Internationals remain optimistic despite heavy underdog status

CHARLOTTE, N.C. – On paper, the International Team at this year’s Presidents Cup would seem to have as much chance of winning as the Washington Generals, the hapless basketball squad that lost some 16,000 times to the Harlem Globetrotters.

Ravaged by player departures to LIV Golf and set to face off against a powerhouse U.S. team that is on an eight-event win streak, the Internationals are heavy underdogs.

And that’s just fine for captain Trevor Immelman.

“If you look at our record in this tournament and you look at our world rankings versus their world rankings,” he said, “we have absolutely nothing to lose.”

That could be the rallying cry for the squad that has eight first-timers, including Canadians Corey Conners and Taylor Pendrith.  No one is expecting them to win. Many feel they will be on the wrong end of a lopsided affair. But they are here at Quail Hollow, ready to compete and that means they can win.

Just like a lottery, the odds of winning may be long, but they’re a lot longer if you don’t have a chance.

On nearly every level, the Americans are superior to their International opponents. In world ranking the U.S. players are all inside the top 25 and have an average ranking of 11.6.

At 17, Hideki Matsuyama is the highest-ranked International player, one of just three inside the top 25.The team average is 48.9 and Pendrith is just the second player from outside the top 100 to play in the event (although he is one of the hottest players on his team, too).

The only International returnees from the last edition of the cup held in 2019 in Melbourne, Australia, when the rest-of-the-world side came within a few strokes of getting its second win, are Matsuyama, Adam Scott and Sung Jae Im. Immelman’s squad lost a good chunk of its horse power when Cam Smith, Joaquin Niemann, Louis Oosthuizen and Abraham Ancer departed for LIV but the captain preferred to look ahead to who is here as opposed to who isn’t.

“Am I disappointed that they're not able to be here?” he said of the departed. “Absolutely. But we have the 12 guys here that we love and wanted to be here, and now we get to go. We get to go up against a strong American team. So we're looking forward.”

The American side, headed by Davis Love III, had its own list of departees including Dustin Johnson, Brooks Koepka, Bryson DeChambeau and Captain America himself, Patrick Reed.

But their bench is exceptionally deep and the replacements are especially talented. As well, seven of the U.S. players were members of last year’s Ryder Cup that saw the Americans hammer the Europeans 19-9.

None of this is lost on Immelman or any of the Internationals. They know what they’re up against and just what lies ahead of them.

“There's massive amounts of respect for the American team,” stated the 2008 Masters champion. “All of these guys compete week in and week out, and all of us know exactly how good they are. So I don't really think you have to harp on it too much. We know where we're at. We know the adversity that our team has been through over the course of the last 12 months. So you really don't need to say too much.”

To give them a fighting chance, Immelman and the other captain’s assistants, K.J. Choi, Geoff Ogilvy, Camilo Villegas and Canadian legend Mike Weir, have been using some advanced analytics to pair up their players for both Foursomes and Fourballs. The science looks at players’ strengths and weaknesses, and which complement other team members.

The next step is to try and determine which International duo will fare well against an American team, and try to slot them in.

“There's a whole host of things that goes into that concoction to find the recipe,” said Immelman, “starting with the golf course and the way that sets up, players' strengths and weaknesses, how we think they can meld together, things we've learned over the past few cups and in our trip here, how guys are going to match up personality-wise, golf balls.”

However, even that might not be enough. The Americans might simply be just too good. Still, a miracle could happen and what an upset it would be if somehow, some way, the Internationals do something that very few are expecting.

If they need a little more inspiration, it might be good to know that while those Washington Generals lost a lot of games, the record book shows that they won six times.

Maybe this will be one of those times.