Tale of the Tape: Ryder Cup, Day 3

AVONDALE, La. — Cameron Smith and Marc Leishman outlasted Louis Oosthuizen and Charl Schwartzel to win the Zurich Classic of New Orleans in a playoff that capped a tight and tense final round Sunday. RELATED: Leaderboard | Winner’s Bag: Marc Leishman/Cameron Smith, Zurich Classic of New Orleans Smith and Leishman won with a par on their second trip up the par-5 18th after Oosthuizen pushed his tee shot into the water and narrowly missed an 11-foot putt for bogey. The Australians forced the playoff by shooting a 2-under 70 in alternate-shot play at the PGA TOUR’s lone regular-season team event. Oosthuizen and Schwartzel began the round with a one-stroke lead, but shot a 71 with three pars and two bogeys. It’s Smith’s third career victory — second at the Zurich team event — and best result since tying for second at the pandemic-delayed 2020 Masters last November. It also was his sixth top 10 since the current TOUR season started last October. Smith’s last victory came at the 2020 Sony Open in Hawaii. It was Leishman’s sixth career victory, his best result since tying for fifth at the Masters this month and his first win since the 2020 Farmers Insurance Open. The climactic finish capped off a compelling duel between two teams that teed off together in the final grouping and took turns holding leads that never grew to more than two strokes. After Smith made birdie putts of 9 feet on the par-5 seventh and 7 feet on the par-3 ninth to pull his team even atop the leaderboard, the Aussies went in front on 10, when Schwartzel’s approach found the bunker and his team two-putted for bogey. Smith and Leishman took a two-shot lead with a birdie on the par-5 11th, where Leishman drove 307 yards into the fairway and Smith sent the team’s second shot 265 yards to the green, setting up a birdie. But they gave a stroke back on 13 when Leishman’s drive went into the TPC Louisiana’s trademark, towering and old-growth cypress three that stands alone like a monolith in the fairway. That forced the team to take a drop that led to a bogey. The South Africans moved back into the lead on 15, where Schwartzel followed up Oosthuizen’s 205-yard approach shot with a nearly 15-foot putt for birdie, while Smith, whose approach had fallen short of the green, narrowly missed a 13-foot putt for par. Smith then bounced his booming, 294-yard tee shot on 16 into the water, but it went out of bounds close enough to the green that Leishman was able to hit a chip on his team’s third shot and rolled it in from more than 23 feet for birdie to tie Ooshuizen and Schwartzel at 21 under. Both teams bogeyed the par-3 17th to head to the par-5 18th tied at 20 under. Peter Uihlein and Richy Werenski shot a 67, with six birdies and one bogey, to shoot up the leaderboard from 18th to third. Billy Horschel and former LSU player Sam Burns shot a 69 to tie for fourth with Brandt Snedeker-Keith Mitchell and Brendan Steele-Kegan Bradley. Ryan Palmer and Jon Rahm, the defending champions from 2019, closed with a 70 to finish seventh at 17 under.

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Ernie Els has charged the youngest-ever Presidents Cup team with the task of taking down the U.S. juggernaut. No matter how you slice it, the International Team captain knows it is going to take a special group to take down a dominant U.S. squad that holds a 10-1-1 record in the competition. They haven’t lost since 1998. Els is an intense competitor who wants nothing more than to be at the helm of the drought-breakers and, as such, he has turned over every possible stone to round out his International Team of 12. The South African legend used his four captain’s picks for the battle at Royal Melbourne in Australia from Dec. 12-15 to create an exact balance. He added Jason Day, Sungjae Im, Adam Hadwin and Joaquín Niemann. Els now has six rookies and six players with experience in the competition. One half of his team is free from scars. Cameron Smith, Abraham Ancer, Haotong Li, C.T. Pan, Im and Niemann get their first taste of it. The other half – Adam Scott, Marc Leishman, Louis Oosthuizen, Hideki Matsuyama, Day and Hadwin – can draw