Secret Envelopes, Unruly Fans, Europe Domination: Unpacking the 2025 Ryder Cup

Secret Envelopes, Unruly Fans, Europe Domination: Unpacking the 2025 Ryder Cup

Wonder [Applause] if you want to go stand up. [Applause] Sean, the champagne is still flowing. Just a couple hundred yards away. Uh, but it’s for the European side. What a week at the RDER Cup. Thank you all very much for joining us for a very special golf subpar here at Tsquare. I want to talk about the the setup a little bit because they should take the warning sign down and put welcome. I’m here in the heart of Manhattan at RDER Cup Live in Rockefeller Center. We’re going to the Swag Popup. Come with me to check it out. Hi everyone. We have 30 minutes in between the morning and afternoon waves here at the RDER Cup. What better place to go than T-Mobile’s Club Magenta? Uh, how we doing? We enjoy ourselves this morning. [Applause] I thought today somehow the US came back and made this place feel like other sports. Golf does not feel like other sports. Often I felt like I was in the middle of some sort of thunderdome out there following JT, following Cam Young, following Bryson and something was building and then something crashed down. But people were cheering for, people were cheering against. This felt kind of like college football e and golf isn’t like that. college football where guys are running hundreds of yards up and down hills, cheers are happening like a mile away from each other. There’s nothing quite like golf. There’s nothing quite like the RDER Cup. My takeaway is just that Europe feels like an immovable force in this event. They have the means, the infrastructure, the people in charge to just do a better job than the Americans. It felt very obvious last night. It felt ultimately true when we watched their press conference and Rory is rattling off the people in the back room, the wives, the an uh statisticians, the people literally deciding, you know what, I think we need better sheets on the hotel beds. I think we need different shampoo in these guys’ hair. That’s what Europe, those are the extent of details they look after to give them an edge. Does that help them put more points on the board? It of course it doesn’t, but they bring it up, so like maybe it does. Yeah, I think the little stuff is the big stuff, Sean. I think that that is the key to understanding the European team. Did Were they on the brink of an all-time collapse today? For sure. But the fact that they built up such a massive firewall of points early in the week meant that they were able to survive a a huge US run today. Two straight days, four straight sessions. They put this event kind of in jeopardy of mattering. Like, you got the NFL going on today. TV ratings were going to be horrible. It it felt like it could be over, you know, early in the afternoon and then the Americans built and built and built and built one at a time. JT said the most important match was the next match and it was really fun to be out there in the middle of it. To me, the biggest takeaway was just Rory Maroyy’s week. I mean, this was Rory Mroyy’s Rder Cup for four sessions. It was non-stop abuse of Rory from outside the ropes. It was, you know, a lot of stuff that was in good fun and went up to the line and a lot of stuff that just busted right across that line and he kind of had to go through the fire to come out the other side to do it. Not even today. He said, you know, he and Scotty both were kind of exhausted. They had a bit of a pillow fight. He ended up losing on 18. Um, but I found his answer afterwards actually really kind of moving. you know, he and Erica have gone through public ups and downs and she was the target of plenty of abuse from the fans this week. And I guess Rory’s answer and then Justin Rose’s answer and Shane Lowry’s answer. Um, I thought that was a touching moment. This has just been a dream week. And, you know, it obviously was really tight there at the end. It was a bit stressful, but the big lad hitting one right to to Luke, made a played an unbelievable last four holes and uh he carried me through the afternoon yesterday as well. Absolute legend along with everyone else sitting up here and um just so happy that uh we could we could get it done. We leave. Jo, you got any more? How do you pick and choose when to interact? Yesterday on 16 in the afternoon, I heard some guy who was like, “Roy, you’re not that good.” And you said, “I’m really effing good.” So, I am. I know you are really good. I know. But when do you pick and choose when to interact with the fans? Obviously, there’s playful. Um, honestly, I I’d say it’s just on impulse. Sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t. Um, I’m quite an impulsive character, if you haven’t noticed. Um, and uh, sometimes I’ll I’ll engage