my own self right now, to be honest with you.”
Koepka cares primarily about Koepka in ways that are transparent and low-maintenance. He doesn’t expect players to conform to him any more than he would conform to them. He hates slow play partly because it is the embodiment of what he can’t stand about golf: People who make everything more complicated than it is. Koepka makes a decision, swings, and lives with the result. He would not want to cause a problem in the locker room any more than he would want to hold up the group behind him.
Giving Koepka a captain’s pick would allow Johnson to say publicly that none of this is personal while quietly convincing his players that it is. It would give him credibility when he said he has the best 12 American players in the world, and his players would be emboldened to prove he does. To win in Europe, the U.S. must think like Europe. The best way to do that in 2023 is to stack the team with PGA Tour stars.