motivation from previous wounds. With an average age of 29.3 it is the youngest side to ever go to battle in this biennial team play. Only veteran Scott has tasted any sort of success in the competition. He was a rookie in 2003 when the Cup ended in darkness as Els and Tiger Woods, his opposing captain this year, could not be split in an epic playoff. After discussion between captains Jack Nicklaus and Gary Player, the Cup was shared. It was a great gesture of sportsmanship and should be applauded. But Els has no intention of sharing this time out. He wants a historic victory. “We’ll be ready to go come December,â€� Els said. “I’m really excited by the new blood that’s come in, and I’m really excited that we have experience. … I think it balances the team really well.â€� Els says he had no hesitation in taking his rookie tally up to six with his picks. He also had no concern in the fact Im and Niemann will be just 21. He could have easily picked another veteran like his countrymen Branden Grace but knows the Internationals need new life. Only once before – in 2013 – have the Internationals had more rookies with seven. Leishman, Oosthuizen and Matsuyama were three of those rookies. “Whether it is in the day and age that we are living in. … I definitely wasn’t that good when I was 20, 21 years old, I can promise you that, but these kids, these guys are world-class players and they have proven themselves,â€� Els said. “Obviously I threw age out of the equation. … but they have one hell of a big future in this event.â€� Niemann celebrated his 21st birthday with his pick. The recent winner at A Military Tribute at the Greenbrier has been smiling since that win but it widened again after he got the call from Els. Now he wants to be a difference maker. Els called him a “kidâ€� but added that he “played like a grown man this season.â€� Im is fresh off winning the PGA TOUR Rookie of the Year and already has two top-3 finishes this new season. “With so many young players on the team this year, I think there will be a lot of passion and energy and I think that positive energy can help the team positively with everything moving forward,â€� the Korean said. “I really want to beat the United States team.â€� Rookie or not, Els says he won’t be protecting any player and his pairings may surprise people. Of course there is the famed analytics Els has promised to use prominently in his thinking. More of that will be unveiled in due time, particularly when he decides who plays Four-ball and Foursomes. But you can gather from his four picks that putting was a key component. “Reading into the statistics of what they have been doing for the last ten to 12 months, that also indicates really how well these guys have played, so they have earned their spot on to this team, through long-term and current form, and that’s the way I wanted to look at it,â€� Els explained. “We want guys who are really solid long-term players. We’ve got a lot to do, but I’m picking guys to make the team to play. I’m not here to guide anybody. “I’m here to try and win enough points to get us over the line, and that’s what the players’ mission is, is to try and get enough points to get the Cup back. If that’s off the back of the rookies, so be it.â€� Els knows he will have to manage several cultural and some language issues. He has been planning for this since he accepted the role well over a year ago. Details, down to individual catering, have been taken care of. But there is no doubt the Australian quartet must take a lead role in preparations for this classic sandbelt course. “The Aussies will play a huge part in getting these guys prepared… I’m very fortunate I have four playing and assistant captain Geoff Ogilvy,â€� Els said. “Definitely between now and then, we’re going to have a lot of chatting going on (with them).â€� At the end of the day all the meticulous planning in the world won’t hide the cold simple truth. They will need to play at their best to take down a stacked U.S. side led by Woods. The talent and enthusiasm are there and now it appears there is balance. With that, they just might find a way to pull off a win for the ages. The young ages.

