Now that we have almost 24 hours between us and the dramatic finale of the Presidents Cup this weekend, there are a few ways to look at what happened. On the positive side, for the Americans, their best players pulled through despite a three-point Saturday night deficit and staved off what would have been the first loss to the Internationals ever on home soil, and the first loss period since 1998.
On the downside? Well, it doesn’t look so great when you have the far superior team and still manage to flub the pairs sessions so badly. There’s no world in which the Americans should have given up 10½ points to the Internationals over the first four sessions, but that’s exactly what they did, and it had some unpleasant echoes to Bethpage. Once again, you had a captain who didn’t seem to have a grasp on pairs strategy, and once again there were unspeakably bad sessions when the Americans got blanked (Friday foursomes, a 5-0 International sweep, had to be a low point for the U.S. in these international competitions). Looked at a certain way, this is pretty dispiriting stuff.
But what if I told you that actually, this was just what the U.S. needed on both fronts? That the Sunday singles session re-affirms that they’re the best players on the planet and that no lead is safe, while the near disaster that came before will force Jim Furyk to really go deep on why his team keeps failing in pairs—and especially foursomes—ahead of next year’s Ryder Cup at Adare Manor.
I explored this idea in depth today, and I truly believe that the U.S. needed this exact positive and this exact negative to extract the most value from the Presidents Cup. Check out the link below, and maybe you too will feel a bit of optimism for America’s Ryder Cup future.
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Corey Conners' putting was really, really bad on Sunday. If you were watching the final day of the Presidents Cup—or any day, for that matter—you probably don't need to see any stats to know that putting is not Conners' strength. However, it was particularly bad at Medinah on Sunday as the Canadian lost the first four holes of his match with Justin Thomas before losing, 5 and 3. Here was a sampling.
Anyway, as of late Sunday afternoon, Data Golf had Conners at an insanely bad -4.62 strokes gained/putting, a full THREE shots worse than anyone else on the greens. Yikes.
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Matt Fitzpatrick’s winning season—he claimed a fourth victory of 2026 Sunday at the FedEx Open de France—can be tied to an array of skills and attributes. His special-edition Bettinardi DASS BB1 Flow putter, however, is part of the picture, too. Fitzpatrick first put the club in his bag in July around the Open Championship. This past week, he picked up nearly two strokes on the field and ranked fourth in strokes gained/putting at Le Golf National on his way to a three-shot triumph. Now, that putter’s unique design, which includes distinctive face grooves in a semi-circular pattern in the center of the face, is available as a special part of Bettinardi’s BB Series ($550).
The BB1 Fitz Flow features a thinner flange and a short flow-style neck design. It’s milled from 303 Stainless Steel with a 350-gram headweight. The face groove pattern was a team effort between Fitzpatrick and the Bettinardi design team, and evokes the shape, style and feel of the C-groove pattern of the Yes! putter that Fitzpatrick used earlier in his career. His latest version also includes a honeycomb pattern on the sole to keep the putter from slipping on slicker putter surfaces.
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Chad Coleman, hired with much fanfare as the LPGA’s chief marketing officer in January, has stepped down from the role less than one year into the job. According to a report from Sports Business Journal, the former chief brand officer at Dude Perfect is leaving the LPGA to spend more time with his family. Coleman was charged with leading global marketing, brand, communications, content and fan engagement. His focus was on accelerating audience growth, deepening relevance with younger fans and storytelling of LPGA players.
Storytelling and social media have gotten a boost in the last year, but TV ratings for the final day of this month’s Solheim Cup, one of the tour’s marquee events, were down nearly 40 percent from 2023, the previous time the event was played in Europe. According to SBJ, only 170,000 people watched on Golf Channel during Sunday singles, which was also fewer than the 179,000 people who watched Saturday, despite the fact that the match was deadlocked in an 8-8 tie entering the last session.
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