He’s long. He’s loud. He says he’s going to bring a “tsunami” of people with him to Bethpage Black. Bryson DeChambeau will be a force in the Ryder Cup when the competition kicks off in about four weeks, but for the U.S. team room’s resident YouTuber and long-drive competitor to be fully maximized as the asset he is, he must be paired with the right partner.
Friday and Saturday, Bryson cannot just Bryson. He must do it while remaining in sync with another member of the U.S. team, and vice versa. So now that the automatic qualifiers are set and Keegan Bradley’s picks are official, it’s time to sit down and muse: Whom is DeChambeau going to play with in Long Island?
Let’s first rewind to France and 2018 — in a Ryder Cup at which the Americans got pummeled by the Europeans, DeChambeau made his first team and played foursomes with Phil Mickelson and Tiger Woods. Both matches were lost, 5 and 4. The question wouldn’t be addressed until later, but it was apparent: Was DeChambeau really the type of player fit for alternate shot? Onward to Wisconsin. DeChambeau was older, in his bulking stage, and brought an energy to the cup that wasn’t necessarily everyone’s cup of tea — that was no secret. So, captain Steve Stricker paired him with the new kid on the block: Scottie Scheffler. Playing their own balls in fourball, DeChambeau and Scheffler tied their first match against Jon Rahm and Tyrrell Hatton and won their second match against Tommy Fleetwood and Viktor Hovland, 3 and 1.
Davis Love III, a vice captain for both teams, said DeChambeau and Scheffler were paired together based on the analytics and the need for a strong four-team lineup in each session of the cup. That data-driven approach was spurred on initially by Paris captain Jim Furyk, who also served as an assistant in Wisconsin.
“The Europeans were ahead of us on the analytics,” Love says.
Now we’re on to something.
At Whistling Straits, DeChambeau could blast drives around the property, and Scheffler could stay in the fairway and fire at pins when necessary. This was a different Scheffler — he had not yet won on the PGA Tour — and might not have had a choice in the matter: “I knew what I was getting into,” Scheffler said at the time. “It’s not like I expected to go out there and be the bomber. We had a great game plan for today, and we knew exactly what we were going to do.”
Bryson DeChambeau, left, and Scottie Scheffler had success together in 2021, but does that make it work four years later? (Richard Heathcote / Getty Images)
Fast forward to 2025: Scheffler is the best player in the world, and DeChambeau is one of the few who can rival him. DeChambeau is now playing on LIV and appearing four times a year in the majors to challenge the PGA Tour’s best. Scheffler is an established leader in the U.S. team room, a development that was born first in Rome, where DeChambeau did not make the squad, and subsequently in Montreal, at last year’s Presidents Cup. Now, a Scheffler-DeChambeau pairing would be something much, much different: It would constitute a “super pairing.” The U.S. team tried pairing its best players together with Woods and Mickelson in the early 2000s, and it was largely deemed a failure, for various reasons. It also once experimented with throwing the aggressive, long hitters together in Brooks Koepka and Dustin Johnson, but that pairing quickly dissipated, too. Generally, the “super-pairing” is ill-advised, especially in the era of advanced statistics, and Scheffler has two practically predetermined pairing options from more recent team competitions in Russell Henley and Sam Burns.
“It took the analytics guys to explain to us why we shouldn’t keep trying to put Brooks and Dustin together. It’s because they birdied the same holes! It’s so simple, but we couldn’t figure it out,” Love says.
So who works with DeChambeau’s profile? If there’s a way to mirror the Scheffler-DeChambeau dynamic in 2021, it might be by selecting Ryder Cup rookie Ben Griffin to step up and play in fourball with LIV’s biggest star. Griffin is a shorter hitter than DeChambeau, but his ball-striking and putting — both of which rank in the top 30 on the PGA Tour — should allow him to ham-and-egg with DeChambeau well. Griffin might not be on DeChambeau’s internet-popularity level just yet, but the UNC product also has a social media presence, so perhaps there’s a personality fit there, too. Knowing the emphasis the U.S. team places on statistical compatibility, but with the added confirmation of character compatibility, Griffin could have been selected specifically to play with DeChambeau.
“All of that was considered before those six guys got picked. There’s somebody in that group that is a great partner for Bryson,” Love says. “Bryson with somebody steady, or somebody who birdies something other than the drivable par-4s and the short par-5s, is a good partner.”
Fourball is one thing — alternate shot, or foursomes, is another. In that format, a different potential partner for DeChambeau emerges, as the golf ball you play becomes a huge factor. According to Brad Faxon, a two-time U.S. team member and current member of the NBC broadcast team, it’s a highly valued factor. There are always rotating pieces of equipment in play for DeChambeau, but right now his ball is the Titleist Pro V1x Double Dot, the same model Cameron Young used when he won his maiden PGA Tour event, the Wyndham Championship. Griffin is the only PGA Tour player using a Maxfli ball.
But do you risk DeChambeau’s volatility in the hope he catches fire with another Ryder Cup rookie in Young, a player whose demeanor couldn’t be less akin to DeChambeau’s? The reward could be massive: Early momentum, as foursomes are happening in the morning sessions, per the U.S. team’s preference, and you could have a potential new pairing on your hands for many cups to come.
“If I’m Keegan Bradley, I want Bryson out there in the first matches,” Faxon says. “As emotional as he is, there’s nobody that’s going to get U.S.A chants more than him. What if Bryson starts off first? What if he hits a shot and drives it on the green?
“The place would go nuts.”
(Top photo: Christian Petersen / Getty Images)
