On paper, Sunday singles at the 2026 Presidents Cup should have been a formality for the visiting side. Team USA arrived at Medinah Country Club outside Chicago trailing the International Team 10.5 to 7.5 — the first time in the 30-year history of the event that the Internationals had carried a lead into singles play on American soil. By the time the sun dropped over Medinah’s famous Course No. 3 on September 27, the Americans had won 9.5 of the 12 points still in play, turned a record deficit into a 17-13 victory, and stretched their winning streak to eleven straight Presidents Cups.
A Deficit With No Precedent
The Presidents Cup splits 30 points across five sessions of fourballs and foursomes before all 24 players tee off in Sunday singles, and for four days it looked like Geoff Ogilvy’s International Team was finally going to end a losing streak that stretches back to 1998 — still the only Presidents Cup the Internationals have ever won, and one they captured on home turf in Melbourne. No International side had ever gone into the final day of a U.S.-hosted Presidents Cup with a lead, and at Medinah they built one convincingly across the foursomes and fourball sessions. That made Sunday’s collapse all the more jarring: a three-point swing over a single afternoon of head-to-head golf, achieved against a team that had controlled most of the week.
Bridgeman Delivers the Clinching Point
It was Jacob Bridgeman, playing in the anchor match, who sealed the win with a 1-up victory over Min Woo Lee as the last American putt dropped. Elsewhere in the field, Jackson Koivun finished the week as the only player on either team to go unbeaten across all five sessions, a quiet but significant stat line on a tournament dominated by comeback headlines. The momentum built match by match: Patrick Cantlay rolled in a 57-foot birdie putt on the 16th hole, and Cameron Young followed with a 31-footer of his own on the same green, the kind of clutch putting that turns a tight singles session into a rout on the scoreboard.
Scottie Scheffler’s Moment of Sportsmanship
Not every storyline from Sunday was about the scoreboard. During Scottie Scheffler’s singles match against Nico Echavarria, a spectator yelled out mid-swing as Echavarria played his tee shot on the par-4 14th, sending the ball into the right rough. Scheffler, playing for the opposing team, immediately called out the heckler rather than let the moment pass. “It’s just ridiculous, somebody yelling in his swing off the tee,” he told Golf Channel afterward. He then conceded Echavarria’s 32-foot par putt on the hole, a concession made purely on the grounds of the disruption. Scheffler still closed out the match 2&1, but the gesture drew as much attention afterward as the result itself, a reminder that the Presidents Cup’s team format still runs on an underlying code of conduct between players who spend most of the year as individual competitors.
A Lopsided Rivalry, Even in Defeat
The bigger picture is still bleak for the International side. The win was Team USA’s 14th in the 16 editions of the Presidents Cup since it began in 1994, and the Americans, captained this year by Brandt Snedeker, have now won eleven consecutive times. Ogilvy’s team produced its best chance yet to change that story, building a genuine lead through three days of better team golf, only to watch singles Sunday unfold the way it so often has for the Internationals at this event. For a format created partly to showcase golf outside the Ryder Cup’s U.S.-versus-Europe rivalry, Sunday’s result keeps alive a familiar question: whether a genuinely competitive Presidents Cup is still possible, or whether the format needs changes to match the drama the Ryder Cup regularly produces.
What’s Next on the Golf Calendar
Medinah now hands off to golf’s other biennial team event. The Ryder Cup returns September 17-19, 2027, at Adare Manor in Ireland, where Europe will defend its title against a U.S. side still searching for its own full-team breakthrough on that stage. The Presidents Cup, meanwhile, heads back to Australia for the first time since the Internationals’ lone win in 1998, with the 2028 edition scheduled for Kingston Heath Golf Club in Melbourne — the Internationals’ best remaining chance in years to finally end the American streak on a course and in a country where they’ve actually done it before.