Ryder Cup flops Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson backed to return in 2020

Scoreless: Both Woods and Mickelson failed to register a point

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1 October 2018

As Europe soared, two of golf’s greats sank without a trace.

According to the script from the US team room, the 2018 Ryder Cup was supposed to play out as a team inspired by Tiger Woods’s resurgent win at the Tour Championship.

However, Woods failed to pick up a point, so too Phil Mickelson. And Mickelson was so poor in the opening foursomes that he was not picked again by his captain and close friend, Jim Furyk, who was surely left to rue the decision to use one of his wildcard picks on the 48-year-old.

But team-mate Rickie Fowler insisted it was not the end to either man on the Ryder Cup stage. “I wouldn’t put Phil and Tiger to bed just yet,” said Fowler. “They could be back in two years and then even four years’ time. What Tiger did this year was pretty special and you’d say there’s plenty more to come from the both of them.”

Despite Fowler’s positivity for the future, Mickelson must surely have said goodbye to the Ryder Cup as a player.

Come Whistling Straights in two years he will have turned half a century, while it is perfectly conceivable Woods, if his back holds together, will return again with a point to prove. When the US last lost the Ryder Cup at Gleneagles in 2014, Mickelson set about on a very public finger pointing exercise at then captain Tom Watson. Yesterday, he was more contrite, slightly pointing the finger at Watson once more as he talked up Furyk as a captain.

He said: “There have been two years — this year and 2006 with Tom Lehman — where it breaks my heart a little bit more than others because those two we didn’t execute while we were given the opportunity to succeed.”

As for the possibility of being only the fourth player to play Ryder Cup golf into their 50s — at 51, Raymond Floyd is the oldest — Mickelson said: “I’m motivated now to work hard, to not go out on this note and I’m motivated to play well to get back at Whistling Straits and show what I can do in these events because this was not my best.”

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Ryder Cup 2018

Ryder Cup flops Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson backed to return in 2020

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