If you think Jim Furyk blew his first Ryder Cup captaincy, you're missing the plot

It can be easy to forget all this stuff as time passes, but know that Furyk hasn’t. He’s made peace with that difficult result, and will surely make a handful of changes to his approach before next year’s Cup, too. But if he gets his tactics wrong in Ireland, will we be talking about Luke Donald’s shampoo choices again?

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Ryder Cup captain Jim Furyk, wearing a red, white, and blue jacket and cap, smiles and points while standing on a golf course near a PGA sign, with spectators and trees in the background.

The most important thing to remember about the Ryder Cup is that it is often simply a collection of coin-flips. The two teams are so stacked with talent that there will be both narrow wins and blow-outs on both sides. There will be 40-footers that win holes and missed 4-footers that lose holes … on both sides. Yes, Dodo Molinari will tilt the course setup in Europe’s favor, but we’re talking about the tiniest of advantages gained there. Truth is, when you flip a coin hundreds of times, you get a normalized result. When you flip a coin only a couple dozen times, you can aggregate a wide berth of plausible results, which causes the storytellers — from both teams and within the media center as well — to focus on the intangibles, like shampoo.

Donald brilliantly navigated the Ryder Cup captaincy for a second time at Bethpage last fall, and reaped all the storytelling rewards in the aftermath, inclusive of his decisions to swap out the shampoo and the sheets in his team’s hotel rooms. Brilliant? Maniacal? Somewhere in between? Whatever the case, hair-care products are what we’ve somehow landed on as a history-telling device for the 2025 Cup.

Much more than we talk about Russell Henley.

If Henley had knocked in his birdie putt on the 18th hole of his singles match at Bethpage Black, the 2025 Ryder Cup gets dangerously close to a coin-flip. (A European assistant captain even said so!) The leaderboard was red, the momentum was leaning in the United States’ direction, and a coin-flip on the totality of the match becomes a coin-flip on everything. On the merits of Keegan Bradley’s pump-up speeches. (Maybe they were brilliant?) On the vulgarity of the home crowd. (Maybe the U.S. fans were just raucous enough?) If that Henley putt drops, it’s coin-flip odds that we don’t spend Sunday night hearing all about how Donald understands thread counts and how light from a hallway can enter a dark bedroom beneath a door frame.

Anyone willing to call the 2025 Ryder Cup “close” would have to acknowledge that Furyk’s 2018 team actually trailed by just one point mid-afternoon on Sunday, once Finau (ahem, Furyk’s captain’s pick) blanked Tommy Fleetwood (now considered an all-time Ryder Cupper) 6 and 4. Brooks Koepka sputtered away a half-point. Dustin Johnson did the same. Jordan Spieth got dog-walked by Thorbjorn Olesen and the end result got out of hand thanks to the final eight matches. The resulting NY Times bombshell was made all the more possible because Reed himself beat up on a Ryder Cup rookie. But it’s all worth remembering that a captain’s legacy can be decided in all those coin-flip points on a Sunday afternoon. Captains’ decisions are multitudinous, be they in lineups made or hotel rooms chosen, and they take place over months, not hours. They are made with a wealth of data and instincts. And then 12 of the best players in the world have to behave like they’re one of the 12 best players in the world.

When Furyk woke up that Friday morning outside Paris, the scoreboard read 0-0, and eight of the 12 best players in the world were on his team. Furyk trotted out a six of those eight in morning fourballs and do you remember what happened? They built a 3-1 lead. That it all came crashing down had a lot to do with those players, but we never seem to talk about that.

In part, because Furyk shouldered all the blame.

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