http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/03/sports/golf/ryder-cup-rory-mcilroy-patrick-reed.html 2016-10-03 03:32:05 Rory McIlroy Falls in Duel With ‘Captain America’ at Ryder Cup To a teammate, Patrick Reed looked a lot like a superhero, tackling the tournament’s toughest missions leading up to a battle with McIlroy, Europe’s most celebrated player. === CHASKA, Minn. — By the time they climbed their final hill at the 41st Ryder Cup and arrived at the 18th hole on Sunday, Patrick Reed and Rory McIlroy looked just about punched out. They had expended so much fist-pumping, finger-wagging fury on the front nine that the back nine looked and felt more like a denouement than the heart of the matter. But that was an optical illusion. Even if the tension between them had largely subsided, these two — McIlroy, Europe’s most famous player, and Reed, an unstoppable force for the American team — carried a lot of emotional weight through their opening singles match. A win could establish final-day momentum here at Hazeltine National Golf Club. Although Reed could easily have cracked at 18, he delivered just what he needed — an 8-foot birdie putt — to preserve what he had spent several hours constructing amid the roars and the sunshine. “Captain America,” said Jordan Spieth, Reed’s fellow millennial and Ryder Cup partner. It was hard to disagree. This was unquestionably a team effort, this 17-11 victory for the United States over Europe. Each of the 12 American players scored at least 1 point, and most scored at least 2. But Reed was the trendsetter and, just as important, the tone setter, clamoring for the toughest missions and disarming the Europeans at their most dangerous. He did so first with Spieth in team play on Friday and Saturday against Europe’s highest-profile pairing, Justin Rose and Henrik Stenson. Reed then did it again all on his own on Sunday against McIlroy, who looked just as pumped for the occasion as Reed did. “All congratulations to Patrick,” McIlroy said after Reed’s 1-up victory. “He was immense this week.” Reed and McIlroy were collectively immense over a four-hole stretch on the front nine in which a birdie could have kept them in the conversation but was not necessarily enough for either to win a hole. McIlroy discovered that the hard way on the par-4 fifth when Reed drove the green — usually McIlroy’s forte — and then made an eagle putt to erase McIlroy’s early one-hole lead. They would both birdie the next three holes to remain all square, but the transcendence was in the details. On the par-5 sixth, McIlroy knocked in a curling birdie putt and pumped his whole body. Reed followed with a shorter birdie putt, imitating a bow McIlroy had made to the crowd earlier in the tournament and then wagging an index finger in McIlroy’s direction as if to say, Not so fast. Not all of Reed’s elders were amused. “Come on, Patrick,” said the veteran coach Butch Harmon, who was working as an analyst for Sky Sports of Britain. “Show some class.” It was certainly not the way Jack Nicklaus or Tony Jacklin would have handled such a moment in the earlier, more Corinthian years of the Ryder Cup. It was also not entirely in the spirit of Arnold Palmer, whose shadow has been long at the Cup in the wake of his death a week earlier. But all the loud body language was, in truth, much more in tune with the modern Ryder Cup, one in which Europe’s emotional leader has often been Ian Poulter, known as a bug-eyed, fist-pumping rival for the Americans in recent years. Though Europe got plenty of spirited performances at this tournament, it had no one who was quite able to replace Poulter’s grit. McIlroy gave it a good shot, however, which meant that Reed was hardly acting up on his own on at Hazeltine on Sunday. The hecklers and the pressure brought McIlroy thoroughly out of his shell. And on the seventh hole, after he had matched Reed’s birdie putt with one of his own, he put his finger to his lips to quiet Reed and the crowd, just as Reed had done during the Sunday singles at Gleneagles in Scotland in 2014. “I don’t think anybody wants to see that kind of behavior at one of the four majors, but I think it works in this event,” said Kris Van Dalen, a 36-year-old from La Crosse, Wis., who was following the McIlroy-Reed duel from just outside the ropes on Sunday. “It brings something more to it. And I have no problem with it.” There may be a generation gap at work, but it was striking that while the pro-American crowd received plenty of behavioral warnings on Sunday — by app and by email and on the scoreboard — Reed and McIlroy clearly felt no obligation to stop inciting each other. The flexing peaked on the par-3 eighth, where McIlroy put his tee shot on the front edge of the green. “He was miles away,” said Reed, who was not. “It looked like I was in complete control of the hole.” Indeed it did. Then McIlroy delivered a putt that rolled for nine seconds and approximately 50 feet across the eighth green before dropping into the hole. McIlroy greeted that surprising development with a primal scream of delight and then responded to the boos and the hoots by cupping his right hand to his ear and shouting, “I can’t hear you!” All Reed did then was sink a 20-foot putt from the fringe to halve another hole. Re-enter the wagging finger, and though it would not have been surprising at this antagonistic stage to see Team Europe charge the mound, McIlroy instead cracked a smile. “It was all played in the right spirit,” McIlroy would say later. “Yes, we mocked each other a little bit, but at the same time it was all in great fun.” And instead of the intercontinental tension rising further, détente broke out as Reed and McIlroy approached each other on the edge of that eighth green and exchanged fist bumps and slaps on the back. It was a surprising, touching move, and the match would never feel like the same grudge match again. Nor was the quality as astonishing again: Both made bogeys on the next hole, and both missed plenty of short-range and midrange putts that could have created more breathing space in the closing holes. But the change in tone did not make the result any less significant to the Americans’ first victory since 2008. “The captain and the vice captains put me out front to go do my job and get red on that board,” Reed said, sotto voce as he stood with his hands on his hips on the 18th green. “It’s a lot easier said than done, especially when you’re going up against a guy like Rory.” But what surely made it easier for Reed was that he so clearly craved the assignment.