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What got lost, while Tron stunted on the digital world this week shortly after Ludvig stunted on the actual one and (easily) landed a Ryder Cup spot in the process, is just how improbable all of this was even as recently as the beginning of this year.
We did a whole long podcast about all of this with all parties reading CVS-length receipts that you can listen to on the NLU feed when it comes out on Tuesday night or Wednesday, but it’s worth revisiting briefly before Rome arrives.
Luke Donald, whose rhetoric about Ludvig Aberg has at times made Tron seem chaste, gushed back in July about how this could in fact take place.
"[Donald] told me there have only been a few [players] that he's played with for the very first time that have the 'wow' factor,” said Golf Channel’s Nick Dougherty.
“One of them is Rory. That was back in 2008 at the Dunhill Links. Now he says Ludvig Aberg is one of those guys as well. He said his driver is a huge weapon, he makes the game look effortless. He added that as long as he continues to show form, he will definitely be considered for the [Ryder Cup] team. ... This guy is going to be a superstar."
Everything gets normalized with time. Everything. If and when Ludvig wins a major (which will require, you know, playing in one), we will look back on these rosters and say, Oh yeah of course Ludvig was on that team. Of course. Of course.
But to do that would be to mitigate (and perhaps even erase) three things that should not be mitigated:
1. That Ludvig was playing (and losing to) Bard Bjornevik Skogen and Sam Sommerhauser in the Thunderbird Collegiate as recently as the middle of April of a Ryder Cup year.
2. That his ceiling is so high and his talent so immense that he truly became undeniable to folks who have seen a lot of ceilings and tons of talent. (Again, this will seem obvious in retrospect, but it’s not right now and it honestly probably won’t be when the regular golf fan is watching Sunday singles).
3. And of course that my esteemed colleague and friend, Mr. TC, sat in an RV outside of a town in rural Wisconsin and, the week before Ludvig shot 72-71-70 to finish T9 for Texas Tech at the 2021 Blessings Intercollegiate, predicted that his beloved boy would in fact tee it up against much of the U.S. dream team — that happened to be celebrating a few hundred yards from that RV — at a course in Rome 24 months from then in one of the greatly anticipated clashes in the history of this event.
All three of those truths are wild, and honestly all three are probably being underplayed.
The most impressive part of it all, though? Donald asked Aberg to go play in Europe ahead of Rome just to get one last look. He asked Ludvig, who spent most of this year in Lubbock, USA, to go to the Czech Republic and Switzerland to put himself out there and his game on the line just to see if he could handle it. He put pressure on him to see how he would embrace it.
And Ludvig lost to just three guys over the course of the two events.
30: That’s Team Europe’s average age this year. In 2021, it was 34.5. What’s maybe even more interesting is that the U.S. team’s average age was 29 in 2021 and is a little over 30 this year. That means the U.S. went from being more than 5 years younger on average to slightly older, which provides some context here from Soly …
What has to rule the day is the upside potential of using your 11th and 12th spots on Hojgaard and Aberg. Both of whom we have no idea how high their ceilings are, and well worth it for the upside.
It certainly is a new era on the European side.
— No Laying Up (@NoLayingUp)
Sep 4, 2023
"Life's better when you constantly assume you could be wrong. You learn more. Resent less. And attract smart people. Being wrong says nothing about you as a person. Not being able to admit it does.”
One point that I feel like I’m screaming from the mountaintop but is just not being heard by most people is that the Ryder Cup is a team event that has absolutely no resemblance to the John Deere Classic or Wells Fargo Championship.
Consider this, which I dug up from Shane Ryan’s excellent The Cup They Couldn’t Lose in which he praises the European way so throughly (and deservedly so!) that I thought at one point he might break ground on a Paul McGinley statue.
[The Americans] adhered to the mindset that a Ryder Cup among equal talents is essentially random, that sometimes they would play better, and sometimes the Europeans would, but all thoughts of strategy or team building were blown out of proportion. Call it arrogance, complacency, or lack of imagination, but they stuck to this belief even as the results showed a pattern that was anything but random.
The Americans has been too successful for too long on the strength of talent alone to study the lesson. In that sense, they were victims of their own success, and it would be years before they could humble themselves enough to learn.
The term “too big to fail” comes to mind. And this is the point of picking JT on the U.S. side (and, to a lesser extent, Lowry on the European side). I’ve gotten hung up on a lot of “but this guy drove it .00003 strokes gained better than this guy you should for sure pick him” stuff in the past, but that is not in any way how the Ryder Cup actually functions (as I spent 2,000 words explaining here).
I’m so happy for Shane Lowry that he was able to finish patching up the exterior of a window on the international space station after it came a bit loose and still had time to get back inside before Sky Sports broadcast the European captain’s picks. Very cool.
👉️ The Soly-KVV pod on the last four European Ryder Cups is so good.
👉️ Not golf, but Brian Phillips on Carlos Alcaraz is insane.
Alcaraz could win 30 majors. He could produce a decade of astonishing highlights. He could peak early and have a disappointing career. He could take $500 million to join a Saudi pickleball league.
I simply have no idea what to expect from him, and that feeling of wide-open horizon is as thrilling as his forehand.
Would listen at this point.
Buddy … yes. Except when they get older they stop asking for Bluey and start asking where Sargent plays college golf and whether his hip speed is as good as Tiger’s used to be (they didn’t ask that but they will some day … they did ask the college question though).
I’ve been mentally, emotionally and spiritually preparing for this moment for many months.
This sent me. Low key but so good.
Imagine paying $47 for that hat. Tbh, may be a Viktor Hovland Memorial “so bad it’s actually kinda good” situation.
I would counter with Collin Morikawa here.
Palermo by Morning.
Imagine using Instagram over Twitter.
I am on a thread with Normal Sport illustrator, Jason Page, and a few other folks, and we were trying to congregate for a meeting this week. Jason said he was going to have a hard time making it because “I just got added to the guest list for my friend’s first European tour show on Tuesday evening.”
One of the other guys in the thread pulled me aside in person a few days later and said to me, “I thought Jason lived in Amsterdam, the European Tour isn’t going there this week is it? I thought they were in Switzerland and then Ireland.”
And he was 100 percent serious.
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