The teams are on the ground at Bethpage Black as the start of the 2025 Ryder Cup looms, and anticipation is already building with suggestions this year's could be the best yet.
Luke Donald raised an eyebrow or two when he picked fledgling pro Ludvig Aberg last time, becoming the first player to make his Ryder Cup debut without a Major start, but his well-researched hunch paid dividends.
Here, we look back with the Swede on his rapid rise to Ryder Cup glory…
A Historic Ryder Cup Debut
When Luke Donald announced his 2023 European Ryder Cup team, Ludvig Aberg was among his picks, not even three months after turning professional.
It was an audacious selection. “Ludvig is just starting to write his history,” said Donald at the time. “I think he’s a generational talent.”
Aberg turned pro in June 2023, shortly after winning his second straight Big 12 individual title at Texas Tech.
The young Swede had held the No.1 spot in the World Amateur Golf Rankings for 29 weeks, and was the first ever recipient of a PGA Tour card via the PGA Tour University programme.
That July, he was paired with Donald for the first two rounds of the Rocket Mortgage Classic at Detroit Golf Club.
It was as if Aberg was being swept along by a whirlwind, yet the impressively calm and measured rookie, 23 years old at the time, kept his stance firmly planted on the ground.
With the Ryder Cup two months away, Donald had six picks to contemplate, and Aberg was the hottest European prospect to emerge from the college circuit since Spain’s Jon Rahm in 2016.
Donald had heard that this 6ft 3in college champ swung the club like Adam Scott, drove the ball like Rory McIlroy and had the temperament of Scottie Scheffler.
As Aberg’s coach at Texas Tech, Greg Sands, put it, “God put together the perfect human being for golf.”
“He was nine-under through 16 holes,” recalled Donald. The Englishman, who played on four winning European Ryder Cup teams, was preparing for his first crack at captaincy during that round in Detroit.
Now, two years after Europe’s victory in Rome, he is winding up for a return leg at Bethpage State Park on Long Island in New York this September.
“Ludvig made golf look very simple,” he added. “Pretty impressive when he knew I was watching. He seemed very unfazed.
"When you play with certain players, you can tell. They have a certain talent that you see when they hit balls, and you’re blown away by the different strike, the sound, the trajectory.”
The Swede shot 65 and 67 paired with Donald. A long shot before those 36 holes, Aberg was now on the shortlist.
“Luke and his stats team – with Dodo [Edoardo] and Francesco Molinari – found out that driving the golf ball really well had a big correlation with success at Marco Simone,” Åberg recalls in an exclusive interview with Golf Monthly.
“My driver stats at that point were really good. I was driving the golf ball very well in Detroit, so that was at the front of Luke’s mind.”
Aberg is coached by fellow Swede Hans Larsson, in a partnership that dates back to Aberg’s high school years at Riksidrottsgymnasium Helsingborg, a prestigious boarding school for elite athletes in southern Sweden.
For his final two seasons at Texas Tech, he agreed with Larsson that he would be as aggressive as possible with the driver off the tee, to take full advantage of one of his strongest assets.
Unbeknown to the pair at the time, this was exactly what Donald wanted for Marco Simone.
Firmly on the Ryder Cup radar
“Thinking back to that summer, I didn’t really have my eyes on the Ryder Cup,” says Aberg, who played four full seasons at Texas Tech.
“I felt like it was too far away. All I wanted to do was kick-start my professional career and see where it took me. When I played with Luke in Detroit, that was the first time I’d ever spoken to him.
"Then Luke texted to say that he would love me to come over to Europe to play in a couple of events, and I got very excited.” That excitement led to success.
“I played in the Czech Masters and finished pretty well [T4th], and then the week after was the Omega European Masters in Crans, and that was the first week when I really started to think about the Ryder Cup,” Aberg recalls.
“The media attention and chatter started around then about me possibly making the team, and I really wanted to win a tournament, so I could have that on my resume if I did play in the Ryder Cup. That was a big carrot for me.”
Donald was due to announce his six Ryder Cup team picks the day after the European Masters, and in Crans-Montana, high in the Swiss Alps, the chatter about Aberg was growing exponentially, particularly after a first round of 64, six under par
A second round of 67 was Aberg’s highest 18-hole score of the week, and ultimately, a run of four birdies on the back nine in the final round saw the rookie claim his first professional win by two shots.
“In Crans, Ludvig stepped up when he needed to,” enthused Donald.
