Professional golf is, for fifty-one weeks of the year, a profoundly individual pursuit. A man stands over his ball, alone with his thoughts and his yardage, and the outcome of the shot belongs entirely to him. This is one of the game’s great virtues — the absence of a teammate to blame, the impossibility of hiding behind someone else’s performance — but it is also, occasionally, one of its limitations. When every week looks the same, when every leaderboard is a column of names arranged by a number, the sameness can become a kind of anaesthesia.
The Zurich Classic of New Orleans, which begins at TPC Louisiana on Thursday, is the annual cure for that condition. It is the only team event on the PGA Tour’s regular schedule — seventy-four pairs of two, playing alternate shot and four-ball across four days — and it is, reliably, one of the most entertaining weeks on the calendar. The problem is that not enough people seem to have noticed.
Why team golf is different
The format changes everything. In four-ball, both players hit their own ball and the team takes the better score. The dynamic this creates is one of calculated aggression: if your partner has already found the green in regulation, you are free to attack a tucked pin, to take on a carry you would never attempt in individual play, to play with the liberating knowledge that a mistake will not cost you a shot. The conservative instinct that governs most professional golf — the instinct that says the percentages favour the middle of the green, the centre of the fairway, the safe play — is temporarily suspended, and the golf that results is often bolder and more watchable than anything the regular Tour produces.
Alternate shot — foursomes, in the older and better name — is something else entirely. Here the two players share a single ball, hitting alternately until the hole is completed. This format rewards a different set of qualities: trust, communication, the willingness to accept that your partner’s shot has left you in a position you would not have chosen, and the discipline to play the next shot without resentment. It is the format that most closely resembles what golf feels like for the rest of us — the Saturday foursome, the club match, the Ryder Cup afternoon — and watching professionals navigate its demands reveals aspects of their character that stroke play never touches.
This year’s field
The 2026 edition arrives with a field that gives the week a genuine headline. Matt and Alex Fitzpatrick — the older brother fresh from his second RBC Heritage title — are the betting favourites, and the prospect of watching them operate as a unit carries a particular appeal. These are brothers who grew up playing the same holes at Hallamshire Golf Club in Sheffield, who know each other’s games with the intimacy that only shared practice greens and childhood matches can produce. In alternate shot, where the key is knowing what your partner is likely to do with the ball you are about to leave him, that familiarity is an enormous advantage.
The other pairing drawing attention is Brooks Koepka and Shane Lowry — a new partnership born from friendship and circumstance. Lowry won this event alongside Rory McIlroy in 2024, but McIlroy is sitting this one out, and Lowry has turned instead to the man with five major championships and a game built on the kind of power that makes four-ball a very appealing format. Koepka, now fully re-established on the PGA Tour after his years on LIV Golf, brings a competitive intensity that could make this pairing formidable or combustible, depending on the week.
Behind them, the defending champions Ben Griffin and Andrew Novak return seeking something no team has managed: back-to-back Zurich Classic titles.
What we lose by not paying attention
The Zurich Classic routinely delivers drama of a kind that individual stroke play struggles to match. The alternate shot rounds, in particular, produce tension that is qualitatively different from the tension of a Sunday back nine in a regular event. When a player hits a poor drive in stroke play, the consequence belongs to him alone and the path to recovery is clear. When a player hits a poor drive in alternate shot, the consequence belongs to his partner, who must now fashion a recovery from a position he did not create and a lie he did not choose. The resulting dynamic — of shared responsibility, of silent encouragement, of frustration that cannot be expressed because the next shot demands full concentration — is compelling in a way that the individual game simply cannot replicate.
There is also the matter of personality. In most PGA Tour events, the players are separated by the structure of the competition. They occupy the same leaderboard but rarely the same emotional space. In the Zurich Classic, they share a scorecard, a strategy, and a four-hour walk that requires conversation, compromise, and the occasional moment of genuine joy when a partner holes an improbable putt. The celebrations are different — looser, more spontaneous, directed at another person rather than at the crowd — and they remind you that these are, beneath the logos and the yardage books, people who enjoy playing golf with their friends.
The case for more
The Ryder Cup and Presidents Cup demonstrate, every two years, that team golf produces an intensity and watchability that the regular Tour struggles to match. Those events thrive because they combine elite golf with genuine emotion — the stakes are shared, the victories are collective, and the format rewards qualities that individual play does not test. The Zurich Classic is the only regular-season event that offers a version of that experience, and it does so with a fraction of the attention.
Perhaps that is changing. The quality of this year’s field suggests that the players themselves value the week more than the broadcast ratings indicate. Perhaps the sight of the Fitzpatrick brothers competing together, or Koepka and Lowry finding their rhythm in alternate shot, will remind a wider audience that golf is not always better when it is played alone. The game was born as a social pursuit — two players, a wager, a walk along the links — and the Zurich Classic, for one week each spring in Louisiana, remembers that origin with a format that brings out the best in the sport.
It deserves more of your attention than it probably gets. This week would be a fine time to start.