It starts today.
Five sessions, four days, thirty points, and one of the best golf courses in the Midwest with a genuinely embarrassing history of blown leads. The Presidents Cup tees off this morning at Medinah Country Club outside Chicago, and if you have not looked at the schedule yet, the short version is that the good stuff starts later than you think today and earlier than you want on Saturday.
Here is the whole week. When it is on, what each session actually is, what the scoreboard is telling you, and who to pull for depending on the kind of sports fan you are.
The Schedule, In One Block
Tee times below are Chicago time, because that is where they are playing. Television times are Eastern, because that is how the networks publish them. Do the hour in your head once and you are set for the week.
- Thursday, September 24. Five four-ball matches. First group off at 11:35 a.m. Central, last of the five at 12:47 p.m. Coverage 12:30 to 7 p.m. Eastern on Golf Channel.
- Friday, September 25. Five foursomes matches. First group at 1:05 p.m. Central. Coverage 2 to 7 p.m. Eastern on Golf Channel.
- Saturday, September 26, morning. Four four-ball matches. First group at 7:02 a.m. Central. Set an alarm. Coverage 8 to 9 a.m. Eastern on Golf Channel, then 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. Eastern on NBC.
- Saturday, September 26, afternoon. Four foursomes matches. First group at 1:15 p.m. Central, rolling straight out of the morning session on the same NBC window.
- Sunday, September 27. Twelve singles matches. First group at 11:02 a.m. Central, last at 1:19 p.m. Coverage 12 to 6 p.m. Eastern on NBC.
Streaming is Peacock for the NBC weekend and the Golf Channel app for Thursday and Friday. If you are at work Thursday afternoon, the phone in the drawer is the play. We are not going to tell anyone.
The Math You Need And Nothing More
Thirty points are on the table. Every match is worth one point, a halved match splits it, and the first team to 15.5 wins the cup. If it lands on 15-15 the two teams share it, which has happened exactly once in the history of the event.
That is it. That is the whole scoreboard. When the graphic shows 8.5 to 6.5 you now know what both numbers mean and how far either side still has to go.
Worth knowing the shape of it, though. There are eighteen points available across Thursday, Friday and Saturday, and twelve more on Sunday. Which means a team can have a rough first three days, trail by four, and still theoretically run the table in singles. It also means a Saturday evening lead is worth a lot less than it looks on television, and everyone at Medinah knows exactly why.
Four-Ball And Foursomes, Translated
Two formats all week, and the broadcast will assume you know both.
Four-ball is what your group plays on a Saturday morning. Two men a side, everybody hits their own ball all the way through, and each team counts its better score on the hole. Low ball wins the hole. It is the friendlier of the two, it produces birdies in bunches, and it is why Thursday and Saturday morning tend to look like fun.
Foursomes is alternate shot. Two men, one golf ball, taking turns. One player tees off on the odds, his partner takes the evens, and they keep swapping until the ball is in the hole. It is the most quietly brutal format in golf, because every bad shot you hit is handed directly to a friend to clean up. You have never voluntarily played it. Nobody has.
The reason Friday and Saturday afternoon feel tighter and slower is not your imagination. Alternate shot makes grown professionals play conservative golf and apologize to each other on tee boxes.
Match Play Rules That Trip People Up
A few things the broadcast never stops to explain, because they assume you have been watching for thirty years.
- The score is holes, not strokes. "3 up" means a team is ahead by three holes with however many left. A ten on one hole costs you exactly one hole, same as a bogey does.
- "Dormie" means a team is up by exactly as many holes as remain. Ahead three with three to play. The trailing side has to win out just to tie.
- "4 and 3" means won by four holes with three left to play, so the match ended on the fifteenth green. This is why matches stop in odd places and the leaderboard suddenly goes quiet.
- Conceded putts are real. A player can wave off an opponent's short one at any time, and there is no arguing it. Half the strategy of a Sunday singles match is deciding when to stop giving those away.
- A halved match is half a point each. No playoff, no countback. Both sides take a half and walk.
Who Is Actually Playing
Twelve a side, six who qualified on points and six the captain picked himself.
Brandt Snedeker has Scottie Scheffler, Cameron Young, Wyndham Clark, Sam Burns, Russell Henley and Collin Morikawa in on points, with Xander Schauffele, Justin Thomas, Patrick Cantlay, Chris Gotterup, Jacob Bridgeman and Jackson Koivun added as picks. Gary Woodland, Jim Furyk, Keegan Bradley and Webb Simpson are his assistants.
Geoff Ogilvy qualified Adam Scott, Hideki Matsuyama, Ryan Fox, Min Woo Lee, Tom Kim and Si Woo Kim, then picked Sungjae Im, Corey Conners, Nick Taylor, Christiaan Bezuidenhout, Nico Echavarria and Ryo Hisatsune. Tim Clark, Trevor Immelman, Taylor Pendrith and Camilo Villegas are helping him run it.
