Two-points adrift overnight and still one-point behind going into Sunday afternoon singles at Royal Liverpool, the visitors eventually overwhelmed a game but ultimately toothless Great Britain & Ireland team to successfully defend the cup won at the Los Angeles Country Club two years ago. The victory takes America’s all-time record in this 97-year-old event to 37-9-1.

The final, and ultimately convincing, score of 15½-10½ also made the Americans the first Walker Cup side to win away from home since 2007. That U.S. team, containing the likes of Webb Simpson, Dustin Johnson, Billy Horschel, Jamie Lovemark, Rickie Fowler and Kyle Stanley, triumphed by a single point at Royal County Down in Northern Ireland.

It remains to be seen if those on the current American squad will go on to anything like individual successes of their already prolific predecessors. What is known, however, is that this was truly a team effort, a proper collaborative endeavour. Points came from nine of the team’s 10 members (Steven Fisk the unfortunate exception), although just one, John Pak (matching earrings and all) emerged unbeaten, walking off with a 3-0-0 record.

Every other golfer on the winning side lost at least once, a “feat” repeated by all 10 players on the GB&I team. Scotsman Sandy Scott (2-1-1) was the best of the Old World bunch, at least statistically, with British Amateur champion James Sugrue the only home player to leave pointless.

John Augenstein gets a high-five from U.S. Walker Cup teammate Akshay Bhatia. Augenstein’s Sunday singles victory gave the U.S. its clinching point at Royal Liverpool. (Richard Martin-Roberts/R&A)

It was clear from the start of the fourth and final session that the Americans were imbued with an uncommon level of determination. Where the golf during Sunday morning foursomes (won 2½-1½ by the Americans) had been less than stellar on both sides, post-lunch the visiting squad was quick to make its collective mark. Six of the 10 won their opening hole. Only the previously unbeaten Brandon Wu lost the 424-yard par 4 (to a birdie), en route to a 4-and-3 loss at the hands of Scott.

“I played very well today,” said Scott, a Texas Tech student by way of Scotland. “I started well and made a few birdies and just had a rough patch in the middle but managed to hold on for the win. On the three holes in a row [9-10-11] that I lost, it was just poor decision making. But I knew I wasn’t playing bad golf, so I just had to get back on track and concentrate a little harder.”

But Scott’s play was the exception for GB&I, the scoreboard an almost exclusive sea of red until eight of the 10 contests concluded in favour of the U.S. Amidst that avalanche, the winning point arrived when U.S. Amateur runner-up John Augenstein shook hands with Thomas Plumb on the 15th green, the American a 4-and-3 winner of Match 7. But it had long been simply a matter of time before the arithmetically unassailable number of 13½ was reached.

All in all, the final score represented something of an anti-climax, especially so in the wake of three sessions that, although lacking in the area of solid course management on both sides, never ceased to be intriguing. Few things in golf are more exciting to watch than a closely fought team competition, even if the play falls short of the level one might expect from some of the best amateurs on the planet. Disappointingly, way more holes were lost rather than won.

Anyway, at close of play, the moods of the respective captains accurately reflected how their respective afternoons developed. Where Crosby’s smiling demeanour captured his mixture of delight and relief, GB&I captain Craig Watson’s habitual deadpan expression was the outward manifestation of an inward despondency. Yes, the home team had pushed its opponents hard for a day-and-a-half. But in the end, as so often over the years, the American’s greater strength-in-depth clinched the victory.

“I am very excited,” Crosby said. “We were a crazy mix of personalities, but all blended well. It was almost too much fun, but after yesterday we sobered up and really focused today, and it was an amazing afternoon. I let them just go play. They are very talented guys who believe in themselves. Their talent came to the surface. I could not be more excited for them and me. I’ve not won anything in about 38 years.”

Akshay Bhatia sits on Stewart Hagestad’s shoulders as the U.S. team begins to celebrate their Walker Cup victory on Sunday at Royal Liverpool. (Jan Kruger/R&A)

Watson, British Amateur champ in 1997, can beat that period of futility by a decade-and-a-half or so, but that now far-off victory over future Masters champion Trevor Immelman at Royal St. Georges was little consolation for the 53-year-old Scot.

“It’s been a fantastic week,” Watson said, displaying a rare burst of enthusiasm. “The lads will probably learn a lot from this disappointment today. It was a tough course the way it was set up. If you were ahead, early pars were enough to stay ahead because birdies were going to be few and far between, and the American boys did that very well. I don’t think playing in more wind would have made too much of a difference. I don’t think the conditions had anything to do with the fact that the Americans outplayed us today.”

No, in the end, for the winning side this was a result built on greater ball-control, both off the tee and around the greens. A combination that ultimately led to their own little bit of history-making.

