2026 Presidents Cup at Medinah: the USA's record 9½–2½ singles and the 8–26 foursomes crack before Adare Manor

On a Monday morning in Busan, my coffee had gone cold long before. On the screen, the Medinah scoreboard had frozen on Sunday's singles session: 9½–2½ to the United States.

I sat and looked at it for a while. Twelve singles matches, nine and a half points for the Americans. Across the thirty-eight team events that the Ryder Cup and the Presidents Cup have written together, no singles session had ever finished at that margin. The previous benchmark was 8½–3½, and the old record was beaten by a full point.

Then I turned to my notes on the pairs sessions.

Foursomes: 8–26 across the past four Presidents Cups.

The two lines sat on the same page. They do not contradict each other. They simply describe two different teams wearing the same shirt.

In Busan, where I live and work, golf is a sport of early mornings and printed scorecards. Korean audiences follow team events with an odd calm — they rarely shout at the screen, they take notes. I learned that habit after a few years, and it helps me see what the roars cover up.

The story at Medinah does not live in that nine and a half. It lives in the reason those twelve singles matches had to exist at all — because the eighteen pairs points had already drifted away in a very different manner.

Context: a tournament designed for the stronger side

The 2026 Presidents Cup was played at Medinah Country Club in Illinois, United States. The format splits 30 points: 18 points in the pairs sessions — foursomes, where partners alternate one ball, and four-ball, where the better individual score counts — and 12 points in Sunday singles. Those twelve singles points account for 40 percent of the total. At the Ryder Cup the equivalent share is 43 percent, twelve out of 28.

That gap is small enough that people usually skip past it. It is also the whole story.

The United States arrived at Medinah with an almost total talent advantage. In nearly every singles match, the Americans fielded a player with a higher world ranking than his opponent. That is why the Presidents Cup has long been described as a genuinely entertaining event that is not truly competitive — a product that looks good and is fairly easy to predict.

That picture only changes if the International Team's talent pool widens, perhaps in a post-LIV era, or if the worrying trend in global player development reverses. Neither is within any captain's control.

Medinah is also not a neutral venue in terms of memory. In 2026, this same course witnessed Europe come back from 10–6 down to win the Ryder Cup, a match remembered as the Miracle at Medinah. The Americans returned this year to the site of their most painful team-format memory and produced a comeback of their own. That feeling of a debt repaid makes it very easy to paper over what is still missing.

And at Medinah, the United States won in the way nobody really wants to win: three points down going into Sunday.

On Saturday afternoon, as the pairs sessions closed, the home team walked off to a mixed ovation. The mood at Medinah in those hours did not feel like a celebration. It felt like a family meeting where everyone knows something is wrong but nobody wants to say it first.

A year earlier, at Bethpage, the Americans had walked away from the pairs sessions at 11½–4½. That was a Ryder Cup, and it was a defeat. Medinah repeated the same rhythm and only changed the ending.

Adare Manor in Ireland will host the next Ryder Cup, expected within roughly twelve months. An away course. A hard task. And a question left unanswered.

Analysis: two lines of data that do not lie

To understand Medinah, you have to look away from the Sunday scoreboard and at the two driest lines in the entire United States team dataset.

Line one: foursomes, 8–26 across the past four Presidents Cups.

Thirty-four matches. Eight wins. A win rate below 0.24. In a format where each pairing is two players and one ball, a sample of thirty-four is large enough to rule out bad luck. A losing run at that scale stops being variance. It becomes structure.

Line two: four-ball, 75½–92½ since 2026.

This is the number that made me stop longest. Four-ball is the format where each player plays his own ball and the better score counts. On paper it favours the strong: gaps in quality, in distance, in birdie-making ability get amplified rather than neutralised. The United States almost always has the better players. And yet it sits below break-even, and well below it.

If the talent advantage cannot explain the results, then the explanation lies elsewhere: how pairs are constructed, how well they read each other, and how two people talk between shots.

To see why foursomes hurts the Americans most, you have to look at the mechanics. Two players alternate hitting the same ball from tee to hole. Every shot by the first player sets the conditions for the shot by the second, and a drive hooked into the trees does not stop at costing one stroke — it forces the partner to play a kind of golf entirely unlike his own. Foursomes does not reward the best golfer. It rewards the pairing that leaks the least and shares responsibility quietly.

A roster full of outstanding individuals does not automatically produce good pairings. That is the heart of the problem.

The singles session is the mirror image, and a remarkably consistent one. Since 2026, the United States is 131–121 in singles. It is the only segment where the Americans hold a positive record. And since 2026 they have not lost a single singles session.

Put the two lines side by side and the portrait becomes clear: the United States is an elite collective when each man answers only to himself, and a fragile one when two men have to share a ball.

A public golf analytics platform once showed that the Americans were genuinely good at foursomes at one point, but that the relevant window sits quite a while back. If that holds, the Medinah problem is recent and has a clear direction: getting worse, not recovering.

