AUSTIN, Texas – Jim Furyk doesn’t appear to be spending his post-Ryder Cup days revisiting the crushing U.S. defeat last fall in Paris. He’s content to leave that to others.
But if the 48-year-old captain, who has been busy the last few weeks contending on the PGA Tour, needed a chance to unpack the rare hits and frequent misses of the 2018 matches, Sunday was probably the day with his possible regrets right in front of him on the championship Sunday.
Neither Kevin Kisner nor Matt Kuchar were ever really serious contenders to land one of Furyk’s four captain’s picks. Kuchar drove a golf cart as an American vice captain in Paris and Kisner watched the American rout from his home in Aiken, S.C.
Arm chair captains will always enjoy the undefeated benefit of hindsight but the facts, however anecdotal, from this week’s WGC-Dell Technologies Match Play are impossible to ignore.
On his march to the championship Kisner defeated Tony Finau, Keith Mitchell and survived a playoff duel against the enigmatic Ian Poulter. He then beat HaoTong Li, Louis Oosthuizen and Francesco Molinari, the European rock who had won 10 consecutive matches dating to his 5-0-0 week at the Ryder Cup, before facing Kuchar.
He cut a similar swath last year to advance to the championship match, rolling over Poulter (8 and 6, no less) and Alex Noren, both staples on the Continent’s team, as well as Kuchar who he defeated, 3 and 2, in Sunday’s final frame at Austin Country Club.
“Kevin Kisner appears to be a very good match player. I’ll tell you a course that would really have suited him. Le Golf National,” Lee Westwood mused in a Tweet this weekend that Kisner called “cheeky.”
The Englishman would know. He was among Thomas Bjorn’s brain trust last fall and was well versed in the set up at Le Golf National, which was groomed to a shaggy perfection for a European team that specialized in hitting fairways and avoiding trouble.
Again, it’s easy to second-guess. Who should have been passed over for Kisner? Finau was ranked below Kisner in the final U.S. Ryder Cup points standings, but his 2-1-0 record in Paris was a rare highlight from an otherwise forgettable week for the U.S. team. For better or worse, Phil Mickelson and Tiger Woods were always going to get Furyk’s nod and although Bryson DeChambeau struggled mightily, going 0-3-0, he won two of the last four events of the season.
Kisner’s performance this week isn’t so much a case of what Furyk did wrong as much as it is a manifesto of why he should never be overlooked by an American captain again.
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He became the first player to advance to the championship bout at the WGC-Match Play after losing a match in pool play since the format made golf’s version of March madness seem more like a muddled mess. He also never lost a match in his only professional team outing, going 2-0-2 at the 2017 Presidents Cup.
“That's the most fun I've probably ever had playing golf was playing team golf,” said Kisner, who birdied the first hole of his final match on Sunday and never trailed in the week’s most demanding conditions. “I'd love to get a try on foreign soil and see if we couldn't be the bad guys.”
There’s a resilience to Kisner that simply can’t be ignored. Although the WGC-Match Play is always one of Tour’s more demanding events to win, both physically and mentally, Kisner endured 120 holes in wind and cold on his way to victory. His first two matches of the week, including an opening loss to Poulter, went the distance and he needed three extra holes in a playoff with the Englishman just to qualify for the knockout stages.
Along with the normal wear and tear of match play the 35-year-old also had to carry the weight of last year’s disappointment with him. After cruising into the final match Kisner’s game abandoned him against Bubba Watson.
“It was just pitiful, man,” Kisner said following the 7-and-6 loss, and added he felt, “helpless.”
There was a flash of a moment early in his title duel with Kuchar when it appeared he might be headed for a similar collapse. A drive into a canyon left of the second fairway led to a bogey and he three-putted from 41 feet at the fifth hole to slip into a tie.
“I felt like something was amiss if I came out and played the way I did. It didn't feel like a quirk to me,” Kisner said of his final match meltdown in 2018. “That was the hardest part to get over, is something wrong with my golf swing and my chipping and putting? And to work through that was the toughest on the mental side.”
But he won the sixth with a birdie and the seventh when Kuchar made par. Kisner led the rest of the way with the type of game that, as Westwood pointed out, was made for a course like Austin Country Club or Le Golf National.
It’s no surprise that Kisner has no use for revisionist history. The only thing more endearing than his southern sensibilities is an utter lack of pretense. As much as he savored his team experience two years ago at the Presidents Cup he expected nothing from Furyk last fall. In simplest terms everything in golf is earned, much like everything in Kisner’s career that has literally been dug from the dirt.
“I gave [Furyk] no reason to pick me,” Kisner said. “I was not on form to go over there. I know the golf course suited me perfect. Who was he going to take out? Was he going to leave Phil at home and take Kiz? Nobody is going to do that, right? Even though hindsight is 20/20, everybody should have taken Kiz.”
Neither Furyk nor Kisner has any reason to look back now, but there’s a lesson to be learned. Looking past Kisner – or Kuchar, a two-time winner already this season on Tour, for that matter – for a sexy or more conventional pick should never again be an option for an American captain.
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