MEDINAH, Ill. — Brandt Snedeker spent a sizable chunk of his Sunday evening pacing back and forth, back and forth between the 15th green and 16th tee. From afar, he looked steely, but up close, he was a frenzied mess of thoughts.
His phone was in and out of his pocket, one hand almost always covering his mouth, masking his words like a baseball pitcher does with his glove. He’d whisper softly into his radio set, then project more forcibly to his increasingly giddy American players, then back to a whisper for his assistant captains.
Then, wham. An expletive into the mic.
The gravity of Presidents Cup matches hanging in the balance had pulled the crowd toward the 18th hole and, damnit, Snedeker wanted to be there to see “the kid,” Jackson Koivun, polish off a full point. But then he looked around and thought about Russ Henley, squarely in a tied match and reading a putt on the 15th, soon to walk off the green and see … none of his teammates? Snedeker stayed put, for at least a few more moments, while the manifestation of his many, many decisions built to a crescendo hundreds of yards away. It felt fitting that, even as this Presidents Cup was angling toward a victorious finish, Snedeker was still filled with stress.
In the end, the team who was favored from the jump won, but the process to get there was one big, four-day reminder: You don’t want that job. Yes, you, the layman punter at home who watched hours and hours of golf on this fall football weekend. You think you’d be a great captain, but you don’t want the U.S. captaincy.
Are you benching the best golfer since Tiger Woods in alternate shot? Okay, maybe if he wasn’t playing like the best golfer since Tiger.
Do you get romantic about Justin Thomas’ after a great Thursday and bench Chris Gotterup after his early struggles? On Friday night that makes you feel foolish — and International sweep! — and on Saturday night you just feel slow. Gotterup and Young burn Medinah to a crisp and the former has posted a picture of the latter to his Instagram story with the quote, “My mf [dawg emoji]”.
Does friendship come first? Fourth? Do you let Scheffler play with his best friend because relationships matter? Wait, how much do they matter when those friends keep losing those foursomes matches. Wait some more — are those friends different than Xander Schauffele and Patrick Cantlay? You send them out again just like it’s 2021. Together, they’re invincible. Unfortunately, it’s 2026, and they’re not so invincible. They lose 4 and 3, and you’re wondering … Am I doing any of this right?
The immense roster depth that routinely makes American teams the betting favorite in team events is the same depth that makes their captain’s job weirdly crippling. No writers are publishing articles about snubs left off the International team. No one critiques Luke Donald when he sits a Hojgaard twin more than he plays them. But back here on the American side of things, three or four American pros — led chiefly by J.J. Spaun — are rather upset, annoyed or just disappointed with Snedeker for not choosing them.
These weeks are so defined by coin-flip decisions that they’ve become a haunted house of hand-wringing for the American captains. Zach Johnson’s captaincy in Rome went so poorly — despite very close relationships with his players — that he’s been kept “out of the loop” ever since, as he recently explained to GOLF.com. (He hasn’t exactly been treated well by American fans in that time, either.)
Keegan Bradley’s time in the Ryder Cup chair ended in a way he called “the darkest time of my life.” He spent much of 2026 in a not-so-soft and not-so-private state of depression over it. Only on Sunday, after a historic singles performance, did he feel some release from those negative memories.
And before this missive is considered as a spree of sympathy, plenty of the stress is deserved. Snedeker erred in many ways — just as Bradley and Johnson both did — some of which was out in the open and, if we are to trust his word, more of which took place behind closed doors. But one thing became abundantly clear in each of his daily pairing sessions: the International team accurately predicted many of his chess moves, and threw him off with some of theirs. Geoff Ogilvy and Trevor Immelman have purposefully kept close relationships with European captain Luke Donald to better understand their blueprint to beating the Americans. (And it damn near worked.)
If Donald is an example of anything, it’s that a successful captaincy can sprout positive fruit from the waning years of a playing career. Captaincies are among the final golf duties these pros can be remembered by.
So we ask: How will you remember Brandt Snedeker, victorious Presidents Cup captain?
For me, it’s a man who badly, badly wanted the job and who inched close enough to life as a losing American captain that he fully realized it while it was happening. Much to his benefit, that fate never became reality, leaving relief to be the dominant emotion of his final press conference, rather than jubilation.
“I was surprised [about how stressful it was],” Snedeker said late Sunday night. “I don’t think anybody knows the weight a captain carries on their shoulders all week. I don’t think they realize that you’re not just making a decision that affects you, you’re making a decision that ripple-affects the whole team — people’s families, people’s lives. Every decision you make carries a serious consequence.
“You think you know, but you don’t until you’ve done it.”
Conveniently seated a few spots down the podium from him was Jim Furyk, a man who has already learned far too well how a captain can be remembered, and who now grabs the baton for an even higher mountain to climb in Ireland.
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