Starting Saturday, the 51st Walker Cup will kick off at Lahinch Golf Club in Ireland, and the home team, Great Britain & Ireland, will be trying to win for the first time since 2015. Earlier, our Jamie Kennedy explored whether the Irish course will give them the advantage they need, but now they seem to have a new ally: A stomach bug. According to Golf Channel's Brentley Romine, illness kept two American players from practicing on Thursday, Oklahoma State's Ethan Fang and Alabama's William Jennings. The U.S. captain, Nathan Smith, said they're "good to go," but then again, that's what you would say, isn't it? As Romine noted, this seems to be a common theme: a stomach bug hit 16 different players at the 2021 Walker Cup, requiring alternates to swap in, and some players had to visit the ER. And at the Rome Ryder Cup in 2023, members of the American team contracted a mysterious illness before enduring a thumping from Europe. Hopefully, for the sake of competition, everybody will be ready to play at Lahinch on Saturday, but now the Americans have a built-in excuse if things go wrong for the first time in a decade.
Folks, we don't mean to shock you out of your senses before the weekend, but a player on the PGA Tour just sprayed the hell out of his tee shot, it ended up in a pizza tent and—I hope you're sitting down—it was not Jordan Spieth. The player was Jacob Bridgeman, it happened on the 18th hole, and you can tell it wasn't Spieth because instead of playing the ball from under the counter and making a miracle par, Bridgeman took the drop and made bogey. He finished at 5 under, and sits at T-14 after 36 holes in Atlanta. You can watch the result in the tweet below, but first, I am contractually obligated to say the following: Now that's what I call a slice!
Earlier Tuesday morning, Brian Rolapp announced that starting in 2028, the Tour Championship would be contested as a 32-man, two-week match-play event. That's great news for the match-play fans, but when it came to the 16-person final weekend, it also sounded pretty familiar. That's because the central concept, of all 16 players playing all four match-play sessions, was something proposed on these very pages back in 2024 (skip to point 3). And, as you see below, we reprised it for a social video last summer (1:50 mark). The exact details of how it will work aren't yet 100 percent clear, but it seems likely that the format of the last four rounds is a clone. That just proves the tour has great taste. All we ask in return is that Golf Digest be named the title sponsor of the Tour Championship at no cost, and for me personally to be paid $1 million. That's fair, right?
Ten days ago, Europe announced its qualifying system for the 2027 Ryder Cup at Adare Manor, and as befits a team who piles on success after success, it looks basically the same as 2025 … and 2023. Today, U.S. captain Jim Furyk told Golfweek that America's system will be announced after this year's FedEx Cup playoffs, but that unlike the Europeans, big changes are afoot. There's not much information yet, but apparently the change will skew toward valuing events that take place in 2027, which means it could end up looking like the European system, which has always put far less emphasis (read: none) on off-year majors. The only American who won a major this year was Wyndham Clark, so in theory this is bad news for him. “It’s going to be the right way to identify the best six players in September 2027," Furyk said.
There are 70 players eligible to tee it up in this week's first FedExCup playoff event in Memphis, but one of them, Daniel Berger, has opted out. As you see in the tweet below, the official field at the FedEx St. Jude Classic includes just 69 players, and Berger's name is the only one missing. We don't know why he's skipping the event, but we know he hasn't played since the Open, and we know he's missed four of his last five cuts dating back to the Memorial. For playoff events, there is no alternate list—you either make the postseason or you don't—and nobody will take his place.
