International stars building momentum at TOUR Championship as Presidents Cup looms

ATLANTA – This week at the TOUR Championship, the small field of players gathered at East Lake Golf Club are each playing for individual honors. One name goes on the FedExCup come Sunday, and there’s plenty to play for in deciding the other 29 spots on the final leaderboard.

But after one round in Atlanta, a trend has emerged – one that could have implications for team play next month.

Half the field that qualified for the TOUR Championship are Americans, although that number dwindled down to 14 out of a remaining 29 when J.J. Spaun withdrew during the opening round because of a shoulder injury. It means that 15 of the participants hail from outside the U.S., and Thursday there was a decided pattern of low scores as it relates to the forming International Team for the upcoming Presidents Cup.

The top six for Geoff Ogilvy's squad will be decided after this event, with the Australian rounding out his 12-man roster with six captain's picks next week. But the automatic qualifiers seem pretty self-explanatory, given that only the top six in the latest standings have qualified for East Lake: Si Woo Kim, Hideki Matsuyama, Ryan Fox, Tom Kim, Min Woo Lee and Adam Scott.

Those six players combined to shoot 21 under in the opening round, led by Lee who takes a two-shot lead into Friday after a sizzling 8-under 62. All told, four of the six opened with rounds of 67 or better on a day when early rain took some of the sting out of East Lake’s difficulty.

“To have six of us here this week, I think is a great showing,” said Scott, who opened with a 4-under 66. “I said to the guys at the last dinner we had in Memphis, for me even coming in, just seeing Ryan’s win, Tom Kim’s win, Min Woo finishing second at the Scottish, Si Woo is playing fantastic every week, Sungjae Im is back, Hideki is top-10ing every week. The momentum looks really good for us, so that’s fantastic.”

Joining Scott with a 66 was The Open champion Ryan Fox, who described making his first Presidents Cup team as “probably the biggest goal of the year.” Fox was on the outside looking in for both the 2022 and 2024 matches, but after lifting the claret jug at Royal Birkdale, he’s all but assured of being on the team at Medinah Country Club.

“Obviously it’s not official yet, but all the extended group outings we’ve had and dinners and stuff like that, we get along really, really well,” Fox said. “I’m excited to be part of the team, and hopefully we can do something special this year.”

Rest assured, it will remain a tall task for the International Team regardless of incoming form. They haven’t won the Presidents Cup since 1998, and the Americans have now won 10 straight matches in the biennial competition since a tie in 2003.

But to have a chance in Chicago, they’ll need some firepower, and that was in ample supply on Thursday. They’re all chasing Lee, who was a runner-up in Scotland and remains in search of his second career TOUR victory after last year’s triumph at the Texas Children’s Houston Open.

Lee called the Playoffs opener two weeks ago in Memphis “probably the saddest I’ve been on the golf course,” as he finished T55 out of 68 players, but he had plenty of reason to smile after grabbing the early lead with eight birdies and his tee-to-green game shining bright.

“This week was a brand new week, and we obviously play from scratch and everyone plays from the same score,” Lee said. “Being out there, I thought, ‘Why not give it a good crack and have a good attitude?’ That was probably a thing that I had to work on over the last two weeks.”

As Scott noted, the options for Ogilvy will extend beyond the six players in this week’s field. Im closed his season with four straight finishes of T15 or better, while Ryo Hisatsune made 23 of 25 cuts this year in his bid to make his first team. Jason Day and Corey Conners offer veteran presence from prior matches.

But the matches next month will be decided by birdies and bogeys, and there were plenty of the former for the International contingent on Thursday. They’ll each tee it up the rest of the week in hopes of advancing their own personal position in the season-long standings, but the potential to inch closer toward an upset at Medinah becomes a bigger consideration by the day.

“The momentum is huge,” Scott said. “I don’t know how we carry it three weeks on from now, but I think a lot of us are going to be playing before the Presidents Cup, too. Anything we can do to kind of keep that rolling and keep the confidence high.”