It was almost 50 years ago that current Lake County resident Johnny Pott, a top golfer on the PGA Tour from the mid 1950s through the early 1970s, was asked by his fellow Ryder Cup teammates to offer the position of Ryder Cup captain to the iconic Ben Hogan. The setting was the Colonial National Invitational in Fort Worth, a course that was oftentimes referred to as “Hogan’s Alley” because of the multitude of success that Hogan had experienced at his hometown course. It was late May of 1967, the 10 man Ryder Cup team had been finalized for that September’s matches at the Champions Golf Club in Houston, and now it was the job of the team to seek out someone who would captain them in their biennial encounter with the top 10 golf professionals from Great Britain and Ireland.
Pott was induced to seek out Hogan because there had been a longtime family connection with the Potts and Hogan. Hogan was a contemporary of Ben Potts, a longtime golf pro in the Mississippi Gulf Coast area as well as Johnny’s father. As the history books tells us, Hogan agreed to become the non-playing captain for Team USA and led the American squad to its biggest winning margin in Ryder Cup history. The final tally was USA 23 ½ — GB&I 8 ½ .
How the times have changed. Earlier this week, in a press conference watched world-wide on the Golf Channel and covered by numerous media and print outlets, the PGA of America announced that Jim Furyk would become the American captain at the Ryder Cup matches which will be held in Paris in September of 2018. Some 50 years ago, there was minimal interest in the Ryder Cup. The top 10 played for their country, they played the top 10 from the British Isles, the results could be read in the following day’s sports sections, and in the big picture of the world of sports, very few people truly cared. They even had to hustle up their own captain. Nowadays the Ryder Cup is a really big deal, right up there with golf’s four major championships. Today, a national organization representing golf club professionals chooses the captain some 20 months in advance with much hoopla, excitement, and assessment. Also, unlike it was in 1967, the Ryder Cup makes a boatload of money for the PGA of America.
Jim Furyk was the odds on favorite to lead Team USA into battle this time around against the European team and their captain, Thomas Bjorn. Now that Davis Love III has had the chance to captain two Ryder Cup teams, and the Tom Watson experiment of 2014 showed the generation gap between the new breed and a senior tour golfer in his mid-60s, the PGA of America has continued with its formula of naming a captain who is largely admired by this current batch of 20-something golfers and who also just so happens to still be active on today’s PGA Tour.
Jim Furyk will be 48 years old when the first tee shot is struck in Paris at the 2018 Ryder Cup matches. He remains a fully exempt golfer on the PGA Tour. Most importantly, his golf game is still relevant. Although he missed a major portion of the 2016 season with a wrist injury and resulting surgery, Furyk showed that he still has game when he returned in the early summer, topping it off with an all time low round of 58 during the fourth round of play at the Travelers Championship at Hartford in early August. A handful of golfers have shot 59 in a tour event, including Furyk in 2013 at the BMW Championship. No one has ever carded a 58 in the history of professional golf except for Jim Furyk.
Jim Furyk was born in western Pennsylvania in May of 1970. His father was a PGA teaching professional and ultimately a head golf course professional. Jim was a solid athlete as a kid who excelled in both basketball and golf. As a senior he won the state high school championship. He ended up playing college golf at the University of Arizona where he was a two time all-American as well as a member of Arizona’s 1992 NCAA championship team. As an aside, Furyk probably has the most non-conventional swing in golf’s modern era. David Feherty has described Furyk’s swing as that of “an octopus falling out of a tree.” Golf’s other funny man, Gary McCord, has said that Furyk’s swing reminds him of “a one armed man using an axe to kill a snake in a phone booth.
Regardless of the uniqueness of his swing, Furyk turned professional upon graduation from Arizona in the summer of 1992 and found himself on the AAA level Nike Tour the following year. During that 1993 rookie season, Furyk won the Nike Tour’s Mississippi Gulf Coast Classic and parlayed that into a place on the PGA Tour for 1994. He adapted to his new life on the big tour, made just under $250,000, and finished 78th on the money list. From that point on, Furyk simply got better, made more money, and started picking up tournament victories.
His initial breakthrough occurred during the latter portion of the 1995 season. Playing in the five round Las Vegas Invitational, Furyk went low, shooting 67-65-65-67-67 for a -28 under par total, good enough to eek out a one stroke margin of victory over Billy Mayfair. He won the Hawaiian Open four months later, defeating Brad Faxon in a sudden death playoff. From that point on, Furyk seemed to be able to take home a win almost every year, winning in Las Vegas for a second and third time in 1998 and 1999, finding victory lane at Doral in 2000, at Kapalua in 2001, and at the Memorial in 2002. The high water mark of his career occurred in June of 2003 when he led the U.S. Open wire to wire at Olympia Fields outside Chicago to win his one and only major title. Other career highlights included his 2005 win over Tiger Woods at the Western Open, and his three victory season in 2010 that culminated with a win at the Tour Championship. Furyk was named the 2010 PGA Tour player of the year at season’s end.
Jim Furyk’s career includes one major title, 17 victories on the PGA Tour, 27 overall titles including the Argentine Open, the South African Nedbank, and the World Challenge, nine Ryder Cup appearances, and seven times on the Presidents Cup team. Now he is the Ryder Cup captain, having been a vice captain for Davis Love III at Hazeltine this past September. Whether Jim Furyk ends up as the winning Ryder Cup captain at Paris in September of 2018 has a whole lot more to do with how many putts Team USA makes than with the choices and decisions he makes as the team’s captain. Nonetheless, Jim Furyk is a most respected choice to lead the American team this time around. He has the background, the demeanor, and the overall experience to do a fine job as team captain. Win or lose, a whole lot more of us will be fascinated by all that plays out in 2018 in Paris than we were with Houston in 1967,
