Medinah’s front nine was still soft from the morning dew when the first result of the week came in, and it set the tone for everything that followed. Scottie Scheffler and Sam Burns needed a bunker save from their captain-in-all-but-name on 17 to hold off Min Woo Lee and Sungjae Im, who had a birdie putt on 18 to square the match and left it with too much pace to have a real chance. One up. A half point that felt, in the moment, like it might have been a full one either way, and by Thursday evening it looked like the shape of the entire session in miniature: the U.S. team finding just enough, and the Internationals left to wonder about the sliding doors.
They closed the day 3-2 to the Americans, a lead that flatters nobody and threatens nobody, and reads as roughly fair for four hours of fourball golf in which both teams had their moments.
Koivun arrives, and Thomas makes sure it counts
The story of the day belonged, by some distance, to a 21-year-old playing in his first Presidents Cup match. Jackson Koivun, Brandt Snedeker’s final captain’s pick, was drawn alongside Justin Thomas against Corey Conners and Nico Echavarria, and the pairing never looked in doubt. Thomas and Koivun closed it out 4 and 3, a statistics service crediting Thomas with 3.65 strokes gained on the day, numbers that undersell how comfortable the match felt from the outside. Koivun’s ball-striking was not always crisp — this was, after all, a college star still finding his feet against Presidents Cup pressure rather than Presidents Cup golfers — but his putter did not know it was his debut, and Thomas did what Thomas does in team golf, which is find a way to make his partner look better than he might have alone. It extends what is now a startlingly good fourball record for Thomas, the sort of number that quietly makes him the most valuable teammate in the American room regardless of who is next to him.
For Conners, the defeat drops his overall Presidents Cup record to 2 wins and 8 losses, a mark that will not trouble the history books kindly, and it was the sort of afternoon where nothing quite got going for the Canadian and his young partner against opponents playing with obvious freedom.
Elsewhere in the fourballs, Wyndham Clark and Collin Morikawa were the most clinical pairing on the course. Clark opened with three birdies in four holes to establish the early control that so often decides these matches before lunch, and by the close he led the field in putting, gaining 2.23 strokes for the round in a 3-and-2 win over Ryan Fox and Adam Scott that was rarely as close as the scoreline briefly threatened to become.
The Internationals find their point, and their personality
If Geoff Ogilvy’s team has one obvious problem after Thursday, it is that two of its best chances went begging. Hideki Matsuyama and Ryo Hisatsune were the exception rather than the rule, taking control at the eighth and running out 3-and-1 winners over Cameron Young and Xander Schauffele in the match that gave the International side its first real foothold of the week. It was thorough rather than dramatic, the kind of win built on steady iron play rather than any single hero shot, and it mattered more for the mathematics than the highlights reel.
The genuine spark came from the other end of the draw, where Tom Kim and Si Woo Kim closed out Chris Gotterup and Patrick Cantlay 3 and 2 in the day’s last match to finish. It was the sort of result the International team has needed all week: two players who talk to the galleries as easily as they talk to each other, delivering exactly when a flat session needed lifting. Ogilvy will already be thinking about how often he can send that pairing out, and Sky Sports later reported the two will indeed stay together for Friday’s foursomes, which tells you everything about how much trust that performance bought them.
Between those two results sits the mild disappointment of the morning: Lee and Im’s failure to find the half point that was sitting there for the taking against Scheffler and Burns. In a session decided by a single point, that is the match the Internationals will replay in their heads longest.
What Friday needs to be
A 3-2 scoreline after fourballs is not a lead so much as a head start, and everyone involved knows it. Five foursomes matches go off on Friday, with the in-form Kim pairing drawn against Cantlay and Schauffele in the day’s finale, a rematch of sorts after Thursday’s result and precisely the kind of collision this Presidents Cup needed to make itself feel like a contest rather than a coronation. Medinah has three days of match play left in it, a lot of golf for a one-point margin to survive, and after Thursday’s mix of composure and near misses, nobody at this Presidents Cup should assume they know how the week ends.