FARMINGDALE, N.Y. — In the end, it all turned on a stick.
Let’s settle this before moving on. It certainly wasn’t a branch. It likely never held a cluster of leaves. Calling it a limb would be malpractice. But it wasn’t a harmless little twig, either. You couldn’t snap it between two fingers, or, more significantly to the first match of the first session of the 45th Ryder Cup, you couldn’t mindlessly flick it away from your golf ball without a care.
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And so Tyrrell Hatton found himself in a thicket of trees right of the 7th fairway here at Bethpage Black on Friday morning, crouched down and glaring at his ball, which nestled snug against that stick. His friend and partner for this match, Jon Rahm, crouched next to him, scrutinizing the scene.
Hatton to this point had had a difficult morning. He’d hooked a couple tee shots, missed a couple putts. The New York crowd was on him. Hatton and Rahm at that point were 1 down to the energizer American team of Bryson DeChambeau and Justin Thomas.
And now, the stick, which Rahm and Hatton debated whether to move off his ball, in hopes of giving Hatton a better chance at clean contact for his upcoming attempt to extract the ball from the woods. But if the ball were to move when they removed the stick, a penalty would ensue.
“It’s not worth it,” Rahm finally said, finalizing a decision to leave the stick alone. “I’d say just play a normal shot.”
And so Hatton attempted to play it as normal as he could. He’d have been forgiven, given the circumstances, if his shot misfired, but instead he somehow flushed it, his ball sailed through the trees and settled 34 feet from the hole. Thomas hit his shot from the fairway to 60 feet and following DeChambeau's nervy lag putt he blew a 5-footer to hand Europe its first hole win. It was a good, old-fashioned match-play reversal.
Team Energizer was rocked and never recovered. Europe won the 8th, 12th and 13th holes and closed out the first match of this Ryder Cup on 15 to win 4 and 3.
It had all started swimmingly for the U.S., as captain Keegan Bradley sent his high-octane duo out first to whip up the crowd and seize that first point. On the opening hole, which among the 24 players in this event is drivable only to DeChambeau, Bryson ripped a drive to the front of the green. The fans, playing their part, went bananas. After Thomas pitched up, DeChambeau holed the birdie putt for a 1-up lead. The U.S. was right on schedule.
When you’re already 1 up pic.twitter.com/812IZsz9L4
— Jeff Ritter (@Jeff_Ritter) September 26, 2025
But as the opening adrenaline faded, so did the energy from the U.S. tandem. That’s one thing about both Thomas and DeChambeau—when things aren’t going well for them in individual events they tend to turn inward. Faced with adversity after that 7th hole, Thomas and DeChambeau would not win a single hole the rest of the way. They made one birdie on the par-3 14th that could’ve done some damage, but Rahm bloodlessly holed a 12-footer on top of them.
Hatton and Rahm went 2–0 as a team in Rome, and Rahm entered 4–0 in the foursomes format. This team was never going to crack easily. And crack they did not. Incidentally, neither did that stick next to Hatton's ball on 7.
When Thomas’s short putt lipped out on the 15th, the first match was decided. If you’ll please excuse the pun, it would be fair to say that Europe had stuck it to the U.S.
First point to Europe.
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This article was originally published on www.si.com as Jon Rahm and Tyrrell Hatton Extinguished High-Octane Americans Thanks to One Key Shot.
