LAHINCH, Ireland – U.S. captain Nathan Smith’s initial message to his players ahead of this 51st Walker Cup?
“He pretty much just told us he wants us to crush these guys,” said Preston Stout, the world’s top-ranked amateur. “That’s the goal. We want to put them away early.”
Despite what the numbers say, it won’t be easy.
Great Britain and Ireland aren’t going to allow it. Not this time.
“We were ready to go last night,” GB&I captain Dean Robertson said on Friday morning, still hours from the opening ceremony.
While the U.S. has had a stranglehold on this competition with five straight victories dating to 2017’s romp in Los Angeles, GB&I enter Saturday’s opening foursomes session at Lahinch Golf Club with arguably their best chance of capturing the Walker Cup since they last won in 2015 at Royal Lytham.
“GB&I’s team is so good,” said Stewart Hagestad, who is representing the U.S. in his sixth straight Walker Cup and is 7-1 in singles play. “They’re hungry. Crowds are there. They’re trying to beat us too, right?”
The Americans are the clear favorites on paper. Everyone but Hagestad is ranked in the top 12 of the World Amateur Golf Ranking; the average rank for U.S. players is 8.2 compared to GB&I’s 39.6. But for just the second time since 2015, GB&I don’t have a single player ranked outside the top 100.
And in terms of experience, no Walker Cup team has had more than this year’s home side, which boasts six returners in Englishmen Tyler Weaver, Luke Poulter and Eliot Baker, Scots Connors Graham and Niall Sheils Donegan, and lone Irishman Stuart Grehan, a 33-year-old reinstated amateur who won the British Amateur earlier this summer. Add in U.S. Amateur champion Jack Whaley and GB&I has both major amateur champions for the first time since 2013.
Those veterans are still stinging from last year’s defeat at Cypress Point, where GB&I trailed by a single point through three sessions before only earning 1.5 of 10 possible points in Sunday singles. Robertson’s mantra that week was, “If they can believe, they can achieve.” But with lightning-fast greens, hero shots by the Americans and Weaver, the team’s star player, drawing then-world No. 1 Jackson Koivun in all four sessions and going 1-3, any belief was swallowed in a dense fog that rolled in late that Sunday afternoon.
However, that belief has returned along with confidence and tenacity.
“It’s fuel to the fire,” said Weaver, who hasn’t competed since April’s ACC Championship because of an oblique injury. “You learn so much from experiences like that. I think this year with the crowd being behind us, being on home soil, it’s just even more fuel. Everything is just kind of building up to this, and we’re so ready to go.”
Weaver wasn’t hitting full shots when the majority of this week’s 10 GB&I players convened at Lahinch earlier this summer for a training camp around the South of Ireland Championship. Graham shot 62 in the stroke-play portion of that tournament, which Grehan won back in 2015. Grehan has played an estimated 40 rounds on Lahinch’s Old Course, most of anyone on either team by far, while England’s Josh Hill was a somewhat surprising selection until one considered that he was the standout of that camp.
It’s clear that Lahinch is the ultimate equalizer. Its par-5 fourth and par-3 fifth holes, both relatively untouched from the late 1800s when Old Tom Morris designed them, feature blind shots hidden by massive sandhills. The rest of the holes, a combination of Alister Mackenzie’s 1927 redesign and Martin Hawtree’s extensive work before the turn of the century, roll beautifully through the coastal dunes, many of them forcing players to relinquish any desire to bomb and gauge.
When the U.S. players first arrived on Monday, they started bombing drivers down the par-4 10th, only to quickly realize that it was better to lay back and hit something closer to 270 yards, avoiding the chokepoint of the fairway.
But with wind like players faced on Friday – and likely will see come Sunday afternoon with forecasted gusts as high as 38 mph – even finding fairways with irons and greens with wedges aren’t guarantees.
“You’re going to have to be dynamic with a lot of your decisions,” Hagestad said, “and what you think could be the case in the morning of how to play a hole might change to the afternoon, let alone day-to-day.”
The wind has been out of the southwest all week, same for the South of Ireland, which has blown a significant amount of salt on the greens. Already slower than the 13s players faced at Cypress, Lahinch’s greens have been made stickier by the accumulation of salt, and it’s been difficult for greenkeeper Brian McDonagh and his staff to keep the desired low 10 numbers on the Stimpmeter.
The good news for McDonagh is that Saturday will see a shift to a southeasterly wind, which will firm and speed the course up. For the players, it will make the par-3s easier, though there will be tradeoff if the greens get too quick in 20 mph gusts.
“In terms of the weather and the wind, am I happy about it?” Robertson said. “I’m very happy about it.”
Robertson just wants the rain to stay away. While his guys have no problem being mudders – Whaley won his U.S. Amateur in wet conditions – he wants dry weather for the sold-out crowds of over 8,000 expected to attend.
Most of them, of course, will be rooting for GB&I, which has led after Day 1 in four straight Walker Cups on home soil, though have allowed American rallies in each of the past two.
Both sides know how important singles are, especially with that format accounting for 18 of the possible 26 points. The U.S. has won nine of past 11 Walker Cups and during that span hold a 126.5-77.5 advantage in singles.
Robertson is well aware of his side’s struggles in the 1v1.
But maybe this time, he hopes, it will feel more like 1v1,000.
“It’s funny, we’ve been walking around town this week, and everyone’s telling us good luck, and we’re like, ‘Yeah, they’re saying good luck now, but come Saturday they ain’t gonna be telling us that,'” said Stout, who is one of three U.S. players who have been dealing with illness; Ethan Fang and Williams Jennings didn’t practice on Thursday and missed that night’s gala along with Stout, though all three returned to the course on Friday.
“It’s going to be loud, but we’re all just super pumped. We don’t always get to play in front of a ton of people. Even though they’re rooting against us, it’ll be fun to put on a show.”
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