United States win 11th straight Presidents Cup as Bridgeman seals 1-up win over Min Woo Lee

Hole 18 green, somewhere near Chicago. Jacob Bridgeman bent over his line while two other singles matches were still out on the course behind him. He did not wait for them. The putt dropped, the match closed at 1-up over Min Woo Lee, and the clinching point belonged to the United States. The electronic scoreboard crossed the 15.5-point mark — the minimum needed to lift the Presidents Cup. The US team had walked into the final day with a task that left no room for error: win eight of the twelve singles matches. They solved it, but only learned the answer on the closing holes.

The 11th in a row. That streak runs longer than the peak career of almost any golfer currently competing. On a record sheet, it is a flat footnote. On the ground, it was an afternoon pushed to the edge.

Context

The Presidents Cup is a biennial men's professional team event between a United States team and an International team. The International side draws golfers from everywhere in the world except Europe — Europe's players already have the Ryder Cup of their own.

That structure explains most of the event's character. The International team is stitched together from many countries, many coaching systems, many time zones and many languages. It faces a roster drawn from a single system, sharing one points structure, one schedule and one selection standard.

The historical record tilts heavily toward the US: 14 wins, 1 loss, 1 tie. Across the last 11 editions, the International team has not won once.

Comparing with the Ryder Cup makes the difference plain. The Ryder Cup is where Europe and the US trade victories across decades, and its competitiveness rests on two sides with comparable resources. The Presidents Cup was created as a wider stage for the rest of the world, yet it has never reached that balance. The result is an event with organisational prestige but thin uncertainty — the very ingredient that keeps viewers in their seats until the last hole.

This year's edition closed on 27 September 2026, according to a Reuters report republished by CNA. What stands out is how the event was handled: of the first four items the wire sent out, three were photo captions. The result was the main part. The people were the footnote.

Core analysis

The final day of the Presidents Cup is always the day of 12 singles matches. No more pairs, no more card-splitting, just one player against one player in match play. It is the format the US team habitually uses to close the story, and it is also the format the International team has come close to overturning more than once.

The requirement for the US that day was specific: eight points from twelve matches. That meant at most four defeats, and every halved match made the arithmetic harder, because a tie splits the point. In match play, each win is worth one point. A 1-up win means winning by exactly one hole over 18 — the thinnest margin the sport allows.

The 8-of-12 figure sounds dry, yet it says plenty about the three days before. The US walked into Sunday without a cushion large enough to relax on. In match play, a theoretical advantage can evaporate in two holes, because a match is counted in holes won rather than strokes taken. A golfer who plays better for 17 holes can still lose by surrendering the two decisive ones. That is why strong teams are pushed into needing more wins rather than merely better golf.

A halved match deserves a note of its own, because it gives neither side full advantage. When a scoreboard carries several halves, the 15.5-point threshold becomes a moving target, and every calculation has to be redone after each hole. It is why captains often say Sunday at the Presidents Cup is not twelve separate matches but one long match with twelve branches.

The list of point scorers for the US ran from familiar stars to newer names: Cameron Young, Justin Thomas, Scottie Scheffler, Chris Gotterup, Collin Morikawa, Patrick Cantlay and Koivun. Bridgeman closed it out. A roster like that has no gap in any line. Depth is the weapon, and in team play depth is the hardest thing to copy.

The most important detail of that afternoon lies in its timing: Bridgeman's clinching point landed while two other singles matches were still in progress. The US was never safely ahead. They reached 15.5 points at a moment when any swing on either adjacent course could have recoloured the board.

The absence of pairings and tee order from the report is an unfortunate gap. In team play, the captain's decisions about who goes out first, who anchors, and who partners whom across the doubles days are the real tactical layer of the event. The final score is only the consequence. A results brief therefore reads like an end-of-term grade sheet with no lectures in between.

Following the live scoreboard from Saigon, I noticed something a results dispatch never fully carries: the rhythm of the afternoon. When a team needs eight of twelve points and is pushed to the 18th of the deciding match, the real gap on the ground is far narrower than the gap in the record books. The grass lay quiet, but the numbers kept whispering.

Contrarian angle

The “11th in a row” headline hides a more uncomfortable reality. The International team took the contest to the edge of the winning threshold. If the US had won as comfortably as the record suggests, nobody would have waited on a 1-up putt in the last match of Sunday.

The structural problem lies in the definition of the teams. The International side is confined to players from outside Europe, which means the event removes half of world golf's resources — the entire European system that produces Ryder Cup teams capable of beating the Americans. The US, meanwhile, is still selected from a single system. This asymmetry is not a one-year story; it repeats every two years, and the pressure for format reform grows with each repetition.

The second blind spot sits in the storytelling. Jacob Bridgeman brought home the decisive point, yet most reports stopped at the result line. Nobody asked which qualifiers he came through, how many matches he played during the week, or how long that putt had been prepared. Sports media has a habit of naming the hero and abandoning him right after the full stop.

What stands out about the US roster is its composition. Alongside established names like Scheffler, Thomas, Morikawa and Cantlay sat younger faces such as Bridgeman and Koivun, and it was the latter group that delivered the decisive point. A golf nation can only do that when its young players are thrown into genuinely competitive events rather than kept in environments designed to protect their records. In plenty of other sports, young talent is introduced on a safe schedule; here, they were handed the heaviest match of the week.

Min Woo Lee is the name worth dwelling on most from the losing side. He belongs to the Asia-Pacific group of golfers occupying an ever-larger share of the world rankings, and standing in the decisive match says something about that standing. Losing 1-up on the final hole is no stain. It is evidence that the International team is edging toward the threshold where it can turn the contest around.

Commercially, the Presidents Cup is a PGA Tour asset: a biennial event with revenue from broadcast rights, sponsorship and hospitality. The results dispatch supplies no figures for those categories, so any estimate of commercial value should stay at the reference level. What can be stated firmly is the reach: a result like this appears across sports pages within hours, then drifts out of the news stream within a day.

The hottest trench is not where the bombs fall, but where the news breaks. Yet when a major wire service compresses a biennial event into exactly three photo captions, that heat disappears from the story before readers can feel it. From keyboard to trench, the distance is one click — and that same distance keeps much of what happens on the course from ever reaching the page.

Forward look

The US will celebrate in its own way, and an 11-edition streak is a genuine achievement, not luck. But the more valuable part for golf sits on the other side of the course: a team assembled from four continents finished within one putt of the prize. Sports data can cry too, if we listen.

If that gap keeps narrowing, the debate at the next edition will no longer be about who wins, but about how this event should be redefined to remain worth watching in 2028.