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The 46th Ryder Cup is 16 months away but one of the first orders of business for U.S. captain Jim Furyk is devising a new plan for determining the 12 players who will compete against Europe at Adare Manor in Ireland next September.
Furyk only recently was chosen to lead the U.S. team again after serving as captain in 2018 in Paris. On Wednesday at the PGA Championship at Aronimink Golf Club, the former U.S. Open champion noted that changes almost certainly will be made to the player qualifying process.
“Everything’s working off money. The purses are so out of whack,” Furyk said. “You know, when just the role of [money] in golf and the tour has changed so much the landscape in the last five years, and so we really need to take a look at kind of a fair assessment of how to identify some simulations.”
Paul Azinger changed the qualifying system in 2008 to award points based on earnings and abandoned the outdated structure in which points were accumulated for top-10 finishes. He also expanded wildcard picks from two to four players after Jack Nicklaus lobbied to add captains picks for the 1989 edition following the Americans’ first home loss in 1987 at Muirfield Village Golf Club. Nicklaus’ team was made up of the top 10 in points (via top-10 finishes) and winners of the U.S. Open and PGA Championship.
Azinger’s logic was simple when he altered the process, arguing that “only two things make guys choke—money and prestige.” Therefore, his automatic qualifiers had been playing well under pressure.”
Money is now a poor barometer for assessing clutch play. There is so much money in golf—71 players already have surpassed $1 million this year on the PGA Tour—and there is such a considerable disparity in purses among majors, signature events and other tournaments that a straight cash-to-points scheme seems, well, pointless.
In the past several Ryder Cup cycles, the majors from off years counted in team standings. That might still be the case, even though two of the year’s four majors will be completed by the end of this weekend. “I don’t think there’s any issue with a retroactive [system] because there’s already been a precedent set. We already done that in the past,” he said.
Furyk didn’t say how the points could be recalculated, again expressing his intent to have numbers crunched and simulations conducted. He added that he would retain six captains picks, which has been the number since the 2021 Ryder Cup.
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Main Image: Ben Jared
