If Johnny Miller were captain of the 2014 U.S. Ryder Cup, he might have asked veterans Jim Furyk, Phil Mickelson, and Matt Kuchar to give their hard-earned spots to eager and unscarred rookies like FedEx Cup winner Billy Horschel and Deutsche Bank winner Chris Kirk.
Johnny Miller not crazy about Tom Watson’s Ryder Cup picks
Johnny Miller says he’s a fan of Tom Watson’s captain’s picks for the U.S. Ryder Cup team but he would have opted for Billy Horschel and Chris Kirk.
Scott Halleran
“The fact that [U.S. captain Tom] Watson picked Keegan [Bradley], and Webb [Simpson], and Hunter [Mahan], who — they’re good picks, there’s no doubt about it,” NBC Sports lead analyst Miller, a critic of the skipper’s choices, said during a Friday teleconference ahead of this week’s matches at Gleneagles. “But obviously if [Watson] could have picked later, he probably would have changed his pick, with Kirk and Horschel.
“But the guys that he picked are good picks,” Miller hastened to add, though not very convincingly.
Watson, a staunch traditionalist who stuck to the schedule that mandated he choose the final three of his 12-player team immediately after the PGA Championship instead of waiting until the end of the FedEx Cup playoffs, said he would have made the same selections even after Horschel won the $10 million FEC jackpot.
“He [Horschel] was on my radar early in the year,” Watson told Reuters last week. “I like his swing, like his fundamentals but he just didn’t perform well enough to get on the team.”
Simpson (with one win, eight other top-10 finishes, and six missed cuts) and Mahan (one win, five additional top 10s, and five MCs), though, did.
Miller, never shy about voicing his opinions, said between Horschel’s back-to-back wins at the BMW and Tour Championships that he would have gone with fresh new faces on the team that the Europeans upset two years ago at Medinah.
Chris Kirk and Billy Horschel at the TOUR Championship, via Kevin C. Cox.
“I would have liked to have seen more younger guys have a chance, especially Chris Kirk,” Miller told the San Jose Mercury News. “I thought he deserved to be on the team. The team is good, but I like young blood.”
The two-time major champion went a step further Friday in his review of Watson’s selections, singling out 44-year-old and perennial runner-up Jim Furyk for his 9-17-4 Ryder Cup record. Never mind that Furyk (four second-place finishes this season, including a tie for second at the Tour Championship, and No. 3 in Ryder Cup points), Mickelson (No. 5), and Kuchar (No. 6) were among the nine players to receive automatic entry into the team’s table tennis “team room.”
“I don’t even know if the U.S. has chemistry,” Miller said, laughing, about whether camaraderie were more important than performance in team events.
“It’s one of those things like, I would have been happy if the U.S. had eight rookies just because the guys who should be the ‘anchors’ — players like Furyk, and even Kuchar, and Mickelson, and of course Tiger’s not here — but those guys hardly had a 50% winning record,” he said. “So going for the ‘veterans,’ I would have got the guys who’ve never lost before and see what they could do because obviously losing five out of the last six matches — guys like Furyk have not done well and haven’t led the team to do anything but lose.”