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PEBBLE BEACH, Calif — Former Dallas Cowboys quarterback and current NFL commentator Tony Romo, fresh out of the broadcasting booth at Super Bowl LIII in Atlanta, is set to play in the 2019 AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am this week. In a field full of celebrity golfers, he’s arguably the most competition-tested. Romo made his PGA TOUR debut in 2018 at the Corales Resort and Club Championship in the Dominican Republic, although he missed the cut following a second-round 82. Being a high-level player without an equipment contract, the clubs Romo chooses to use are particularly noteworthy. Below, I take you through the clubs and shafts in his bag this week, along with insight from two different equipment TOUR reps. Driver, fairway wood and hybrid After calling the Super Bowl game on Sunday, Romo was out on the Pebble Beach range on Monday afternoon, braving the rainy and windy 40-degree weather for a practice session. He hit buckets and buckets of wedges and irons, and he eventually broke into a driver testing session. He showed up to the range with a TaylorMade M3 driver and a Fujikura Atmos Blue shaft, but he tested a TaylorMade M5 with a Fujikura Ventus 7X shaft in it, under the supervision of Fujikura TOUR rep Patrick McCoy. I caught up with McCoy for his insight on how the testing session went: “The driver that we made him was standard, 45.75 inches end of grip, (swing weight) D3, which was his gamer specs with the Atmos Blue,â€� McCoy told me. “We had him try a Ventus 7X in a 10.5 (degrees) M5… as we went thru the fitting we slowly opened up the face a little bit and then moved the weights a little bit forward, which lowered his launch and then also eliminated some spin. His misses were either low on the face or high on the face, but at the same time he was kind of working on his golf swing… I have not worked with him on a launch monitor in a while, but he’s gotta be over 170 ball speed… we know Ventus was a little bit weaker in the handle for him, and you could see that in transition, he’s got a very fast move from top to bottom.â€� As McCoy explains, Romo is currently making changes to his golf swing with teacher Chris O’Connell. “His body has a tendency to outrace his hands at times, which changes his low point of impact, or the bottom of his arc,â€� McCoy said. “He wants to feel like he’s more level and he’s still driving. That’s his miss, the handle gets up, shaft droops, and the face gets open. So (his miss is) high on the face where there’s more loft, or low on the face … he knows how to fix it and that’s awesome that he can make the changes. He likes to see it fall a little bit right. His misses are probably a little on the spinny side, but at his speed, that’s OK because it keeps him in the fairway. Or when he’s off, he’s just a little off … Once he got where he liked the face angle, he said the shafts — both Atmos and Ventus — felt good. They felt stable… it looked like he tended to bend the Ventus a little bit more from the top, yet it didn’t sacrifice anything at the bottom with his impact location and his face direction.â€�  It will be interesting to see which driver – the TaylorMade M3 with a Fujikura Atmos Blue shaft, or the TaylorMade M5 with a Fujikura Ventus shaft — Romo ends up using come competition time on Thursday. It should be noted that the Ventus comes stock in a Dallas Cowboys’ colorway. To fill out the top end of his bag, Romo is using a Callaway Rogue 3+ fairway wood with a Mitsubishi Diamana W-series 70X shaft, and a Titleist 818H2 hybrid with a Mitsubishi Tensei CK Pro White 90HY shaft. Mizuno irons, per usual Jeff Cook, a Mizuno TOUR rep, told me that he and Romo go way back to when Romo was just a second-string quarterback for the Cowboys, and he had a “hodge podge set of clubs.â€� Romo and Cook met through Cook’s college roommate, who was a General Manager of Trophy Club, a country club in Dallas, at the time. “We actually had a cookout at my buddy’s backyard (in Dallas) and Tony came over,â€� Cook told me. “I didn’t even know who he was, because he was the second string quarterback. He came over, we had a cookout, and we ended up throwing the football in the backyard, talking golf. And then we ended up playing golf while I was down there. He was good. I mean, he’s always been basically a scratch golfer, and obviously a gifted athlete. And that’s how it all started. He didn’t really have any clubs, he had kind of a hodge podge set of clubs. And I took care of him on Mizuno clubs. He’s been in our clubs ever since he came to Dallas.â€� Flash forward to 2019, and Romo is using a combo set of Mizuno MMC MP-18 irons (4-6 iron) and MP-18 blades (7-PW), each equipped with Nippon N.S. Pro Modus3 Tour 120 shafts. Jordan Spieth’s wedge You may recognize Romo’s Titleist Vokey SM7 wedge; it’s a hand-me-down from Jordan Spieth. “He’s best friends with Jordan,â€� Cook said. “He plays a lot with Jordan at the same club, they play all the time at home. When Jordan gets done with his and gets new ones, he gives them to him, or whoever else he gives them to.â€� In addition to the 60-degree, University of Texas-stamped “JSâ€� wedge, Romo also has a 50-degree SM6 F-Grind and a 56-degree V-grind Vokey prototype. The 60-degree wedge has a Project X 6.0 shaft, while the 50- and 56-degree wedges have a True Temper Dynamic Gold Tour Issue S400 shaft in them. Tiger Woods’ putter Romo is also the recipient of another hand-me-down golf club from a champion golfer. Inside Romo’s bag is one of Tiger Woods’ old Method 001 putters, stamped with Tiger Woods on the hosel, Woods’ classic dot alignment aid on the topline, and a blacked-out Ping putter grip. It’s the same style putter that Woods used to win THE PLAYERS Championship in 2013.

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