There was a moment very early on that spelled trouble for the International team in Thursday’s disastrous opening session of the Presidents Cup at Royal Montreal Golf Club. It happened Wednesday afternoon when captain Mike Weir eschewed all logic and reason and decided to not lead off the opening four-ball session with a Canadian player, or, better yet, a duo from the Land of Maple.
Asked if he thought about leading off with one of his three fellow Canadians—you know, to get the Quebec crowd buzzing early—Weir offered some odd reasoning that “the matchups are the matchups” and then added, “We didn’t really just want to put out a Canadian just to do that.”
Let’s translate that logic into a hockey analogy: “We really didn’t want to clear the puck out of the zone to kill a power play just to do that.”
No, no, no. Some things in sport you absolutely do. You spike the football to stop the clock. You intentionally walk Aaron Judge. You do everything possible to get the home crowd frothing.
Weir had been saying for the better part of 18 months that the plan for this 15th Presidents Cup was to make the American team, the one with the dominant 12-1-1 record, more uncomfortable than they ever had felt before in a “road” match. The former Masters champion was hoping for something in the vicinity of hostile.
Then he didn’t pull the trigger on the one move that might have helped get his team off to the start they absolutely needed to have. At day’s end, the Americans seized the early momentum, the crowd never got into it and it’s not too soon to start thinking about pairings for 2026 at Medinah Country Club, near Chicago, after the U.S. whitewashed Weir’s charges, 5-0.
The sweep marked the fifth time that one team shut out the other in a session and the result each time has been the Americans wielding the brooms. The last time it happened also came at Royal Montreal in 2007. So much for hostile.
The U.S. has never lost when leading after the first day. So there’s that.
- It might seem like an oversimplification to suggest Weir erred in leading off with Jason Day and Byeong Hun An against Xander Schauffele and Tony Finau Thursday instead of, perhaps, Corey Conners, who was paired with the Internationals’ best player, Hideki Matsuyama, in the anchor match. But as Golf Channel analyst Paul McGinley noted during the broadcast coverage, that first match often can be psychologically crucial. The former Ryder Cup captain recalled how important it was for Collin Montgomerie and Padraig Harrington to take down Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson in the first match of the 2004 Ryder Cup at Oakland Hills. “It filtered down to the rest of us,” McGinley said.
