Presidents Cup: Tiger Woods plus nobody equals a Day One disaster

The underdog Internationals roll to a 4-1 lead in the first-day action at the Presidents Cup Best Ball competition Thursday at Royal Melbourne.

The smart money made the U.S. team an overwhelming favorite in this week’s Presidents Cup. If the U.S. team ever shows up, that may eventually turn out to be deserved.

During Thursday’s first day of play, however, Playing Captain Tiger Woods pretty much took on the International Team all by himself. Tiger was brilliant. Pairing with Justin Thomas in the opening match, he won six holes – all of them with birdies – in defeating Marc Leishman and Joaquin Niemann 4 and 3.

Had the day’s competition ended right there, it would have been okay with the Yanks. The remaining four best-ball matches all went to the internationals, giving them a 4-1 lead in points after the first day.

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It was not a result that seemed likely at the day’s beginning. Based on 2019 Strokes Gained averages, the U.S. pairings held advantages ranging between one-half stroke and two strokes in four of the day’s five matches. Statistically, the International team had the upper hand only in the pairing of Adam Scott and Byeong An vs. Americans Tony Finau and Bryson DeChambeau.

Simply put, the problem was that some of America’s best didn’t play like America’s best. The team of U.S. Open champion Gary Woodland and world No. 5 Dustin Johnson played particularly lackadaisically. Pitted against Louis Oosthuizen and Abraham Ancer, Woodland birdied only one hole all day – the last one he played. Johnson did a bit better, but only managed to win one hole, that being the par 4 eighth with a birdie.

By that point in their match, Oosthuizen had already won four holes by himself. He and Ancer dismissed Woodland and Johnson 4 and 3. Ancer, one of seven Presidents Cup first-timers on the International roster, made five birdies, a total that was matched by Matsuyama.

On the remaining three U.S. teams, no player won more than two holes all day. The team of Patrick Cantlay and Xander Schauffele played as listlessly as Woodland and Johnson, winning only two holes in their match with Sungjae Im and Adam Hadwin.

Those two wins, on the sixth and seventh holes, briefly thrust Cantlay and Schauffele into a 1-up position. But they combined for only two birdies the rest of the way, both by Cantlay and neither winning a hole.

Meanwhile, Im squared the match with a par at the ninth hole, then Hadwin put his team in front with another par at 16 when the Americans managed nothing better than Schauffele’s bogey. It was the last of five holes lost by a U.S. team to a par Wednesday.

Finau, the only American aside from Woods who played up to his press clippings, did record six birdies – along with one bogey. The problem was that four of those birdies only served to offset birdies by Scott or An.

Obviously a best-ball match play competition can’t be scored like a standard medal play event. One way to gauge the relative performances of the players in these types of team events is to assign points based on hole outcomes: two points when a player’s performance results in a win and one point for a halve. Based on that system, here were the eight best performances at Royal Melbourne Thursday:

Rank: Player (team) – Pts

1: Tiger Woods (USA) – 15

2: Sungjae Im (Int) – 14

T3: Adam Hadwin (Int) – 13

T3: Adam Scott (Int) – 13

T3: Hideki Matsuyama (Int) – 13

T3: Tony Finau (USA) – 13

7: Patrick Cantlay (USA) – 12

8: Louis Oosthuizen (Int) – 11

Tiger Woods is a great player, and he proved Wednesday that he deserves to be on the team. But if the U.S. doesn’t get better performances than that from the rest of its roster when the event moves to alternate shot format Thursday, the 2019 Presidents Cup could be effectively decided before the weekend is very far along.