Nick Price: Presidents Cup Format Change Exciting
Nick Price, International team captain, was one of leading proponents of making a format change in the Presidents Cup. He thinks the excitement of the finish in Korea proved the latest format tweaks are a big improvement, even though the International team did not win.
“This is what The Presidents Cup needed. There’s no doubt,” he said to NBC after the final putt dropped. He said the closeness of the contest reminded him of something Seve Ballesteros said about Ryder Cup before Europeans began their dominance in that event.
“I remember when Seve lost the Ryder Cup, and he went in the locker room, I think it was in’81 or ’83, all the guys were down,” Price said. “And he said, no, this is only one point we lost by. This, we should be excited about. And I think that’s where we, the International team, and the Presidents Cup is right now.”
Adam Scott agreed.
“We all sit up here, and we haven’t won, but we feel maybe a little bit like Seve felt talking to that European team; that we are much closer ( to victory),” Scott said, adding that the request for format change was favored not just by Nick Price.
“There’s no doubt this team was much more invested in this event than any team I’ve ever been on before, and that’s thanks to Nick Price and the assistant captains kind of getting us together over the past 12 months or so to make some positive changes to this event, which I obviously felt was necessary,” Scott revealed. “I think they made the right decisions, and the proof was in the pudding today with how it all panned out.”
Realistically, the International Team did a lot with what they had. The Golf Channel pointed out the disparity between the two teams with a graphic chart that explained it as follows:
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The average world ranking of the U.S. side was 14.5 while the average ranking of the Internationals was 33.5.
The U.S. players had five players in the top five in the world rankings while the Internationals had one.
The U.S. had all 12 players in the top 30, while the Internationals had five. Seven were ranked 31st or lower.
What all that means is that the golf quality of the U.S. team top to bottom was higher than the International squad. For the Internationals to come within a point of defeating the U.S. team means they had, as a team, an extraordinary performance.
Nick Price took a page out of the European Ryder Cup team philosophy of pairing countrymen. He put South Africans Louie Oosthuizen and Branden Grace together with success. Oosthuizen went 4-0-1, and Grace was 5-0-0.
“My last Presidents Cup, I was 0-4, so this was a pretty big step up in the right direction,” Grace, No. 22 in the world, said.
The Internationals didn’t get the best out of their best player, Jason Day. He went 0-4-1, which no one would have expected before play began.
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Price tried several combinations to no avail. Day paired with Steven Bowditch, Adam Scott, and finally, Charl Schwartzel to no avail. The PGA champ went 0-5-0. However, he is not the only top-ranked golfer to have a poor Presidents Cup. Ernie Els in 2000 and Phil Mickelson in 2003 went gone 0-5-0.
While it is easy to focus on the last few matches that included Sangmoon Bae and Anirban Lahiri, as Price noted, they were not necessarily what decided the outcome.
“You can’t look back at one shot on the 18th hole,” he told NBC. “That’s often what happens. You look back, there were mistakes made early on in today’s round and yesterday’s round and Thursday and Friday.”
And, if world No. 2, Jason Day, had won two of his five matches instead of going 0-4-1, the Internationals would have won the Presidents Cup.
Despite the loss, Price thinks the future is now brighter than ever for the International team.
“It was a nail-biter, and that’s what this has to be,” he said to NBC. “It has to be exciting. It has to create an energy and an interest, not only in the US, but globally. We’re going to have Chinese players on this team. We are going to have South Americans. We’re going to have a lot of players from all around the world, and we want those people to watch and enjoy this Presidents Cup.”
Next: Team USA Wins Presidents Cup in Dramatic Finish
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