As the Ryder Cup proved again last week, there's nothing more compelling in golf than a tense match-play duel. When Rickie Fowler birdied his last four holes in the singles competition on the final day to tie Edoardo Molinari of Italy, it was a two-minute drill ending with a touchdown. When Graeme McDowell of Northern Ireland sank his twisting 15-foot birdie putt on the 16th hole to effectively put away Hunter Mahan and win the Cup for Europe, it was Michael Jordan hitting a nothing-but-net three-pointer at the buzzer.
Given that match play so often produces this kind of drama, especially at Ryder Cups, it might seem a puzzlement that we golf fans don't see more of it. The match-play format, in which players compete hole by hole instead of adding up their cumulative strokes over a round, is by far the dominant style of golf played recreationally in the U.S. and around the world. It's more enjoyable and exciting than stroke play because an awful hole here or there doesn't spoil the day (you lose only that hole and move on) and thus encourages more daring, aggressive shots.
Match play is, in fact, the oldest and most natural form of golf. If a couple of aliens arrived from outer space and stumbled upon a set of clubs and some balls sitting on the first tee of a golf course, they would pretty quickly figure out how to hit the balls a pleasingly long way. Noticing a flagstick in the distance, one would challenge the other and off they'd go, with whoever got there in the fewest strokes declared the winner (they would certainly figure out what the hole was for, too). The loser would point to the next flagstick for a chance to win his money back, and match play is born.
Sooner or later, no doubt, someone would propose keeping a running tally of every stroke, but historically all the early recorded competitions — King James IV in 1503, for example, or the Duke of York, later King James II, in 1681 — were match play. Not until the mid-18th century are there records of stroke-play competitions, introduced to make tournaments involving larger numbers of golfers feasible. Single-elimination match play competitions with dozens of players could take days or even a week to complete. At the early Scottish and English golf clubs, the golfers in such special, large events competed for a medal. Thus stroke play came to be called medal play.
The basic rules of golf developed around match play, but some of those rules didn't work in medal play. For example, at various times in the past, the punishment for losing a ball in match play was forfeiting the hole. In stroke play, however, individual holes are not lost or won, so an alternative, stroke-and-distance penalty developed. Another match-play convention that didn't work in stroke play was the stymie, whereby on the putting green one player's ball blocks his opponent's path to the hole. When the competition is only between the players on that hole, stymies are quirky but fair, an accepted condition of the match. In a stroke-play tournament against players all across the course, a stymie (in particular, a deliberate stymie) is not fair to the player being stymied.
Not until relatively recently, in 1946, did the U.S. Golf Association eliminate most of the differences between match-play and stroke-play rules. These days the remedy for a lost ball is the same in match play as in medal play (stroke and distance) and stymies are not allowed anywhere. A few differences remain, however. Most general breaches that in medal play invoke a two-stroke penalty, such as playing a wrong ball (as Fowler did in a foursomes match at the Ryder Cup), result in match play in loss of the hole.
Another key difference is that, in match-play only, when a player hits out of turn his opponent may (but doesn't have to) ask him to replay the shot. At the 2000 Solheim Cup, American Kelly Robbins required Annika Sörenstam of Sweden to do just that after Sörenstam chipped in for a birdie. Robbins and her partner won the hole (and halved the match) after Sörenstam predictably missed the birdie chip with her second attempt.
Despite the mano a mano appeal of match play, stroke play dominates in professional golf for several practical reasons and one philosophical one.
"You can never predict how long the individual matches will go," said Tyler Dennis, head of competition for the PGA Tour. The Tour administers two match-play events, the WGC-Accenture Match Play Championship in February and the biennial Presidents Cup, but the rest are stroke-play events with easier-to-schedule outcomes (weather being the only wild card). "In a knockout tournament like the Accenture, one match could be over on the 11th hole and the next one could go 22 holes. That's a problem for television," Dennis said.
The other big match-play limitation is that the elite players golf fans most want to watch can easily bite the dust early. Ernie Els washed out in the first round of three consecutive Accenture events from 2006 to 2008. In the 2002 Accenture, journeyman Kevin Sutherland beat journeyman Scott McCarron in the long 36-hole final. Morose network executives cheered up the next year when Tiger Woods won and the ratings soared.
Team match-play events like the Ryder Cup, the Presidents Cup and the women's Solheim Cup, on the other hand, avoid these problems. All 12 players on each team are superstars and nobody gets eliminated. The loser in a morning match may well play that afternoon. Matches unresolved after 18 holes are declared a half; they don't go into extra innings. And they use three interesting variations of the match-play format: fourball, foursomes (alternate shot) and singles.
The philosophical problem with individual-match-play events is that they don't necessarily identify the best champion. "If all you are trying to do is determine who is playing the best over a relatively short period of time, 72 holes of stroke play is more equitable," said Mike Davis, the head of rules and competition at the USGA. "One player could shoot 67 but lose to a 66 and not advance to the next round, while in the next group a player could shoot 71 and advance because he beat a guy who shot 72."
Primarily because of that perceived inequity, the U.S. Amateur, which began in 1895 as a match-play event, switched to stroke play in 1965. Eight years later it switched back, mostly because of the lure of tradition. "Stroke play may have been fairer, but we lost some mystique with it," Davis said. Most of the USGA's big events remain match play. Of the 16 tournaments it runs, only the U.S. Open, the U.S. Women's Open, the U.S. Senior Open and the U.S. Men's State Team Championship are entirely medal-play events.
At that elite level, however, match play is not the comfortable game it is on the local muni. Buddy Marucci, the lifelong amateur who narrowly lost to Woods in the finals of the 1995 U.S. Amateur and who won the U.S. Senior Amateur in 2008, has won tournaments in both formats but finds match play to be far more difficult and stressful.
"It wears you down, because each match could be your final round. You're always on the verge of elimination," he said. It's harder to stay in your routine, just playing the course, because you sometimes have to respond to what your opponent does. And losses are harder to take. "If I'm off one day and shoot 75 in stroke play, it's not the end of the world. Maybe I can come back and shoot a good score the next day. But in match play, if I lose a match 3-and-2, that hurts for a long time."
