There are few things in golf quite like the first tee at the Ryder Cup, with seasoned professionals speaking about how they have struggled to get their ball to stay on its tee due to their hands shaking.
Few have arguably had a baptism of fire quite like Tony Finau, with the 35-year-old making his debut in the Ryder Cup back at Le Golf National in 2018.
Of course, few will ever forget the sight of the incredible grandstand which seemed to suffocate the first tee six years ago; making a hole surrounded by water even more daunting for those tasked with heading out on a cold Friday morning just outside Paris.
And it turned out that Finau’s first ever shot in the Ryder Cup was also the first shot of the 2018 event, with Jim Furyk putting him and Brooks Koepka out in the first match, as they took on Justin Rose and Jon Rahm.
Tony Finau explains how he came to hit the opening tee shot at the 2018 Ryder Cup
And if it seemed as if the stakes could not be higher, Finau was playing on a team with legendary figures in Phil Mickelson and Tiger Woods. Unfortunately, it would appear that Woods was in no mood to put an arm around Finau’s shoulder when he found out that he would be hitting the opening tee shot of the event.
Speaking on Grant Horvat’s YouTube channel about the most memorable moment of his career, Finau explained how it came to be that he would be hitting that iconic shot.
“2018 Ryder Cup, Jim Furyk asks me when I want to go, and me and Brooks were going to be paired together. We’re like, ‘yeah we’d like to go first’, and he’s like ‘well, JT and Jordan are going to go first, I’m going to have them lead off, so you guys will go second’. We’re like, ‘great’,” he said.
“He ends up coming back to us like, ‘actually, they said if you guys want to go first, you can go first’. So I was like, ‘alright great’. And Brooks comes to me and he’s like, ‘you want to hit the first tee shot?’ ‘No, I’ll give that honour to you’. ‘No, let me rephrase that, you’re going to hit the first tee shot’. Brooks gives me the opportunity to hit the first tee shot, and since we’re the away team in Paris, I’m literally going to be hitting the opening tee shot out of the whole Ryder Cup.
“So Tiger finds this out at the team meeting that night. Tiger looks at me and he’s like, ‘don’t F it up, kid’. That’s all he said. And then he kind of chuckles. Anyway, I go to sleep and all I’m thinking about is that first tee shot.
“I get to the first tee, 10,000 people around, MJ’s there, Michael Phelps, these guys are all there watching. There’s so much energy, and then all of a sudden, as soon as I teed the ball up, you could hear a pin drop. Never experienced anything like it in my life.”
Why the stakes were even higher for Finau
What made Finau’s shot slightly easier was the fact that it was the fourballs up first, so there was a chance that Koepka could bail him out had the nerves got the better of him.
But what was perhaps forgotten was that Furyk overlooked the likes of Xander Schauffele, Matt Kuchar and Kevin Kisner to pick Finau, who was 15th in the qualification standings. For him therefore, to hit the first tee shot was quite something.
And the US would go on and dominate the session, with only Francesco Molinari and Tommy Fleetwood saving Europe from a 4-0 scoreline.
Finau meanwhile, would take two points from his three matches for the week, with an emphatic win over Fleetwood in the singles when the Englishman was looking to win his fifth point of the event. You would imagine that getting that first tee shot away made everything that was to come a lot easier for the debutant.
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