A Few Ways To Make The Walker Cup Better Even After Another Sensational Match

Golfweek’s Adam Schupak offers four suggestions to make the Walker Cup even better and I wholeheartedly endorse three of them, with one addition.

I’m on the fence about Schupak’s call to move the matches permanently to early May. This works around the NCAA Championships and ensuing June and July pro debut weeks for top college golfers. I get the concept, but a lot may change with amateurism in the coming years. This also feels like a nod to the PGA Tour’s untenable wraparound schedule and the pro tournament exemption game, two things that could easily change and which are way less important to golf than the Walker Cup.

Schupak also calls for expanding the rosters to 12 as they did this year due to COVID. That move saved the matches after a severe outbreak of an unexplained virus, allowing the governing bodies to take advantage of the extra bodies on hand. That kept the matches going and entertained those of us who watched some terrific golf given the weakened state of most players, the pressure of a team event and the challenges of Seminole. Challenges being a euphemism for borderline goofy.

Anyway, the alternate spots also gave some worthy young men a special experience they would not have gotten sitting at home.

Schupak’s most sensitive suggestion revolves around Team GB&I. He’d like it to be Team Europe.

While GB&I put up a noble fight, losing 14-12, the U.S. now holds a 38-9-1 all-time record in the competition. It isn’t quite the Harlem Globetrotters dominance of the Washington Generals, but it is lopsided enough to resemble Alabama over the rest of the SEC. Four years from now when GB&I returns to the U.S. for the matches at Cypress Point, it is likely that none of the competitors will have been born since GB&I last won on U.S. soil (in 2001). We’ll never know how much of a difference Spain’s Jon Rahm and Norway’s Viktor Hovland would have made, but I’d love to find out from the next generation of continental Europe stars and put to bed the nickname of “the Walk-over Cup.”

I was pondering a post about this very topic but when the matches got close and I chickened out. Before moving on I looked up the Official World Amateur ranking to see what kind of team would have been fielded.

This year’s GB&I team by the ranking:

1 of the top 20

4 of the top 30

6 of the top 50

The one top 20 player went 0-4 so the rankings only mean so much (but that was a terrific, hard fought 0-4 if such a thing is possible).

If the team had been expanded to Europe it would have looked like this on paper:

4 of the top 20

9 of the top 20

12 of the top 50

The likely adds to the roster assuming a European team of twelve and not too much politicking:

5. Ludvig Aberg (Sweden)

13. Vincent Norman (Sweden)

18 David Puig Currius (Spain)

23 Mattias Schmid (Germany)

30 Alvaro Mueller-Baumgart Lucena (Spain)

32 Eugenio Lopez-Chacarra Coto (Spain)

36 Jose Luis Ballester Barrio (Spain)

This would mark a huge change for the R&A to grapple with. I can’t fathom the first world ramifications Martin Slumbers and friends would have to deal with given the times (Brexit). The change would also be a tough sell given how valiantly this year’s team played and how close they came to winning.

As for the one non-Schupak suggestion that’s all mine: honorary Seminole memberships for all 24 players.

Why?

Besides putting on a great show, the simple act of not spilling their guts out on the course and revealing from where the “stomach bug” originated. Given that media outlets blamed The Breakers or worse, the players were saints for not saying more.

Memberships for everyone! Oh and not to worry about Nathaniel. He’s already got one.