If you think Jim Furyk scored his first Ryder Cup title, you're missing the point

When Tiger Woods won the 2018 Tour championship… was it Jim Furyk's fault?

When the PGA Tour schedulers – years ago – played the Tour Championship before the 2018 Ryder Cup on another continent … was Furyk to blame?

When Bryson DeChambeau won two playoff tournaments and raced to the top of Golf Twitter's captain list … was it Furyk's fault that he chose DeChambeau, who couldn't find the right path in France?

And it was Furyk's fault that the 47-year-old who appointed the “army” of the Ryder Cup also set out to win that year – and the counter-argument was simply asking that 47-year-old (we're talking about Phil Mickelson) to be the veteran of your three rookies in the road game?

Oh, the things we choose to forget about the Ryder Cup from eight years ago!

And while we're at it … it was Jim Furyk who should thank you for having the courage to pair Jordan Spieth with Justin Thomas for the first time? The duo that (1) wanted to play together, and (2) Dominated their European opponents that year and in 2021?

Did Furyk find fame when he stared at the popular curtains and stuck to the numbers, choosing Data Golf's 4th ranked player in the world as the invisible captain's choice? That would be Tony Finau, a rare bright spot in the 2018 Ryder Cup and clearly a smart choice. But how many people remember it?

They only remember that Furyk the rest the captain's selectors could not reach the 16th hole during their week in the French countryside. They only remember that the Thomas-Spieth pairing ended Spieth's relationship with Patrick Reed and that angered Reed so much that the Band-Aid of being paired with his idol, Tiger Woods, disappointed Reed, a player who was notoriously selfish. Reed took New York Times that Sunday night and he rose and fell in Furyk's leadership. The management of the European team is praised for giving the players the opportunity to choose who they play with; Reed suddenly got into a frenzy when he couldn't find his part-time job.

The flurry of negative, ambiguous rhetoric following Furyk's selection as 2027 Ryder Cup captain was in many ways predictable. Especially since the man who was at the top in 2018 will have to continue to answer for the decisions he made at that time – decisions that, at the time, passed all tests. Remember that Shane Ryan of Golf DigestRyder Cup modern history expert, said Furyk did “everything he should” going into that week, and that Thomas Bjorn, on the other hand, deserved to be upset.

It would be easy to forget all of these things as time goes by, but know that Furyk hasn't. He made peace with this difficult result, and will definitely make a few changes to his approach ahead of next year's Cup. But if he does his dirty tricks in Ireland, will we be talking about Luke Donald's shampoo choices again?

The most important thing to remember about the Ryder Cup is that it is usually a collection of coins. Both teams are so loaded with talent that there will be narrow wins and blowouts on both sides. There will be a 40 foot winning hole and a 4 foot losing hole … on either side. Yes, Dodo Molinari will tilt the course setup in Europe's favor, but we are talking about very small gains there. The truth is, if you flip a coin hundreds of times, you get the same result. If you flip the coin only a few times, you can combine many tangible results, which causes storytellers – in both groups and within the media center – to focus on intangibles, like shampoo.

Donald deftly navigated the Ryder Cup captaincy for the second time in Bethpage last fall, and reaped all the storytelling rewards afterward, including his decisions to change the shampoo and sheets in his team's hotel rooms. Are you smart? Maniacal? Somewhere in between? In any case, hair care products are what we have come up with in some way as a tool to tell the story of the 2025 Cup.

More than that we are talking 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 is dangerously close to the coin. (The European assistant captain even said so!) The scoreboard was red, the momentum was leaning toward the United States, and the coin flip in the center of the game was a coin toss. everything. On the merits of Keegan Bradley's pumping speeches. (Perhaps they were smart?) At the height of the home crowd. (Maybe US fans have just if Henley putt goes down, we'd better not spend Sunday night hearing how Donald understands string counting and how light from the hallway can penetrate a dark room under a door frame.

Anyone willing to call the 2025 Ryder Cup “close” will have to admit that Furyk's 2018 team actually trailed by just one point Sunday afternoon, when Finau (ahem, Furyk's captain-designate) beat Tommy Fleetwood (now considered the all-time Ryder Cupper.) Dustin Johnson did the same. Jordan Spieth was dogged by Thorbjorn Olesen and the result got out of hand because of the last eight games. The result The NY Times the bomb was made more possible because Reed himself beat the Ryder Cup rookie. But it's good to remember that a captain's legacy can be decided on all those coin-flip points on Sunday afternoon. The captain's decisions are many, whether on the roster or on the hotel rooms selected, and they happen in months, not hours. They are made with a wealth of data and instinct. Then the 12 best players in the world behave like they are 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 top 12 players in the world were on his team. Furyk struck out six of those eight morning four balls and do you remember what happened? They built a 3-1 lead. How it all went down had a lot to do with those players, but we never seem to talk about that.

In part, because Furyk took all the blame.