After finishing up the BMW PGA Championship on Sunday in England, 11 members of the European Ryder Cup, caddies and captain Luke Donald boarded a flight for New York, where they met up with teammate Sepp Straka for a two-day reconnaissance trip to Bethpage Black, site of the 45th Ryder Cup.
“We plan to play nine holes on Monday and 18 holes on Tuesday. We’ll go into the city for a fun dinner Tuesday night. Because we don’t get to go into the City during the week of the Ryder Cup. It’s obviously on the doorstep, but it’s just far enough away and so busy that week. It’s nice to experience where we are, that New York kind of vibe,” Donald said.
According to Donald, members of the team are going to stay on the East Coast to adjust to the time change, a five-hour difference from the Irish Open and BMW PGA Championship of the past two weeks, and some of them will be playing together in the New York area ahead of the Ryder Cup, which begins Sept. 26. “Some people are sticking together up in New York. Some people are going to work with their coaches. Some people are going home. It’s not all 12 together doing the same thing. I think it’s important; you don’t want to — they are together a lot this week. If you are all together next week and the week after, maybe that’s a little overkill… as long as they are not flying back to Europe and have to deal with jet-lag, I don’t really mind what they do.”
Donald said that the trip two years ago was a pivotal part of meshing as a team that won the biennial competition 16 ½ to 11 ½, so, they’re running it back.
“It’s one thing that I think worked very well for us in Rome. We had never really had an organized practice trip before,” explained Captain Donald. “Sort of the building of a unified team really started again on that — I think it was a Monday between Irish and Wentworth, so the Monday of Wentworth we went over and we sort of started to form as a team then.”
In Rome, he gathered the team around a fire pit during the first night of their practice session as an exercise in team building and creating the right culture for the team. Donald kicked things off by telling the story of his start in golf and what the Ryder Cup had come to mean to him and then everyone from Jon Rahm to Rory McIlroy to rookie Ludvig Aberg took their turn.
“I sort of passed it around,” Donald said. “I started with Jon, went to Rory, and it just sort of just started to flow, you know? And then some people didn’t give too much away, but some people really opened up. And what it really did was it made a lot of the rookies understand that a lot of their upbringing in golf was exactly the same as the superstars. They had something in common. They were playing because of a lot of sacrifice from their parents because some people were told they weren’t good enough and they needed to prove themselves. And it was amazing, like kind of just the emotion and the conversation that happened.”
He added: “I didn’t really know what to expect and how it was going to go and whether these guys would kind of buy into it. And it was amazing in the end…By the time we got back to the Ryder Cup, we were already a team. We were rolling.
“I think, again, Ryder Cups, sometimes at the beginning of the week, you feel like you sort of are trying to find your place and figure out what the plan is, and I think a lot of those decisions and team building was sort of done the week before or two weeks before. Very important, and it’ll be important again this time around.”
Shane Lowry echoed that sentiment. “I think it’s important and we showed how important it was the last time. I think we got together and we did our trip to Rome. Then when we arrived in Rome for the Ryder Cup, it felt like we had never been apart. It felt like we just sort of floated into the week and cruised into the week,” Lowry said. “Yeah, it is a big part of it. Obviously to get to see the golf course outside of the mayhem of Ryder Cup week is very important as well. When you get to a Ryder Cup week, it’s just a bit different and it’s just not the same as a normal week. Practice rounds are a little bit more challenging than normal, and yeah, so it will be nice to see. I think we are playing a couple of rounds that week. It will be nice to see the golf course, and kind of figure out a game plan for how we are all going to play it. I’m sure by then we’ll know who we’re going to play with, or to a certain extent, anyway. But yeah, those trips are very, very important.”
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