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There's nothing like foursome golf in the Ryder Cup.
The four matches that comprised yesterday's opening foursome (or alternate-shot) games proved the best players often hit unusually strange shots when playing this format. (The singular “foursome” is the right word, by the way.)
The freak-shot show started early.
Padraig Harrington, this year's British Open and PGA Championship winner, slapped a 6-iron 25 yards right of the green and into a hazard on the par-three third hole at the Valhalla Golf Club in Louisville, Ky. His fellow European team members Paul Casey and Henrik Stenson rinsed shots on the par-five seventh hole in their match against Justin Leonard and Hunter Mahan.
The carnage continued. Stewart Cink whipped a shot into the water on the seventh, and later pushed an approach from the 15th fairway into a hazard as he and partner Chad Campbell lost the hole to Ian Poulter and Justin Rose. Campbell and Cink won the match on the last hole as the United States took three out of a possible four points in the opening session.
Throughout, much of the golf was wretched and weird. What was going on?
Foursome golf, that's what.
“This has been an absolute mess by a lot of teams,” NBC analyst Andy North said as the ragged golf proceeded.
Hardly anybody plays foursome golf any more, yet the format represents the game's original type of competition.
The Muirfield Golf Club in Gullane, Scotland – its formal name is The Honourable Company of Edinburgh Golfers – was founded in 1744, and is considered the home of foursome golf. (That's why the format is sometimes called the Scotch foursome.)
Alternate-shot is the most entertaining form of team golf because two players use one ball.
Cink got to the heart of it when he said he prefers to control all the shots. Players also would prefer to play the ball they normally use, which adds to the machinations that go into foursome golf. Modern golf balls vary in launch angles and spin rates, to cite a couple of factors.
U.S. team member Phil Mickelson believes he has solved what can be a complex matter.
“What we do in alternate-shot is, I tee off with [his partner's] ball and they tee off with my ball because we can switch balls each hole,” Mickelson said yesterday morning, before he and Anthony Kim took on Harrington and Robert Karlsson.
“So it really doesn't become much of a factor, because off the tee it's not going to make too much of a difference. It's the distance control and how [the ball] comes off the irons and the trajectory and so forth. And we will be hitting our own balls with our iron approach shots. I just don't think it will be a factor.”
But there are emotional factors. Foursome golf is so rare it can be considered an eccentricity. Players look out of their element. How to behave?
“When playing a foursome, do not remind your partner about his bad shots until the game is over,” the British writer Horace Hutchinson, an accomplished amateur, advised well over a century ago. “You may rest assured that he did not foozle the ball on purpose.”
There were plenty of foozles yesterday.
Harrington topped his team's second shot from a fairway bunker on the par-five 18th hole when he and Karlsson were even against Mickelson and Kim, who barely got out of a greenside bunker there.
Mickelson was left with a sharply uphill short pitch shot. Uncharacteristically, he left the shot five feet shy of the hole but Kim saved the half-point when he holed the putt to tie the match.
Meanwhile, Europe's Sergio Garcia dumped a shot into the water on the 15th hole. North called it a “cold skull.”
Local favourite Kenny Perry drove into the water on the last hole when he and Jim Furyk were a hole up on Garcia and Lee Westwood; the Europeans escaped with a half. Westwood and Furyk would have been justified in wanting to throttle their partners.
“An anxious player never makes a good foursome partner,” Hutchinson wrote. “He only irritates both himself and his partner and irritation is fatal to a successful combination.”
Much of the play by the end resembled what Sir Walter Simpson in his 1887 classic book The Art of Golf called “Duffers' Foursomes.” These are “matches in which the real flukes are the clean-hit shots and the winning side that which has the luck to make the greatest number of these.”
The best thing about fearsome foursome golf?
The combatants get to do it all over again this morning, and we get to watch.
