Jason Sobel - November 18, 2011

• By Morning Drive Team
• Nov 18, 2011 7:23 AM ET

Sobel’s visit began with an admonition from Gary that he broke his word that he would visit the studio wearing clothes by IJP Design (Poulter’s clothing company). The most noteworthy thing about the matches so far to Jason is the performance of the duo of Mickelson and Furyk. After Mickelson declined to say on Morning Drive who he wanted to team with, he is surprised to see he and Furyk playing so well despite the fact that they had only played together one time since 1997 before this week (1999 Ryder Cup).

Tiger Woods is 0-2-0 despite actually playing some good golf this week. Neither Steve Stricker on Day One nor Dustin Johnson on Day Two have done much to help Tiger. In text messages with Tiger’s instructor Sean Foley, Foley was amazed how quickly people proclaim Tiger is back and then proclaim that he is not back. But that is just the way it is with Tiger. He felt it was interesting that Int’l Captain Greg Norman followed the Tiger match the entire time and feels that it is a big focus of the Int’l team to make sure that they defeat Tiger Woods in his matches.

He does not see how Ernie Els and Ryo Ishikawa are still together with how they have performed in Day One and Day Two. He did acknowledge that there may be something that Norman sees  that he and others do not. It is also a surprise that Norman is keeping the Australians separated for the most part this week as Sobel thinks that the separation is costing the International team some momentum and crowd energy. For Day Three, he thinks that the local crowds will be behind both Ogilvy-Allenby and Baddeley-Day and it will be interesting to see the effect of the local crowds on those matches.