John Hawkins - November 16, 2011

• By Morning Drive Team
• Nov 16, 2011 8:53 AM ET

He is very excited about The Presidents Cup this year and he is also excited about his varied schedule this week in the Golf Channel studios. Every pairing has an interesting element to it but he feels that Greg Norman has some particularly interesting choices. He was very surprised to see the Els-Ishikawa pairing but it is also a sexy pairing which draws attention. His favorite U.S. pairing may be Bubba Watson and Webb Simpson and the pair of Aaron Baddeley and Jason Day is very interesting too. K.T. Kim and Y.E. Yang may not be favored but the team competition allows for very interesting scenarios. Because of the international team’s poor performance in foursomes, it is crucial that Ernie Els and Ryo Ishikawa get the team off to a good start. Ishikawa played with Ogilvy in 2009 and they got routed early by Woods and Stricker. Ryo has had a very tough year and Ernie is not playing well either so he wonders if it is too much to ask for these two players to set the tone for the day and maybe the entire 2011 Presidents Cup. He feels that the difficult greens at Royal Melbourne may be worth 3 points for the International team as a number of international team members have experience on those greens and they are also the home team.