Zach Johnson Once Said He Wanted His Ryder Cup Roster Decision to Be Difficult. Lucas Glover Has Done Exactly That

Glover won for the second straight week, and, with one event remaining for players to earn points and two weeks until Johnson sets his Ryder Cup roster, his decision appears to be complicated.

Five hundred thirty-two days ago, Zach Johnson was named U.S. Ryder Cup captain.

Excited and honored, the Drake alumnus now has two weeks before he’ll announce his final decision on keeping or dropping players from his team. Some of those players he would never could’ve imagined would land squarely on the bubble.

Brooks Koepka, Wyndham Clark and Brian Harman all have changed the top of the U.S. Ryder points list with major victories during the spring and summer. They are inside the top six in the current standings. Johnson has had time to process and accept that all three players, who were unlikely to have been part of his initial plans, will now be part of his team.

Clark is a lock, with Harman sitting fourth and Koepka fifth. This week’s BMW Championship is the final week players can earn additional points to finish in the top six and earn automatic berths.

While either Koepka, a LIV member, or Harman could possibly fall out of the top six after the BMW, Johnson would be heavily scrutinized if he left a 2023 major winner off the team.

Johnson’s most intriguing option has emerged during the past two weeks: Lucas Glover.

At 43, Glover has found the fountain of youth with a long broomstick putter that has done nothing but turn heads of other players, fans and the media covering the former U.S. Open champion. For the last two weeks he’s beaten the PGA Tour’s best.

Glover has never played on a Ryder Cup team, and, when asked about the biennial matches after he won Sunday in Memphis, he was short and succinct:

“I think I’ve never made it and I want to,” Glover said. He is almost unquestionably playing the best golf of his career.

It’s been a meteoric rise.

Glover decided he needed putting help and called L.A.B. Golf, the manufacturer that makes Adam Scott’s putter, and asked for a model similar to Scott’s.

That was the request: no specs, just send a putter like the one Scottie uses.

Since Glover and Scott are close to the same height, Glover 6'2" and Scott 6'0", that was close enough for the Clemson alumnus. When he received the putter, inside the box was a ticket that confirmed it was built to Scott’s specs.

Describing his work with a conventional putter “a definition of chaos,” Glover stood in front of a mirror in his garage and taught himself how to putt standing up. He was unsuccessful when he tried the stroke at Memorial, where he missed the cut. He then missed a two-footer in the U.S. Open qualifier playoff in Columbus after shooting a 63 in the morning. Glover had no place to go, so he stuck with it.

Everything started to click at the Rocket Mortgage in Detroit a month later, where he finished T4 with weekend rounds of 64–65. It was his first top 10 since the 2022 FedEx St. Jude Championship, where he finished T3.

From there the success just continued, T6 at the John Deere, fifth at the Barbasol Championship. A missed cut at the 3M Open didn’t derail Glover, as he then won for the first time since 2011 at the Wyndham Championship and followed that up with a playoff win over Patrick Cantlay at the St. Jude last week.

Before Memorial, Glover was 95th on the Ryder Cup points list. He moved to 35th after the Wyndham win and is now sitting at 16th after the win in Memphis with just one week to go to accumulate points. Captain Johnson is watching, and once upon a time he said he’d be looking for players who will be a fit for the setup in Rome.

“I don't want to say horses for courses, but you know what, I have a little bit freedom involved, so once I understand what that golf course demands, certainly fully knowing that the European Ryder Cup team has a little bit of say in how they set the course up, I think it allows me to really pinpoint some key attributes that could be, you know, an asset on this golf course,” Johnson said when he was initially named captain.

Over the last 532 days those thoughts have no doubt evolved.

At the Open Championship at Royal Liverpool, Johnson was asked about Justin Thomas, who has struggled in 2023 and was clearly on the team when Johnson first took the reins. Today Thomas represents a difficult decision.

Johnson has said he doesn’t believe in trying to identify the 12 best Americans, which he calls a subjective ranking, but the 12 best to form a team, similar to Herb Brooks’s philosophy at the 1980 Winter Olympics with the U.S. hockey team.

“It's very difficult to put the 12 best guys together for that week, but I’m leaning more on that,” Johnson said. “It’s also 12 guys in a locker room that want to be around each other. I want five vice captains, counting me, six individuals that want to be around each other, and I want synergies within the captaincies to overflow into the players.

“I think we’ve done a really good job of that as of late, and I think when it comes down to it, the guys play with a little bit more freedom and expectations are laid out and communication is at a high level.”

Ultimately, Johnson wants 12 guys who want to be there and fight. In the scenario Johnson outlined, is it possible not to pick Glover?

Glover is liked by many in the locker room, with an easygoing attitude and grit. He’s a major winner (2008 U.S. Open) and today is the hottest golfer on the planet. It seems difficult to leave him off the team at this point, and that decision would be scrutinized.

Johnson said at the Open at Hoylake that he wanted players to make his decision difficult. Lucas Glover has granted his wish.