Would you take the job as Ryder or Presidents Cup Captain?

Written by Mel Sole on September 21, 2015. Posted in PGA Tour

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Why in the world would anyone want this thankless job?

But, every two years, there are former PGA Tour players (who I always thought were pretty smart) lobbying for the worst job in all of sports. If your team loses, you were a terrible Captain who made poor tactical decisions, made the wrong pairings, or made the wrong Captain’s picks. If your team wins, they all played great, congratulations!

No thanks, Just stay at home, watch it on TV and criticize whoever was stupid enough to take this job!

Cameron Morfit of GOLF.com certainly thinks the same way. Check out his take on the subject.

Pity poor Jay Haas, who will lead the Americans into battle at the Presidents Cup on Oct. 8–11 in South Korea. Maybe nobody told him the awful truth, that being the captain of a U.S. Ryder Cup or Presidents Cup team is the worst job in sports this side of mixed martial arts mop man.

David Graham, a genuinely good guy who was just inducted into the Hall of Fame, had is captaincy of his International team taken away before a shot was even hit at the 1996 Presidents Cup, the result of a team mutiny that left everyone looking and feeling awful. At Oakland Hills in 2004 we made fun of Hal Sutton’s cowboy hat and ripped his disastrous decision to pair Tiger and Phil (0-2-0) as Bernhard Langer’s European team cruised.

Nick Faldo took arrows in 2008, when a ragtag group of Americans (no Tiger!) led by Paul Azinger stormed to victory at Valhalla. And at the 2014 Ryder Cup at Gleneagles, Scotland, another player-insurrection (and odd decision-making) tarnished Tom Watson’s legacy.

Those are just a few of the lowlights.

Now we get Haas’s hotly talked about captain’s pick of Phil Mickelson as one of two wild cards to round out the 12-man roster when the Americans journey to Jack Nicklaus G.C. Korea in Incheon City. (Jay’s son Bill was the other pick — you’d better believe Jay gave a little extra thought to that one.)

Bill Haas made sense; at 11th on the points list he was next in line to make the team on merit after the 10 automatic qualifiers. But Mickelson? The critics howled. The guy who was 30th on the points list? Who hasn’t won a tournament in more than two years, is 45, is 182nd in greens in regulation, and did little more than make the cut at the Barclays and the Deutsche Bank Championship? Wouldn’t it have made sense to take a guy who represents the future (Billy Horschel, Brooks Koepka) and not the past?

Here’s the thing, though: Poor Haas couldn’t not pick Mickelson. For one thing, Haas says his players and vice captains lobbied for Lefty. But even if they hadn’t, how long do you think these guys have known each other? Two decades? How long do you think Haas has known Koepka? Two months? Call it the better the devil you know than the devil you don’t know bias, or the friendship conundrum. Whatever you call it, it’s just one reason why captains are set up to fail, in this case erring on the side of age and experience (or decrepitude, depending on how the pick performs).