If there is one decision the Ryder Cup captaincy of Hal Sutton is remembered for, it is surely the move to pair Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson for the first two sessions at Oakland Hills.
Unsurprisingly, Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson were the two highest ranked players in the field at the 2004 Ryder Cup. However, the two had never been paired together in the previous three Ryder Cups.
Woods had already garnered a reputation for being a difficult player to find the right partner for. By the time he teed it up in Michigan, he had already had eight different partners. Mickelson would be his ninth.
But Hal Sutton clearly saw no reason why the two best players in the field would not be able to blow the Europeans away. Unfortunately for USA, that is not exactly how it played out.
Why the pairing of Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson failed at the 2004 Ryder Cup
Woods and Mickelson lost both of their matches on Friday. Both went to at least the 17th hole, but it says everything about the manner of the defeats that the two have never been paired together again.
And in 2016, speaking to Golf.com, Mickelson explained the reason why he believes they failed to click that week.
“Tiger found out the year before when we played at the Presidents Cup in 2003 that the golf ball I was playing was not going to work for him,” he said. “He plays a very high-spin ball and I play a very low-spin ball, and we had to come up in two days with a solution.
“So I grabbed a couple dozen of his balls, I went off to the side, and tried to learn his golf ball in a four- or five-hour session on one of the other holes, trying to find out how far the ball goes. It forced me to stop my preparation for the tournament, to stop chipping and putting and sharpening my game in an effort to crash-course learn a whole different golf ball that we were going to be playing.
“And in the history of my career, I have never ball-tested two days prior to a major. I’ve never done it. Had we known a month in advance, we might have been able to make it work. I think we probably would have made it work. But we didn’t know until two days prior.”
How the 2004 Ryder Cup played out
Unfortunately for Sutton, that was one of a number of decisions which backfired across the week 20 years ago. Europe led 6.5-1.5 after the opening day, with only Chris DiMarco and Jay Haas winning a full point for the home side.
The gap would be extended after Saturday, with Bernhard Langer’s men winning 3-1 on Saturday afternoon to take a 11-5 lead into the singles.
And there was to be no Brookline-style comeback. Woods did win the opening singles match up against Paul Casey, but he was one of just four Americans to win their points on Sunday as Europe sealed their biggest ever victory at 18.5-9.5.
Both Woods and Mickelson would lose three matches across the week, with the latter only managing to take one point from the event.
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