Presidents Cup 2026: Team USA Rallies From Three Points Down With an All-Mallet Putter Squad

Cameron Young's 32-foot putt on the 16th hole rolled slowly, grazed the right edge and dropped. The grandstand behind the green went quiet for a beat before the applause rolled in. That birdie closed out Ryo Hisatsune and gave the United States its first point of the day at the 2026 Presidents Cup.

I have watched matches from the press rows since 2026, and rarely has a single afternoon been settled so completely by the putter. After Young came Patrick Cantlay, who holed a 57-footer from off the green to put his match with Adam Scott out of reach. Collin Morikawa answered Hideki Matsuyama's 45-footer with one of his own, then made a 31-footer on the 15th to flip a match he would eventually win on the 18th.

Then came Jacob Bridgeman, the PGA Tour's best putter this season. He holed a 4-footer on the 18th green to seal the Americans' 11th straight Presidents Cup victory. A name, once a whole grandstand sings it, becomes an address of the heart — that afternoon, the stands sang Bridgeman's.

The context before the final day

Team USA entered Sunday trailing by three points. After Saturday, captain Brandt Snedeker put it plainly: the Internationals had simply made more putts. It was a remark that left his own team needing to answer with the very club that had cost them points.

Two concepts matter here. Strokes Gained: Putting measures the gap between a player's actual putting results and the field average from the same distance; a positive figure means the player is gaining shots on the field, a negative one means he is giving them away. Putters split into two main families: the traditional thin-headed blade, and the mallet, whose larger head pushes weight away from the centre to raise moment of inertia (MOI). Mallets forgive off-centre strikes far more readily, at the cost of feel when the ball sits down in thick grass.

The 2026 Presidents Cup course ran fast and true with few breaking putts — exactly the conditions where mallets thrive.

Early on the final morning, the practice green was almost empty. An empty course, and still the wind keeps time for the ball. I stood there listening to balls rolling across the grass, knowing the afternoon would be decided from inside ten metres.

What actually happened on the greens

Seven of the top nine putters for the entire week were on Team USA, and on Sunday the long putts dropped exactly when they were needed. That is the core of what the numbers say.

The specific list: Young from 32 feet on the 16th; Cantlay from 57 feet off the green; Morikawa from 45 feet and 31 feet inside a single match; Bridgeman from four feet on the closing hole. Four players, four kinds of pressure, one outcome.

The more interesting part sits in the golf bags. All 12 members of the U.S. team used a mallet-style putter, five of them from TaylorMade's Spider Tour family — the PGA Tour's winningest putter in 2026 and again the winningest model at this Presidents Cup.

Two of those players, Chris Gotterup and Patrick Cantlay, played the Spider as gear free agents, meaning they carry no equipment contract and chose the model they trust most. They were the only gear free agents on the U.S. team this season. Gotterup led the 24 players in the field in Strokes Gained: Putting.

Four other Americans used one of Scotty Cameron's Phantom mallets. Cameron Young moved from the 10.5 Xperimental Prototype he used at the Tour Championship to a Phantom 5.5 this week. Justin Thomas went the other way: after playing Young's previous 9.5R for most of the season, he switched to the 10.5 Xperimental.

The 9.5R did not vanish from the matches. Rookie Jackson Koivun used one to post a 2-0-1 record in his debut.

The contrarian angle

"They just made more putts" is accurate but leads people to the wrong conclusion: that the Americans won because their hands happened to run hot for one afternoon.

Separate the two things. A single blazing putting day is the most volatile data in the four Strokes Gained categories; it predicts almost nothing about the next meeting. If the U.S. team had been leaning on feel alone, it could not have erased three points against an International side that struck the ball from tee to green perfectly respectably across the first three sessions.

The equipment decisions say more. A 12-man squad, steered by different coaches and different sponsorship arrangements, converging on one style of head is a rare thing. When two gear free agents — men free to choose any model on the market — both pick the Spider Tour and both finish at the top of the putting table, that is a signal about fit with the greens, not the luck of an afternoon.

Seen from the other side, that convergence is also erasing an edge. As an entire generation moves to higher-forgiveness heads, the separation created by equipment narrows, and the gap returns to where it always was: reading greens with the eye and with data.

The new generation watches the ball with its eyes; I still hear it with my ears, and both are ways of loving the game. But I wonder: when everyone is holding the same shape of head, will the winner be the better green-reader, or the one with more data?

The signal to watch

The Internationals lost through the very strength they believed they were leading with. At the next Presidents Cup, the question is no longer who putts better, but how many International players switch to a mallet — and whether they do it earlier than the Americans.

The United States won an 11th straight title with a near-uniform set of clubs. If the Internationals want to close the gap, they must choose: follow that road, or open a different one nobody has walked yet.