and sometimes I’ll catch myself and and refrain, but I don’t I don’t really choose when and and it’s just it’s sort of sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t. I mean, God, those final moments walking those holes was extremely memorable just for us. We’re obviously not invested in the competition in the same way, but it was so fitting that it was Shane Lowry to get that final point to, you know, to retain the cup to get them to 14. I mean, the way he did it to pour in a birdie on top of Russell Henley in front of a massive crowd after serving as kind of, you know, sidekick is the wrong word. Rory’s bouncer, Rory’s big brother, his enforcer, uh, the emotional heart and soul of this Rder Cup team. You talk about guys stating their intentions. I mean, Shane has made it clear just how much RDER Cups mean to him. You had the winning moment today. I guess I’m I’m wondering when you woke up this morning if you thought there was any chance that you would be the guy to finish it out and uh if you could just take us into that moment on 18. What was going through? Calm down. Yeah. Yeah. You you only retained it, Shane. Just calm down. They wanted us to ride our code by the way, but like it was bit of two po. Um to be honest, no. Like I I obviously I I have faith in my team to go out and I thought we were going to win the Rder Cup early today, but it’s not that we weren’t all going out to win our own match. That that’s was the main goal. And look, Luke, we were well prepped on that last night. Like you don’t want to take any complacency out there to that like arena against those players. Like the US team are 12 amazing players and we knew it was going to be very hard. But uh I didn’t envision myself going up the 18 needing a birdie to retain the RDER Cup. It was uh yeah like the worst two hours of my life. It was it was horrible. Um honestly it was it was uh but I said to my caddy walking down 18 I said I’ve got some I’ve got an opportunity to do the greatest thing I’ve ever done uh today. And I did it and I’m very proud of myself and He didn’t know he was going to be on this team. Shane has had a tricky year. He has struggled a lot. You You see his name on the world rankings and it’s going down and down and down and people were wondering just because you played well. Just because you’ve won a major doesn’t make you a shoe in. He didn’t find out till the night of Wentworth before the captain’s picks are made to say, “Yeah, okay, you’re actually on this squad.” And so it was been a Ryder Cup angsty year for him. And then it’s a Ryder Cup intense week for him when he’s Rory’s bodyguard. And then on Sunday he’s in the middle, he’s walking into the fairway of 18 and he tells his caddy, “I have the chance to do one of the coolest things in my entire life.” And then I did it. I appreciated Keegan’s accountability because he, you know, already has sort of owned up to, okay, I probably should have set up the golf course differently. We tried to set the course up uh to help our team. Obviously, it wasn’t the right decision. Um, you know, I think anytime you’re the leader of a team or you’re the captain or the coach or whatever, we talked about this last night, you have to take you’re going to get the accolades and you need to take the blame for when things don’t go well. Um, I definitely made a mistake on the course setup. Um, I should have listened a little bit more to my intuition and I I just I just we for whatever reason that wasn’t the right way to set the course up. We didn’t expect the greens to be this soft. They they were as soft as I’ve ever seen greens without it raining and then you know especially here um you know it can get pretty firm and they just they never firmed up. Uh he hasn’t really said anything about pairings. I think that there’s probably I mean we’ve got after a match that ended up this close there’s going to be two years of analysis. Um but yeah, I appreciated that he kind of took it on the chin and said, “Yeah, look, this one is all on me.” Because we haven’t always had that from American captains. I want to know how you’re doing because you were so in Keegan’s favor. You know, you’re from the same part of the country. You talked to him. You wrote a cover story about him. You were certainly nervous for how he was going to go about doing this. So, if you can try and pull your biases a little bit aside, how do you grade out his performance? Well, how about how about with bias for a second? Like there is something kind of deeply tragic about the way this all went down. Not only that, you know, not only that Keegan wanted to make this team more than anything and then was sort of made made captain, which was not necessarily the dream, but close to the dream. Then the fact that they just got drubbed for two days