What is striking is that the event structure is working against the side that keeps winning. The Presidents Cup awards 60 percent of its points in pairs; the Ryder Cup awards 57 percent. In other words, the American weakness is more expensive in the very event they keep winning, and slightly cheaper in the one where they keep struggling. That paradox has never been satisfactorily explained, and it deserves more attention.

I have sat in enough grandstands to know that sound is a form of data. In a singles session, the roars build shot by shot, group by group walking down the fairway, a burst of applause breaking out in one corner and spreading to the next. In a foursomes session, the course goes noticeably quiet. Not the quiet of concentration — the quiet of caution. The crowd waits for a mistake so it can exhale, and when the mistake comes, that sigh sounds nothing like applause.

A roar is never just noise; it is the heartbeat of a city. And at Medinah, that heartbeat ran fastest on the one day the home team had nothing left to lose.

That is the platform beneath every comeback. Trailing by three, the Americans walked into Sunday with a sense of release. No complex pairing schemes, no agonising over who fits with whom. Twelve golfers, twelve separate matches, twelve chances to decide alone. Comfort in the singles format belongs partly to skill, but mostly to psychology, and that psychology is fed by the feeling of not having to share the blame.

A member of the coaching staff once told me in Doha that American golfers are "supremely confident once left to their own devices." That sentence describes the Medinah balance almost perfectly.

The problem is that Sunday only comes once in four days.

Thursday, Friday and Saturday still belong to the pairs, and that is where the Americans drifted. Under the current allocation — 18 pairs points and 12 singles points — a three-point deficit entering Sunday corresponds to the United States taking only 7½ of 18 pairs points. The record 9½–2½ singles session erased that gap. It did not erase the cause.

Every match is a drumbeat; I am only the man keeping time between two grandstands. And the rhythm at Medinah slipped for two days, then landed on the final beat — the way a musician who has been off all night finishes on a perfect note and makes the audience forget the whole piece nearly fell apart.

Contrarian angle: a win that reads as a warning

Right after the last ball dropped at the 18th, a theory started spreading among European fans: that this comeback would disguise the core American problems and keep the United States in a state of denial for a few more years.

Based on my experience following team events, the theory is right about the mechanism and wrong about the conclusion.

Right, because a win is always a better anaesthetic than a loss. At Bethpage, people were forced to look at foursomes. At Medinah, they can choose to look at nine and a half. Same dataset, two readings, and the comfortable reading always wins in the first seventy-two hours after the applause dies.

Wrong, because the theory assumes the coaching staff and the players read the same way the public does. What I heard from inside the team after Medinah pointed the other way — the tone carried no self-congratulation at all.

And there is a detail that gets little mention. Captain Brandt Snedeker spent much of the week second-guessing his own decisions, made mistakes in how he built the pairings, and was bailed out by the sheer quality of the roster he had in hand. That is a criticism aimed at the captain's chair, not at the golfers.

If that repeats — and it did repeat at Bethpage, where the captain was called incompetent — then the problem in American team golf is no longer one bad hire. It is a structural issue in how captains are chosen and how decision rights are split between the captain, the advisory group and the players themselves.

Jim Furyk, appointed to lead the United States at the next Ryder Cup, is regarded as the best realistic choice right now, simply because he understands the shape of the problem. Understanding and fixing are two different things. But at least it is a start pointing the right way, and in this sport a start pointing the right way is usually the rarest thing available.

There is a psychological trap I consider the biggest risk for the Americans right now: believing that Sunday comeback ability is a reusable skill rather than a low-probability event. A record singles session is wonderful to rewatch on television. It is a poor strategy to plan around.

If the United States arrives at Adare Manor assuming it can always repair the week on Sunday, the Ryder Cup will be decided on Friday and Saturday rather than Sunday. And this time, the course will not be in Illinois.

What I will be watching

What I will track over the next twelve months is not any individual player's record. It is two men standing together on the tee box of a foursomes hole, and how they talk before hitting the third ball.

Four specific signals are worth logging. First, the American foursomes record at the next team event — any continuation of the losing run confirms this is systemic. Second, the singles unbeaten streak dating to 2026 — the day it breaks will be the day the lone-wolf narrative loses its protective shell. Third, Furyk's pairing decisions and whether they show signs of being data-led. Fourth, and furthest out, the depth of the International Team's talent pool, which depends on post-LIV player movement and the health of the global development pipeline.

In the golf analytics industry, another signal deserves attention: public data platforms are quietly shaping how fans discuss team events. The fact that figures like 8–26 and 75½–92½ circulate freely in fan conversation is a cultural shift, and it favours anyone who wants to see a problem before it becomes a headline.

Data tells you where you stand; emotion tells you why you stay. At Medinah, the data said the United States remains the strongest side when each man stands alone, and the most vulnerable when two men have to walk together. The emotion at Medinah said the crowd sang itself hoarse on Sunday, after staying silent for two days before that.

People do not remember a tournament by the trophy, but by the stretches where they held each other. At Medinah, the embraces only came after everything nearly broke. Adare Manor will not hand the Americans a second record singles session to fix their mistakes — and if anyone believes it will, that belief is the biggest remaining problem of all.