Donald Backs Mixed Ryder Cup Event; Calendar Fears Linger — SkimNews
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- Luke Donald, Team Europe's Ryder Cup captain, proposed creating a mixed Europe vs America team event modelled on the Ryder Cup and Solheim Cup, telling the Telegraph ahead of the BMW PGA Championship that he'd love to see pairings like Nelly Korda with Rory McIlroy.
- Mixed-gender team golf is already built into the Los Angeles 2028 Olympics, and the Grant Thornton Invitational — an annual December event combining PGA Tour and DP World Tour players and successor to the defunct JCPenney Classic — provides an existing template.
- Paul McGinley, the Ryder Cup-winning captain, told Sky Sports the core complications are calendar space and whether players "are going to play another team event, particularly when they're probably not going to get paid for it."
- Anthony Wall, former DP World Tour player, said on the Sky Sports Golf podcast that the schedule "is getting tighter and tighter" and that Olympic golf is already making player commitments harder to secure.
- The Presidents Cup at Medinah this week sees Team USA chasing a record-extending 11th consecutive win over the International Team, and McGinley said the PGA Tour has already rejected converting that event into a mixed team format.
- Five of the world's top six women's golfers would qualify for an International team under current Presidents Cup eligibility, a point McGinley cited as evidence that a mixed format would finally produce balanced matchups against the dominant US side.
Why it matters: Donald himself conceded the event "would take some time to create," and the source's named experts identify two concrete blockers — an autumn calendar already crowded by the Ryder Cup, Solheim Cup and Presidents Cup, and the absence of player pay for team weeks — that any organizer would have to clear before adding a new biennial mixed contest.
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