Medinah woke up on Sunday with the Internationals three points clear and closer than they have been in a generation to something no visiting team has managed since 1998: a Presidents Cup won on American soil. Geoff Ogilvy’s side had swept a foursomes session, split the rest close to evenly, and arrived at the final day needing only five points from the twelve singles matches to make it happen. Brandt Snedeker’s Americans needed something closer to a rout in reverse, eight points to win the cup outright and seven and a half just to keep it. That is the kind of arithmetic that tends to produce either a coronation or a very long, very quiet team room, and for most of Saturday evening it looked like the Internationals were the ones doing the planning.
A lineup built to hold a lead
Ogilvy’s answer to the maths was to front-load his order rather than protect it, sending out players he trusted to close matches early and take the pressure off the back of the draw. Snedeker, defending a cup his team already held, needed the opposite: fast points, and preferably ones that meant something to the players making them.
Sunday singles at the Presidents Cup.
— Presidents Cup (@PresidentsCup) September 26, 2026
Hisatsune vs. Young
T. Kim vs. Clark
Conners vs. Thomas
Echavarria vs. Scheffler
Im vs. Burns
Bezuidenhout vs. Gotterup
Matsuyama vs. Morikawa
Scott vs. Cantlay
S. W. Kim vs. Koivun
Lee vs. Bridgeman… pic.twitter.com/yAw7jPnnaz
The morning that turned
Cameron Young supplied the first genuine hammer blow, closing out Ryo Hisatsune 3 and 2 in a match that never really let the Japanese rookie in, and two groups behind him Justin Thomas did something closer to a demolition. Thomas had gone into the week without a Presidents Cup Sunday singles win to his name, an odd gap in a record that is otherwise stuffed with team-golf highlights, and he closed the account emphatically, beating Corey Conners 5 and 3 in a match that was functionally over by the turn. It was the kind of morning the Americans needed: fast, clean, board-changing points rather than the grinding half-point matches that let a leading team run the clock.
Further out on the course, the match that best captured the day’s mood swings was playing out in real time. Scottie Scheffler and Sam Burns were both fighting to keep pace in their own singles matches, and when Burns’s group went 1 up through the middle of the round it read, in the moment, like exactly the kind of flip the Americans needed replicated eleven more times.
And just like that USA flips the final match of the morning.
— PGA Tour (@PGATour) September 26, 2026
Burns and Scheffler head to 17 1-UP @PresidentsCup.
📺 NBC pic.twitter.com/yIVMs6V7Bz
Kim keeps the door ajar
The Internationals were not simply going to stand aside, and Tom Kim made sure of that early, clawing back a deficit against Wyndham Clark to win 3 and 2 in a match that swung on two par saves nobody but Kim seemed to believe he would make. Sungjae Im added to it, closing out Sam Burns 3 and 1 in the group that had briefly flipped USA’s way an hour earlier, a reminder that momentum at Medinah changed hands roughly as often as the Chicago wind did. For a stretch around midday, the board still had enough orange and red on it to keep the maths interesting, and a home crowd that had spent two days growing anxious found something to hold onto.
A cup that stayed home
It did not last. As the later matches worked their way down the stretch, the results kept breaking the same way: Collin Morikawa took care of Hideki Matsuyama, Chris Gotterup closed out Christiaan Bezuidenhout 1 up, Patrick Cantlay beat Adam Scott, and Xander Schauffele saw off Ryan Fox, each result trimming another half point or more from what the Internationals actually needed. By the time the last groups were making their way up Medinah’s closing holes, the Americans had done what three days of foursomes and fourballs had suggested they might not manage, reclaiming a lead they had surrendered on Friday and turning Sunday into the same story the format has told more often than not: a huge American rally, an International side that pushed harder than the final tally will show, and a trophy that, as reporting from the grounds had it late in the day, finished somewhere in the region of 16 to 14 in the home side’s favour.
For Ogilvy’s team, there is real substance to take from a week that included a Friday sweep and a lead heading into the final day that no International side had built on U.S. soil in this event’s history. The 1998 drought will run on regardless. For the Americans, Sunday was a reminder that a cup built on match play rarely stays settled until the very last group walks up the very last hole, and that Medinah, for all its length and all its trouble off the tee, will be remembered less for who led on Saturday night than for who was still standing on Sunday evening.