“Ludvig birdied four of his last five holes to win. That was very impressive.” Irishman Paul McGinley played on three European Ryder Cup teams – like Donald, on the winning side every time – before captaining his team to victory at Gleneagles in 2014.
“You get talent coming out on tour all the time, but can they do it under real pressure?” he said on the High Performance podcast ahead of the 2023 Ryder Cup.
“Playing with the Ryder Cup captain, under pressure, Ludvig performed. Then in Switzerland, Ludvig knew he had to do something special to get picked, and again, he performed.
"There’s the talent and then there’s the ability to perform under pressure, and they are two different things. When a golfer can blend those two things together, like Ludvig can, that is something special.”
Setting new records
Just three months after turning pro, Aberg set a record as the fastest golfer to be selected for the Ryder Cup after joining the pro ranks. He also became the first player ever to compete in the Ryder Cup before teeing up in a Major.
Former Ryder Cup player and fellow Swede Peter Hanson is employed by the Swedish Golf Federation to help young golfers make the transition to tour life, and he saw Aberg evolve.
“The more you shine the light on him, the better he gets,” Hanson told Golf Monthly.
“The key to getting Ludvig prepared for the Ryder Cup in a short amount of time was that we wanted him to be ready to play five matches, but expect to play just one,” said Hanson, who played for Europe in both 2010 and 2012.
“Ludvig needed to know that if he only played in the singles, that was fine.”
Aberg had not even met most of the European team members by the time they assembled at Marco Simone for a preamble in September 2023.
He was duly boosted when Rory McIlroy walked up to him on the 1st tee and said, “I’ve been looking forward to this for a while.”
But nothing can prepare a golfer for the intense atmosphere of the Ryder Cup. The noise is beyond compare even for experienced pros, let alone for a rookie who’s never played in a Major.
“In college, we don’t really play in front of crowds, so it was a brand-new deal for me,” Aberg admits.
“I remember getting overwhelmed at times and having to take a couple of minutes for myself, just to breathe and to make sure that I was okay.
“I was fortunate that my first Ryder Cup was at home, so the majority of the fans were rooting for us, and that made it a bit easier.
"That crowd made us feel like we were rock stars as we walked up to the tee boxes, and not only had I never experienced that before, but I have not felt it since then either. Even in a Major Championship, you don’t get that atmosphere.”.
One of the highlights of the 2023 Ryder Cup from a European perspective was the foursomes partnership of Aberg and Norway’s Viktor Hovland, who is two years older and was playing in his second Ryder Cup.
The pair won two foursomes points and added another triumph to Aberg’s groundbreaking year by setting the record for the largest ever margin of victory in an 18-hole foursomes match in Ryder Cup history, dismantling Scottie Scheffler and Brooks Koepka 9&7.
A dominant performance
It was a match of remarkable contrasts. While the home pair posted seven birdies in their last eight holes, the Americans were seven-over-par by the time the four players shook hands on the 11th green.
By the time the group reached the 8th tee of that match, Aberg and Hovland were already five holes up. The 8th is a 515-yard, downhill par 4, with water and trouble along the left-hand side.
Aberg stepped up to the tee and smoothly crushed his tee shot straight down the middle, far beyond the 300-yard mark.
He set up Hovland for a straightforward mid-iron to the pin, while the desperate Koepka – five-time Major Champion, don’t forget – hooked his tee shot into the hay.
The score turned to 6-up in a hurry, as Aberg delivered on Donald’s hope for dominant driving.
“I remember walking off the 8th tee and we were pretty far ahead, but in that kind of match play situation it is easy to become content too soon,” Aberg says.
“You can start to play to protect your lead, and Viktor and I had a conversation that we were going to keep the pressure on, to finish it early and make sure we got a long lunch break. It was really cool to have that mindset and to get the point early.
“It was something that none of us were expecting. Viktor and I put a lot of pressure on by finding a lot of fairways and a lot of greens, and we were never in trouble. Scheffler and Koepka didn’t have their best day either.”
Hanson was inside the ropes at Marco Simone as part of Aberg’s support team.
“Ludvig and Viktor got along really well, and there was a great balance in that partnership,” said the six-time winner on the European Tour.
“The Viktor Hovland I saw in Rome was completely different from the one at Whistling Straits.
“When he got to Rome, you could see he was confident. He was ready for the atmosphere and he liked the pressure. I could see it on the outside of him, and it was fantastic.
"He really helped Ludvig to feel confident in that environment and they were a perfect pairing. Hopefully they will both play again this year and find that very strong dynamic again.”
