First tee - especially this week - at Ryder Cup unlike anything else

SAINT-QUENTIN-EN-YVELINES, France – Profound transformations rarely have such a distinct tipping point, but the U.S. Ryder Cup team’s journey from perennial loser to heavy favorite can be traced to a single and seminal moment.

“When some dumb ass opened his mouth,” Phil Mickelson shrugged two years ago following the U.S. side’s victory at Hazeltine, its first in the matches since 2008.

That “dumb ass” was Mickelson who sat at the far end of the U.S. table during the team’s press postmortem following a particularly ugly loss to the Europeans in 2014 at Gleneagles in Scotland.

Four years later it’s impossible to overstate how awkward that moment was as Lefty subtly dismantled the U.S. Ryder Cup leadership, from captain Tom Watson all the way to then-PGA of America president Ted Bishop. Nor is it possible to overstate the impact Mickelson’s words would have on the future of the matches.

From those dark moments in Scotland was born the U.S. Ryder Cup task force, which was as impactful as it was poorly named. There was no shortage of issues the players had with the Ryder Cup process, but what emerged from that housecleaning could most easily be defined as ownership.

“I don’t think we can give [PGA of America CEO and then-president, respectively] Pete Bevacqua and Derek Sprague enough credit for what they did,” said Davis Love III, who would get his second turn as captain in ’16 as a result of those changes. “Task force was probably not a great term, but what they did was get everybody in the room. That’s hard to do for an organization like them, to give up some control.”

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Decisions involving the competition side of the Ryder Cup are now decided by a committee that includes three players and three PGA officials. It’s democracy in its purest form.

A continuity plan was put in place that would allow future captains to first learn the ropes as vice captains, like Jim Furyk in ’16 before getting his turn this week, and detailed blueprints were created for each match that wouldn’t leave players wondering who they would play with or what was expected of them.

The result was a six-point victory two years ago at Hazeltine and a renewed sense of hope in the U.S. team room, and that optimism has carried forward to this week at Le Golf National, where the American dozen are favorites despite not having won a Ryder Cup road game in 25 years.

But if 2016 was a proof of concept, this week in France is every bit the ultimate litmus test for the reinvented American playbook.

Furyk’s team certainly has the look of a group on a mission and begins the week as a good bet to keep the cup for good reason. The average world ranking for the American team is 11.17, compared to the European average of 19.07, and three of the last four events on the PGA Tour season were won by U.S. team members Tiger Woods and Bryson DeChambeau.

“We're playing against a brilliant U.S. team and we have massive respect for them. You know, on paper, they are better than us,” acknowledged Paul Casey, who is making his first start for the Europeans in a decade.

But then the U.S. regularly enters the week as paper lions and the Continent’s team room is riddled with the type of relatively nondescript players who biennially transform into giant killers at the matches.

Players like Francesco Molinari, who outplayed Woods when the two were paired together during the final round of The Open, and Tommy Fleetwood, a Ryder Cup rookie who appears poised to follow in the footsteps of Ryder Cup first-timers Thomas Pieters (4-1-0 in 2016) and Jamie Donaldson (3-1-0 in 2014).

As hard as Furyk and his vice captains try there’s no escaping the record book. In 1993, when the U.S. team last won a Ryder Cup in Europe, nearly a third of the current American team were newborns.

But the relative indifference and youth of the U.S. team may work in the American’s favor. Woods and Mickelson stand as the final vestiges of the team’s foreign futility, and they have both made 40-something look good this season.

“The rest of us are simply here and looking at this week as an opportunity for us to show that the golfers from the United States can beat the golfers from Europe, and we can do it over here,” Jordan Spieth said.

In 2016, then-captain Love posted a sign in the team locker room – ignore the noise. That has proven to be particularly difficult for the U.S. side this week. Although no one involved in the 2014 coup ever guaranteed success, the bar was set at Hazeltine. Everyone involved knows there will be no moral victories this time.

For some, even Mickelson, what transpired at Gleneagles is still complicated.

“When I talk about it openly and try to share insight, sometimes it comes across like I'm trying to take a shot at somebody, and I don't want to do that,” Mickelson said. “The bottom line is going to be preparation. When we can eliminate the variables, eliminate the uncertainties, it eliminates the pressure.”

What the new process doesn’t do is eliminate responsibility. As difficult as the episode was for everyone involved, and it was difficult, the result is a renewed optimism, both inside and outside the team room.

As calculating as Mickelson can be, when he leaned into the microphone in ’14 it would have been difficult to imagine that in four years the U.S. team would find itself at such a profound crossroads.

“I think we ended up in a much better place. It was hard for [Tom] Watson and Phil [Mickelson], but that was 20 years of frustration spilling over,” Love said.

As encouraging as the U.S. team’s victory at Medinah was the true test of the reimagined American Ryder Cup team was always going to be Paris and a road record that’s been hanging over their heads for two generations.

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