was really tough. Um, and then there’s even something kind of dark that it was the golf course that it feels like betrayed him. Like that was the thing that he probably messed up the most was, you know, they made this they they took the teeth out of Beth Page. They made the rough short. Uh, the greens were crazy soft, which seemed to kind of take them by surprise. Like even with all the rain, it seemed to be, you know, even today it hasn’t really rained much in a few days. And so it was just like the fact that Beth Paige Black betrayed Keegan. The fact that the the Rder Cup, the thing that he loves the most, really just doesn’t love him back. Luke Donald sat up there tonight and was asked, “Okay, would you take two more years of being a captain?” And he didn’t say no. He hasn’t said no. He might be there in Ireland. He might try to win a third straight Ryder Cup. So that is why this event is special. It keeps pushing us forward. If there’s one weird little controversy, the sort of thing that seems to happen every RDER Cup, there was a lot of chat today and and even on the US side as they were making this comeback about the envelope rule. Um there was chat after the after the round between the captains. All right, what is the envelope rule? It’s basically in place if one player on, you know, if a player on one team gets hurt, then the other side has basically agreed, look, our guy is going to sit out also. we don’t want this to come down to injury, you know, we’ll just call this a tie. We’ll move on with the rest of the match. This has been in place since the 1970s. They put it into play in the early ‘9s. It’s helped both teams. Um I did a little thing on it early in the week because mostly it’s this kind of little fun quirk of the RDER Cup. And if it was, you know, a close or tied match going to the last day, you probably say, “Okay, that’s a wash. Doesn’t really matter. We’ll let the rest of the guys decide it.” In this specific circumstance, this is where it would matter the most when one team desperately needs a giant comeback where every half point matters so much. And so, I mean, as it got closer and closer and closer, you’re saying, geez, this tie between this half point each to Harris English and Victor Havlin, could that be the difference in the entire cup? Um, it ended up 1513, right? If it’s 14 and a half, 13 and a half, then you can still say, look, this could have ended in a tie. If if English had beaten Havlin, whatever, after the round, each side made it clear. Keegan Bradley was clear, look, Europe maybe has the best captain ever, maybe the best team ever, but this rule, this rule should change. This is not this is not good sports. This is, you know, everyone knows how dumb this is. He said he has a bunch of ideas, I would imagine. You know, so Keegan Bradley wanted to either force Victor out into playing today or to just give a point to the Americans. And I just think that, hey, Keegan, there’s a thing called the captain’s contract. You signed it knowing that if Harris English broke his foot falling down the stairs that you were going to get that half point and it was going to hurt the Europeans. So like we signed up for this. It’s part of the deal. We did sign up for it. In every other sport, you know, if you get hurt in tennis, your opponent gets a pass the next round. If you get hurt in baseball, you’d bring in another guy. you know, you wouldn’t just kind of be like, “Yeah, let’s move on from that.” So, but yeah, we kind of we knew this rule before the the week. Are you asking for there to be a Ryder Cup alternate? I think there should be a Ryder Cup alternate. Hell yeah. We need more guys in uniforms out there. Anyway, Luke Donald and the rest of the European team kind of rolled their eyes at this idea that, you know, of like, okay, let’s not get into this right after a loss. I think they should probably change it going forward. Um, but by the time today rolled around, it was a little bit late. And for the record, we saw Victor Havland out on the golf course. He he looked injured. So, don’t don’t let the conspiracy theories run too wild. I mean, there will be a Dare Manner previews to come. Whether or not Luke Donald is there in a third consecutive captaincy, he said he’s going to enjoy tonight. We’re going to enjoy tonight, too, even if we don’t get invited to the victory party. [Music]

From the unruly fans at Bethpage to Europe’s historic victory, GOLF’s Dylan Dethier and Sean Zak break down the entire 2025 Ryder Cup.

Europe reclaimed the Ryder Cup Sunday at Bethpage Black, 15-13, despite a closing surge by the United States. But what does this mean for the future of the Ryder Cup? And did the envelope rule have a play in this win?

Dive in to unpack.
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