“I'm happy for Scottie (Scheffler) that he was able to hang on until the end,” U.S. Presidents Cup captain Jim Furyk joked Monday.
Scheffler, the world No. 1 and the favorite to win this year's PGA Tour Most Valuable Player award, earned his spot on the U.S. team months ago. But Furyk knows waiting for the automatic qualification to finish was the easy part. On Sunday, the top six U.S. points players earned a spot on his team. Now comes the hard part.
“It feels like it's been such a long time to prepare, but once (automatic qualifying) is over, it all happens so quickly,” Furyk told GolfChannel.com. “I've learned how quickly those last couple of weeks have gone by (as captain of the 2018 U.S. Ryder Cup team).”
These are the six players who qualified to play on the U.S. and International Presidents Cup teams.
Furyk said many lessons learned from the U.S.' loss in the 2018 Ryder Cup will inform his role as Presidents Cup captain, including the type of course the U.S. will play at Royal Montreal, where he took a course-viewing trip with his family about a month ago and expects “thick rough and narrow fairways.”
It was a similar situation at Le Golf National in 2018, where the course is known for its thick rough and narrow fairways that severely blunted the U.S. team's power advantage, and Furyk will be keeping those lessons in mind as he prepares to announce his six captain's selections next Tuesday.
“One of the things I saw going into 2018 was we have a lot of golf courses for heavy hitters, so we went to Jersey and played Ridgewood, and of the top 15, one guy was a short straight hitter and the rest were heavy hitters (on the leaderboard),” Furyk recalled. “We knew we were going to Le Golf National and it was going to be a very tough setup, so we knew the course we were going to play was pretty open.”
This time around, the top U.S. players are facing tougher tests in the playoffs, from the postseason opener at TPC Southwind, to last week at Castle Pines (won by Keegan Bradley, who was ninth this week in fairways hit), to this week's finale at East Lake, which has been redesigned and should make tee shots even tougher.
Furyk plans to visit East Lake on Tuesday to meet with players and said he estimates there are 10 to 12 players in the running for the six captaincy picks, including last week's winner Bradley.
“It's great to see him step up. He was around 18th in the rankings and has picked up steam,” Furyk said of next year's U.S. Ryder Cup captain, who has risen to 10th on the final Presidents Cup points list.
In addition to Schaeffler, Xander Schauffele, Collin Morikawa, Wyndham Clark, Patrick Cantlay and Sahith Teegala were automatically selected to this year's U.S. Presidents Cup team. The next six players on the final points list were Sam Burns, Tony Finau, Russell Henley, Bradley, Brian Harman and Max Homa.
