What happened to international men’s golf, and is it America’s fault?
Let’s begin with three sobering facts:
Fact 1: My colleague Jamie Kennedy, in preparation for our “50 Things that changed golf” podcast on the founding of the Presidents Cup, uncovered a stat from when the Cup debuted in 1994 about “international” golfers. International, in this case, means players who are eligible for the International team at the Presidents Cup, i.e. not American or European. At the start of that year, there were eight (!) international golfers in the top 20 of the World Ranking. There were seven Americans, and only three Europeans.
As we prepare for this week's Presidents Cup, 32 years later, there are nine Americans in the top 20, 10 Europeans … and one international golfer, Si Woo Kim.
Fact 2: During the Presidents Cup captain’s picks selection show on the Golf Channel, when International captain Geoff Ogilvy announced he was taking Christiaan Bezuidenhout with his final pick, the caption on the screen read, “two top-10s in PGA Tour events this year.” Those came in Puerto Rico and Myrtle Beach, both “additional events” held opposite signature events. Later, Golf Digest’s Joel Beall brought up the fact that even though he’s playing in the Presidents Cup, Bezuidenhout could lose his tour card.
Nothing against Bezuidenhout, a South African golfer I like and admire, but when someone with that résumé can make the team roster, all you can say is, “ooof.”
Fact 3: When Ryan Fox won the Open in July, he became only the sixth international golfer, with Cam Smith, Hideki Matsuyama, Jason Day, Adam Scott and Ernie Els, to win a major in the last 15 years. Compare that to the 1990s, when internationals won 10 majors, or the 2000s, when they claimed 13. In fact, that 20-year stretch from 1990 to 2010 looks in retrospect like a golden age.
And it was a golden age that launched the Presidents Cup. When the event began in 1994, the gamble inherent to the project was that international golf would continue to rise, and this golden age was the start of a movement. To men like Deane Beman and Tim Finchem who launched the event, it probably didn’t seem like much of a gamble at all. But the wave broke, and somewhere around 2012, it started to recede.
The modern, uncompetitive Presidents Cup can be seen as a symptom, or perhaps a casualty, of the broader phenomenon. The International team’s two best results, a victory and a tie, came in the midst of that 20-year golden age, in 1998 and 2003. Since then, they have come close twice while playing at home, but most results have been relative blowouts, and the team record is 0-10.
What happened? Why have the last 15 years, which should have seen a rise in the fortunes of international golfers, instead brought diminishing returns?
And could the problem be America itself?
The LIV Golf cop-out
To start, we have to mention LIV Golf, which is a convenient but ultimately inadequate explanation for a bigger problem. While that league sprang up in the middle of the international decline, not the start of it, it’s true that it took a much harsher bite out of the International team than the American team... whose relative depth made the loss of players like Bryson DeChambeau and Brooks Koepka less critical (or the European Ryder Cup team, which mostly lost older players). The Internationals forfeited a solid core of players including Smith, Joaquin Niemann, Carlos Ortiz, Abraham Ancer, Marc Leishman and Lucas Herbert. Without the depth to make up the gap, winning the 2022 or 2024 Presidents Cups became an act of wishful thinking.
If anything, though, attributing the decline to LIV is a cop-out, and disguises a trend that was already well established. Among the LIV defectors, only Smith truly can be called elite, and outside of him and the veteran Leishman, the others only accumulated five PGA Tour wins between them. Even the most promising of the young bunch, Niemann, has had a poor record in majors, and aside from a flukey run by Mito Pereira at the 2022 PGA Championship that ended in a late collapse, Latin America seems no closer to producing its next major champion after Angel Cabrera's Masters win in 2009.
You could say the same about men’s golf in Asia. Since Y.E. Yang’s breakthrough against Tiger that same year, only Japan’s Hideki Matsuyama has captured a major. And although South Korean players like Si Woo Kim, Tom Kim and Sungjae Im have forged nice careers on the PGA Tour, the lack of major victories or sustained runs into the top of the World Ranking stands in stark contrast to the state of affairs in the women’s game. Look at those World Rankings, and you'll see 11 Asian women in the top 20, along with a surplus of major wins.
