Once again, no moral victories

Ok, it wasn’t as bad as we thought it might be as we knew our big guns weren’t at the top of their game, and as bad as it looked at the end of the second day of match play, on paper it may have come down to one or two puts that could have swayed a match that was halved which would have turned a 1 point loss into a 1 point win, but at the end of the day no one remembers who comes in second, even when there are only two sides competing. There were some positives as Tiger not only showed up but would have been in the running for MVP (2-1 in teams and 1-0 in singles) so one can’t fault Pavin for his captian’s choice. However there were some disappointments as the Phil Mickelson/Dustin Johnson duo lost both the Session One Four-ball and Session 2 Foursomes matches where when putting together the starting lineup on the flight over Pavin had to pencil halving the combination of those two matches rather than losing 2 full points. For all of the talk about how the top-five ranked players would do somewhere lost in the rhetoric was the concept that this is a team competition and if you have a weak link it will surely be exposed and that couldn’t have been more the case as Stweart Cink and Matt Kuchar failed to tally a point in either team or individual play which was the difference in the end. So much like the Men’s Basketball program perhaps it’s time to assess some ownership, and although they’re not getting paid directly for their time, re-create the importance of what it means to represent the US, and bring back a little Payne Stewart enthusiasm. Let’s tear down the engine and build it up again from scratch so we can get the program back to some consistency, because it still means more to them than it does to us, and close should not be good enough. Let us know your thoughts on the overall performance of the US Ryder Cup team here and in any of the quick links.