Every player has to get into at least one match before Sunday, so nobody spends four days holding a water bottle. And because Thursday and Friday run five matches instead of four, ten of the twelve are out there on both of those days.
Who To Root For
Depends entirely on what kind of sports fan you are, and all five of these are legitimate.
If you just want the flag. Easy. The Americans have won ten straight and lead the all-time series 13-1-1, and there is nothing wrong with pulling for the team that is supposed to win. Flag week is the one week a year where nobody is going to give you grief about it.
If you like a guy with something to prove. Scottie Scheffler. The best player in the world by a comfortable distance carries a 3-5-1 career record in this event, which is the sort of stat that follows a man around. Tiger and Phil both had slow starts in team golf before it turned. This is the week Scheffler gets asked about it eleven more times.
If you like rookies. Jackson Koivun is 21 years old, has made seven starts as a professional, won the 3M Open by holding off Scheffler down the stretch, finished top five at the Biltmore Championship, and is now the second-youngest American ever to play in this event behind Jordan Spieth. Jacob Bridgeman won the Biltmore two weeks ago and got picked off the back of it. Both are making their debuts today.
If you root for underdogs on principle. The International side. They have won this thing once, in 1998 at Royal Melbourne, and have not so much as tied it since 2003. Si Woo Kim and Tom Kim are the pairing to watch, Si Woo has never lost a four-ball match in this event, and Ogilvy has four rookies he clearly believes in. Twenty-eight years is a long time to be told you cannot win.
If you appreciate a good subplot. Geoff Ogilvy is captaining the International team on a golf course he helped redesign. He knows where the trouble is on every hole out there, and he is going to spend four days trying to use that against the home team. That is a genuinely strange and great sports situation.
The Thing Hanging Over Medinah
Everyone in the American team room knows this one, so you may as well.
Medinah hosted the 2012 Ryder Cup. The United States led 10-6 going into Sunday singles and lost 14.5 to 13.5. Snedeker played in that match. Three of his four assistant captains were there too. The European press called it the Miracle at Medinah and nobody on the American side has enjoyed hearing the phrase since.
So the story of the week writes itself. If the Americans build a lead by Saturday night, every camera and every broadcaster is going to bring up 2012 approximately once per commercial break, and the men on that first tee Sunday morning will have heard it all before anyone says it out loud.
The One Session To Clear The Calendar For
Sunday afternoon.
Twelve singles matches going off between 11:02 a.m. and 1:19 p.m. Central, twelve points on the board, and the whole cup decided inside about five hours. Singles is the format where the television actually works, because the broadcast can cut from a man standing over a six footer to another man standing over a six footer and both of them matter.
If you can only watch one session this week, it is that one. If you can watch two, add Saturday morning, because four-ball with the cup still live produces more birdies than anything else on the schedule.
What To Wear For Four Days On The Couch
Ours run $29.99, which is about a sleeve of balls, and this is the week of the year where the flag on your chest needs no explanation.
USA Flag Clubs & Balls is the straight-down-the-middle pick and the one that sells hardest every flag week. USA Flag Golfer does it with a single silhouette. Tees And Irons Flag reads as a flag from across the room and as a bag full of equipment from four feet away, which is the detail people ask about. American Flag Club and Flag Swing cover the same ground with the club doing the work.
Flag EKG is specifically for Sunday, when your heart rate becomes a medical event somewhere around the fourth singles match. Back Nine is the honest choice for a tournament that gets decided on back nines five sessions running. Here For A Good Time is for whoever in the room has no rooting interest and is mostly there for the food, and Fueled By Turn Dogs is for whoever is running the grill.
If you would rather wear it on your head, there is the matching USA Flag Clubs & Balls hat, plus a golf towel for the bag and a hoodie in the same design, which late September in the Midwest is going to justify by about seven in the evening. The rest of the warm stuff is in hoodies and long sleeves, and the bag gear is in hats and golf towels.
Saying this plainly because it comes up every single week. These are t-shirts. Nearly every course in the country wants a collar on you at the first tee, so this is not the shirt for your own round. It is the watch party shirt, the bar shirt, the shirt for the four hours on Sunday when you are yelling at a television about a putt you could not hit. If you need the collar for an actual round, that is what the polos are for.
The full lineup is in The Tee Box, with the newest designs in New Arrivals. We have been making shirts for golfers since 2025, and a Chicago golf week with the flag involved is about as good as this calendar gets.
Set The Recording
Thursday 12:30 p.m. Eastern. Friday 2 p.m. Saturday from 8 a.m. straight through to 7 p.m. Sunday noon to six, and that is the one.
Thirty points, twelve men a side, nobody getting paid a dollar, and a golf course that has already watched one team give away a four point lead on a Sunday afternoon. Four days of it. Go enjoy it.
See you tomorrow.
Dan
Shanked Right
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