MEDINAH, Ill. — The objective for the home team in the Ryder Cup and Presidents Cup is to get up early in the matches and ride the momentum of the crowd. The common phrase heard at these competitions is to get a lot of red — or blue (Europe) or gold (International) — on the board.
U.S. captain Brandt Snedeker tried to stack the top of his Sunday lineup while trailing by three points and said, “We’ve got some studs up there at the top of the lineup that are going to go out there and hopefully put a bunch of red on the board.”
It used to be an actual thing. Now it’s a figure of speech.
There were no boards at Medinah.
It’s a recent trend, at the Ryder Cup in Europe, and now the Presidents Cup. Organizers are leaning on video boards across the golf course that show a mixture of results and video of other matches.
But to get a sense of the score requires being there long enough for the screen to change.
The stationary boards — similar to what’s found at the majors — used to have all the matches and the score in red, blue or gold to indicate who was leading. Spectators knew, players knew, momentum was created.
Boards were noticeably missing in France in the 2018 Ryder Cup. Kerry Haigh, the chief competitions officer at the PGA of America, also noticed them missing and said that would not be the case in U.S. matches. There have been boards at Whistling Straits and Bethpage Black.
The PGA Tour had 20 video boards across Medinah, eight with content such as real-time scoring, graphics and video, 12 with PGA Tour content.
For the players, noise was good enough without the visual.
“More than anything I want to hear the crowd going. The crowd can tell you what’s going on,” Snedeker said Saturday. “We had a great crowd today. I heard a lot of roars out there. It was exciting. I don’t think we need boards; I think we need crowds.”
He went on to say that “what’s on the board doesn’t matter” because players should be paying attention to the match in front of them.
As for no standard boards, International captain Geoff Ogilvy pointed to his radio to let his players know what was going on, if the pockets of occasional cheers weren’t enough.
“They ask us what’s happening, and I guess we text the leaderboard on the phone if there’s no board there, like we do,” Ogilvy said. “We’re all communicating about what’s going on in other matches. Some of the guys don’t care like what the other matches are doing.”
He also said Sunday that it was tough getting scores to load on the phone because of so many people in the crowd using their phone at the same time.
