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“I have a chance to do the coolest thing in my life here,” Shane Lowry said to his caddie walking up the 18th fairway on Sunday of the 2025 Ryder Cup at Bethpage Black. He was referring to his upcoming 6-footer that would clinch the Ryder Cup on away soil for the European team.
Spoiler alert: He made it.
Five years earlier, at the 2021 Ryder Cup at Whistling Straits, a visibly emotional Rory McIlroy fought back tears after his Sunday singles match when it looked like his team would lose. Despite putting a point on the board for his team, McIlroy lamented that he wished he had contributed more that week. “The more and more I play in this event, I realize that it’s the best event in golf, bar none,” he said.
Those are just two memories that come to mind when I think about how much team golf means to the best players in the world, and I'm sure you can think of dozens of others. The game's most elite players experience the full range of emotions — the highest of highs and lowest of lows — when playing for their team or country.
I'm not suggesting professional golfers don't enjoy, crave or flourish in team golf settings. I'm simply saying professionals don't need team golf the way recreational players do.
Playing as an individual is plenty of incentive for professional golfers to play their best. Golf is their livelihood and, for many, their identity. Attached to virtually every stroke are implications for rankings, money, reputation and legacy.
For professionals, team golf is a rare opportunity to add something extraordinary to an already highly competitive career.
For the rest of us, there are no FedEx Cup points, no world rankings, no Tour card and no paycheck waiting on the other side of the 18th green.
That’s not to say recreational golfers don’t have some skin in the game, be it a $20 in the Nassau, a trophy or simply bragging rights. But for everyday golfers, team golf can be the thing that gives an otherwise ordinary round of golf meaning, stakes and memories.
Consider the most common example of recreation partner golf: the Member-Guest. We take a game that, for most participants, has very little consequence outside the club and build an entire competitive universe around it:
- handicaps
- flights
- teams
- formats
- prizes
- side games
- uniforms
- matchups
- meals
- cocktails
- awards
It's almost comically elaborate. And that's exactly the point. It's not just about creating competition, but rather creating an event people will remember.
I realized just how powerful this could be when I turned 40 earlier this year. My husband gave me free rein to plan whatever kind of celebration I wanted. I could host a dinner, plan a trip or pick out some expensive piece of … golf equipment (you thought I was going to say jewelry, didn't you?). The sky was the limit for my 40th.
So I invited 23 of my closest golf friends to Scottsdale and turned my birthday into a two-day, Ryder Cup-style competition.
We had teams: Vintage vs. Vogue. We had uniforms and team gifting. We had an opening ceremony where everyone got dressed up. People made speeches and we unveiled the pairings. There was strategy, a little bit of trash-talk and plenty of friendly competition. We even had awards beyond simple bragging rights.
In other words, we had gone to an extraordinary amount of trouble to turn a golf weekend into an event that mattered.
And it worked.
It wasn't really about the outcome of the event, although maybe I'm saying that because my team, Team Vintage, didn't win. It was about what happened when we gave a group of women a reason to care about the outcome together.
Some of the women were sisters. Some had known each other so long they might as well have been sisters. Some knew a handful of others; some knew only one or two people in the group.
But over the course of the weekend, 24 women who otherwise might never have shared a golf course became teammates, opponents and, ultimately, part of the same story.
That's the part I didn't fully appreciate before I did it: we had created meaning where there wasn't any to begin with.
A few months after my 40th birthday tournament, I saw the same phenomenon in a very different setting.
My husband and I were spending some time in Carmel and the Pebble Beach area. After playing the par-3 short course, The Hay, we bellied up to the bar for a drink when we saw a group of men gathering for what turned out to be the Crewe Cup, an annual invitational team match-play tournament featuring elite amateur players in a pure, no-handicap format.
Built around competition, camaraderie and tradition, the event uses the game at its highest level to drive meaningful philanthropy at the grassroots level.
Among the men heading to tee off at The Hay was Steph Curry — yes, that Steph Curry.
My husband and I had previously met him at a Golden State Warriors game, so we went over to say hello. Turns out, one of the greatest basketball players of all time is just like us.
Sort of.
Even people who have access to almost every imaginable form of entertainment still choose to create occasions around amateur golf. Curry could play golf almost anywhere, with almost anyone. Instead, he was there for an amateur team competition with his friends.
At some point, golf stops being only about improving at golf. We still want to hit better shots, of course. But the reasons we keep showing up multiply: the walk, the competition, the clothes, the place, the post-round drink, the people we know we'll see.
And team golf amplifies the one thing that can be hardest to manufacture in recreational golf: a reason for everyone to care about what happens next.
The elite player will leave the Walker Cup, Solheim Cup, Presidents Cup or Ryder Cup and return to another tournament, another leaderboard, another week of individual competition.
For the rest of us, that made-up team event might be the only tournament we play all year.
That's why I think amateurs need team golf more than professionals do - not because we care more about winning, but because we have fewer opportunities to make golf matter.
A Member-Guest. A women's league. An inter-club match. A buddy trip. A couples' event. The Ryder Cup you invent for your 40th birthday.
We create the stakes because, unlike the pros, we have to. And in the process, we create something better than a scorecard. We create a story that belongs to all of us.
One that we'll still be talking about 10 years later.
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