Major champs battling…in sixsomes?! How new team event stands apart

CLEARWATER, Fla. — Peter Jacobsen, the seven-time PGA Tour winner turned broadcaster and general man about golf, co-created the World Champions Cup because he thought senior golf needed a team event in the mold of the Ryder Cup and Presidents Cup. In at least one regard, the upstart tournament, the second playing of which kicked off Thursday morning here at Feather Sound Country Club, does mimic its more established cousins: the best players from the U.S., Europe and the rest of the world playing for their flags in a format that breaks from the drumbeat of traditional stroke-play events. But in far more regards, this World Champions Cup has its own identity.   

For one, no hecklers!

We’re joking, but only kind of. The 18 players who competed in the opening three six-ball sessions Thursday morning were welcomed on the 1st tee by a couple hundred fans peering down on them from a half-filled wraparound grandstand — but not with booming chants of U-S-A or ole-ole-ole or by a foul-mouthed emcee . . . just with good old-fashioned applause. Patriotic symbolism was also at a premium, short of Miley Cyrus’ “Party in the USA” blaring from speakers by the tee. No fans in face paint. No Viking horns. No Stars-and-Stripes overalls. The couple of Team USA supporters who did have American flags draped over their shoulders said they were a last-minute impulse buy, snagged while shopping for throat lozenges at CVS.

If the environment lacked electricity, though, it allowed for fluidity. One moment, you could have a front-row seat to Colin Montgomerie smoothing balls on the range or Miguel Ángel Jiménez firing up a stogie; the next, you could be sitting tee-side as major winners like Stewart Cink, Darren Clarke and Mike Weir ripped their drives (and, in Clarke’s case, cracked wise) at the opener. Out on the course, even better sightlines were available; whereas at a Ryder Cup, you need to elbow for space and get four or five holes ahead of a group for a decent vantage point, at the World Champions Cup, you can get so close to tees and greens that you can hear the players’ banter. (Yes, that was Jerry Kelly at the par-5 5th, razzing his partner, Steve Flesch, for an awkward bathroom encounter Flesch had had on the walk to the tee.)    

The World Champions Cup’s format is also a long way from that of the Ryder or President Cup. To begin with, there are three teams in the mix, which complicates the scoring; traditional head-to-head match play doesn’t work.

When Jacobsen conceived of the event with his co-founder, Intrasport chief Charlie Besser, Jake said the two men “locked themselves into a room with reams of papers” to concoct a scoring system. What they settled on was a stroke-play format that is contested across 24 nine-hole groupings and includes both team and singles play.

On the first two days of the three-day event, the players compete in six-balls (i.e., best ball scoring with three pairings in each group) and Scotch Sixsomes (which is a modified version of alternate shot). In both of those formats, according to the official rules, “The team with the lowest score on a hole will receive two points. The team with the second lowest score on a hole will receive one point. The team with the highest score will receive no points. Whenever teams finish with the same score on a hole, those teams will be awarded the same number of points.” On Sunday, the event will wrap with six singles matches with scoring that follows that of the team formats. All in all, there are a total of 648 points up for grabs. At the inaugural event, in 2023, the U.S. won in a nail-biter, collecting a total of 221 points, which, amazingly, was just two more than the International side’s haul.  

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“Two years ago, I had a bunch of players say to me, ‘I don’t get the format,’” Jacbosen told me. “All I could said to them was, ‘Once you play the first hole, you’ll get it.’ And then they all came in afterward and said, ‘Oh, ok, yeah, I get it.’”

If six players and their caddies on a hole sounds like a crowd, it is, especially when they’re collectively bunched around a tee box or pacing a green. Simply keeping track of who has the honor can be a chore — unless you were Stewart Cink on Thursday morning. In his opening six-ball match, Cink found himself in the unenviable and “tedious” position of hitting last on every hole. “We didn’t win any holes outright,” he told me after he and Jason Caron picked up 7 points in their match against Darren Clarke and Thomas Bjorn (Europe), and Steven Alker and Mike Weir (International). “So I hit sixth for nine straight holes and three straight hours.”

That bit of ignominy aside, Cink said that he likes six ball, because with so many balls in play, “there’s always going to an action moment on hole, good or bad.”

Jerry Kelly, who won 6 points with Flesch on Thursday morning, sounded like he was less well suited for a format that requires the patience of a schoolteacher. Kelly, who has a reputation for playing quickly, said he started getting antsy . . . on the first tee. “After the fifth guy,” he told me, “I totally quick-stepped him off the tee.”

Kelly said the heavy traffic on the greens was a challenge, too. “It’s tough stepping around everyone’s mark, and just about everybody stepped on a mark,” he said. “Really a bit of cluster in your mind, and you kind of don’t focus on your game as much as you normally do, because you’re always trying to get out of someone’s way or trying to figure out when it’s your turn to hit. Takes you a little more out of your game.”

Steve Stricker, who with his partner Justin Lenard earned only 5.5 points in their morning session before they bounced back to a 9.5-point tally in the afternoon, said the key to sixsome golf is giving yourself mental breaks when play slows down — and it will slow down: the nine-hole morning sessions all took three-plus hours. “You gotta just go away and get into another zone for a minute and not pay attention,” Stricker told me.

As the afternoon matches made their way to the final hole, a par-4 with water short and right of the green and a box seating behind it, the crowds were bigger and livelier than they had been at the opening tee shots. Three women in star-spangled caps stood near the green angling for a view around a couple of camera operators and photographers, while up in the stands, where bartenders were pouring drinks, fans mustered a short-lived U-S-A! chant.

But, really, it was the blue-and-gold that deserved the cheers. When Justin Leonard holed the day’s final putt, a 5-footer for par, Europe had opened up a 4.5-point over both its opponents. Maybe this event isn’t so different from a Ryder Cup after all.