Wyndham Clark shares ‘one of the biggest shocks’ about Zach Johnson’s Ryder Cup captaincy

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It did appear that so little of the 2023 Ryder Cup went according to plan for Zach Johnson and the US team, with the visitors’ fightback in the last two sessions in Rome still leading to a five-point defeat.

Few would have predicted that Max Homa would be the only US player to play all five matches, while no-one would have ever imagined that Scottie Scheffler and Brooks Koepka would suffer a Ryder Cup record defeat at the hands of debutant Ludvig Aberg and Viktor Hovland.

The American team were dealing with illness during the week, which did appear to cause some problems for Zach Johnson. However, few could look at the pairings on Friday morning and suggest that the captain had to change a great deal due to the conditions of his players.

Wyndham Clark reveals what shocked him during the 2023 Ryder Cup

But if there was a plan, it seems that that plan did not make its way to the players for much of the week. Wyndham Clark was making his Ryder Cup debut in Rome, and he told the No Laying Up Podcast that it was alarming how off the cuff everything seemed to be.

“That was honestly one of the biggest shocks when I played for the team in Rome. I didn’t really know who I was playing with, and didn’t know the situation, and so I was just out on the range and then they’d come up and say, ‘alright Wyndham, you’re going with so and so’. ‘Okay, I didn’t even play practice rounds with him’. It was just disjointed,” he said.

How did Clark perform on his Ryder Cup debut?

Clark went into the week as the current US Open champion, so he may have been hoping to play a prominent role in the US trying to win on European soil for the first time since 1993. Remarkably, America are still yet to win the Ryder Cup in continental Europe.

He would make his first appearance on Friday afternoon, with Clark and Homa facing Justin Rose and Robert MacIntyre in the fourballs. And it did appear that the pair were going to put USA’s first full point on the board as they led 2 up with two to play.

However, Clark would miss a putt on 17 to win the match and then get his approach into 18 completely wrong, sending the ball into the crowds on the right.

But he was involved in the US’s most dramatic win of the week, as he and Patrick Cantlay beat Rory McIlroy and Matthew Fitzpatrick on Saturday evening. Of course, that was the match where tensions boiled over.

Clark would lose to MacIntyre in the final match in the singles to end his week with a 1-1-1 record – certainly not the worst performer on the American side by any means.