Much was made a week or so ago about Justin Thomas’ comments on the 2025 Ryder Cup at Bethpage, which caused a stir when they were interpreted as him criticizing the final decisions on course setup.
As so often happens in our current information environment, his 85-minute conversation on the No Laying Up Podcast was whittled down to just a few sentences, chopped up by others, chopped up again, disseminated out to the world and then debated online. (You can listen to the pod here. It’s worth your time!)
Does JT wish he could redo those particularly apparently viral comments? Perhaps. He went on SiriusXM PGA Tour Radio to clarify them. But that’s not a point I’d like to work through right now. (At risk of making a similar mistake.) I’d rather dive into something just as narrow but far more intriguing than the past Ryder Cup: the structure of the next one!
A few of Thomas’ sentences from that podcast that got lost in the hullabaloo of last week’s news cycle, and they revolve around synergy. While exploring what went wrong in 2025 and forecasting how it could possibly change for 2027, Thomas said that changes were necessary for Team USA success.
“What those specific changes are, I’m not sure entirely,” Thomas said. “But something does [have to change]. There just seems to be more, I would say, synergy, and more just similarities maybe because — we have the Presidents Cup. I feel like we have the opportunity of, I don’t want to say using that event, but something. There needs to be some kind of, like, partnership there. It doesn’t make sense that they’re so …
“Connective tissue,” NLU host Chris Solomon said, jumping in. “It just needs to be more…”
“They’re not related at all,” Thomas continued. “They’re run by two different organizations. It feels like there’s just some things I feel like — we just, maybe if it’s … put in a position to be more successful, or just something that’s more organized to — to make sure that all the boxes are checked. Everything is — how it’s run, how it should be done, how it should be, to where we are put in the best possible position to succeed and play well, I guess. Not sure if that’s really answering.”
You have to appreciate Thomas taking on the question and sharing his feelings, even if he has as much frustration as he does a concrete plan. But the reason he knows the approach could be more cohesive is because he looks around and sees the other side, Team Europe, with some undeniably successful strategies in place.
One of the major differences between the Ryder Cup teams is the structures that support them. On the American side, there is the PGA of America, which serves under the mission of growing interest and participation in golf via the massive network of golf professionals in America.
On the European side, there is the DP World Tour, formerly known as the European Tour, which operates for professional golfers — decidedly, if confusingly, different than golf professionals — by organizing tournaments across the world. The DP World Tour runs Ryder Cup Europe on a 12-months-a-year basis, knowing well that the latter’s success underpins the financial solvency of the former.
In other words, while the Ryder Cup is an integral part of the DP World Tour’s big-picture strategy, it’s more like an important one-off for the PGA of America. Which makes it much easier for leading European golfers to completely put aside any of their individual desires (and/or differences) for a week or two. They’re playing for the Tour that they grew up playing, the one that helped launch their careers, and they can help their Tour by staging and winning an entertaining Ryder Cup. (Their investment in the outcome is part of the reason that Americans earning a stipend for playing in the Cup — while the Europeans don’t — isn’t quite apple to apples.)
The people running Ryder Cup Europe are the same people that meet with Rory McIlroy and Tommy Fleetwood and Viktor Hovland at basically every non-U.S. tournament they play year-round. The media comms staffers who organize and moderate McIlroy’s press conferences at, say, the Australian Open in December are the same staffers he embraced in a hug just off the 18th green following his Ryder Cup matches in New York. The competitions directors who oversee tournament green speeds at the Dubai Desert Classic in January were there sharing updates with Hovland on the putting green at Bethpage Black right before his matches. I had the good fortune to be there for both of the above, and chatted with David Garland, the director of Tour Operations at the DPWT between Saturday sessions at Bethpage. He rummaged about behind the scenes throughout Ryder Cup week, busy as ever, because that’s his job and he’s passionate for it.
But his compatriot across the pond? That’s likely Kerry Haigh, the chief competitions officer for the PGA of America. Haigh’s course setups are popular with pros, but he has fewer built-in opportunities to get to know them. He’d organically interface with pros twice a year (if that), during the Ryder Cup plus the PGA Championship, a major with 156 players in the field. (The fact that 20 of them are club pros serves as another reminder that these governing bodies have different goals in mind. And for the record, that’s ok! It just creates a ton of synergy for one side and a built-in challenge on the other.)
If you look closely at content released by Ryder Cup Europe, you’ll see Garland occasionally in the background, or sitting for dinner with McIlroy or other players. The same can be said for Michael Gibbons, once a content director for the DP World Tour, the man who originally came up with the idea for Francesco Molinari and Tommy Fleetwood to get in bed together following the 2018 Ryder Cup. Gibbons is able to obsess over Ryder Cup minutiae on a more full-time schedule nowadays, helping manifest anything that improves a winning pathway for Team Europe. He’ll see players in Dubai and in England and Scotland, all across the calendar, bolstering trust and familiarity the PGA of America simply cannot create one week a year.
Does the constant presence of the same people doing the same things help the Europeans make more putts in crunch time? It’s tough to quantify, which makes it on of golf’s great unanswerable questions. But it’s at least a reasonable theory that continuity makes them more comfortable. You can look in the gym, too, where the physios and people taking care of Team Europe’s bodies Ryder Cup week are the same folks traipsing across Europe in a big physio trailer all season long. If Viktor Hovland’s neck is bothering him, the same people helping him with it at Bethpage are the ones he’ll find when he kicks off his 2026 calendar year in the United Arab Emirates. On the structure front, that feels like an advantage.
All of which brings us back to Thomas’ dream of a certified partnership between the governing bodies that work to trot our similar-but-different versions of Team USA every other year. What he’s dreaming of, even if he didn’t say so directly, is something a lot like what Ryder Cup Europe has.
None of this would be such a big deal if the Americans were winning the event more often. But in response to each loss — now five of the last seven Cups — the search for answers has only grown more urgent.
So … could there be a partnership of sorts between the Presidents Cup — run by the PGA Tour, which interfaces with pros like Thomas more than 20 weeks a year — and the Ryder Cup heads at the PGA of America?
One would have to hope Thomas is sending that request up the ladder.