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Seven past captains of U.S. Walker Cup teams had assembled at Ruth’s Chris Steak House in West Palm Beach in early 2018 to salute Crosby, who had just recently been named to lead the Americans in 2019, and to offer him advice. Among them was Jay Sigel, a playing captain at the matches at Royal Liverpool Golf Club in 1983 when Crosby was a member of his team.

When it came around to Sigel, he turned to Crosby and said, “Whatever you do, play all your players three times.”

A spit-take in range of prime beef generally is considered bad form, and Crosby restrained himself. Presumably. But he made his point. “You benched me twice,” Crosby said to Sigel. “I’ve been holding this baggage for 35 years.”

The mood was convivial and all in good fun. Sigel apparently had not recalled having kept Crosby out of half the four sessions, and Crosby harbours no true ill will toward Sigel. But the experience undeniably left a scar, notwithstanding the Americans’ three-point victory.

“I was kind of mad,” Crosby said recently, noting that the ’83 Walker Cup took a distant second to his experience in the World Amateur Team Championship in Switzerland the year before when his final-round 68 propelled a U.S. team that included Sigel to a victory. “The Walker Cup was not nearly as wonderful as the World Amateur.”

Now 57 and the captain of the U.S. team, Crosby returns this week to Royal Liverpool Golf Club, site of the 47th Walker Cup, and he brings with him virtually a blank slate on which to create memories. “I don’t remember much,” he said of his prior experience there.

U.S. captain Nathaniel Crosby with team members Brandon Wu (centre) and Cole Hammer (right) in a Walker Cup practice session. (Chris Keane)

Royal Liverpool, in fact, registers barely a blip in the voluminous Crosby family album filled largely by the family patriarch, the legendary entertainer Bing Crosby, Nathaniel’s father.

Bing was an unabashed Anglophile and a devotee of British golf courses. On one business trip to London, in 1971, he flew into Scotland, played the two existing courses at Gleneagles, Turnberry, the Old Course at St. Andrews, Muirfield, Sunningdale, Royal West Norfolk, Huntercombe and Royal St. George’s before getting around to the reason he was in the U.K.—business.

Yet there is no evidence that Bing ever played Royal Liverpool, though he did perform at the historic Empire Theater in Liverpool, about 10 miles east of Hoylake. His only brush with the course was when he was considering playing the British Amateur when it was held there in 1953, until a British sportswriter, Desmond Hackett, pointedly suggested he not.

Hackett noted that when Crosby had played the British Amateur at the Old Course at St. Andrews in 1950 female admirers “ran screaming all over the course, treading thru bunkers, stamping their ignorance on the greens with high-heeled shoes …

“Bing Crosby is entitled like any other golf-minded citizen to enter for the Amateur so long as he complies with the rules which set down plainly but firmly, ‘I am eligible under conditions of the championship and have a handicap not exceeding three strokes.’ If Bing Crosby can play to three, then I am entitled to top billing at the Palladium.”

Bing did play to a three but chose not to compete at Hoylake, no doubt to the dismay of those who would have enjoyed seeing him. It would not have been a small turnout, either, for an entertainer held in the highest regard there for his talent, fame and, especially, his contributions to the war effort, in entertaining troops and raising funds.

Thirty years later and six years after Bing’s death, Nathaniel drew crowds on and off the course at Royal Liverpool in 1983 thanks at least in part to his family ties.

“…[E]ven though he wasn’t necessarily the most feared golfer in the USA team, he was definitely the one who aroused the most curiosity,” head professional John Heggerty recalled in Royal Liverpool Golf Club Magazine’s 2018-2019 edition.

“You have to remember that all those years ago the Crosby name was much more firmly in people’s imaginations than it is now, even though Bing Crosby had passed away a few years earlier … so Nathaniel had something of the celebrity about him, especially to non-golfers.”

Crosby (first row, far right) played on the 1983 U.S. Walker Cup team at Royal Liverpool, where he returns this week to captain the U.S. team in the biennial matches. (David Cannon/Getty Images)

Heggerty noted that Crosby and a few of his teammates ventured to Liverpool’s Green Lodge pub one night. When word spread that he was there, a crowd gathered. Crosby does not recall that, other than noting that in those days, including his few years as a professional on the European Tour, he often drew “disproportionate crowds to who I was,” he said. “I didn’t pull like Seve, but there was a curiosity factor.”

What Crosby does remember of the Walker Cup was an amusing story involving him and his caddie, who bore an uncanny resemblance to Rod Stewart. “Everybody called him Rod,” Crosby said. Golfers in those days provided their own practice balls and their caddies shagged them for the player.

“You’ve got to go shag some balls for me,” Crosby said to Rod within earshot of the gallery that included women aghast at him using the word “shag,” a vulgarity according to its British definition.

What he also remembers was sitting out the morning foursomes on the first day, then getting routed by GB&I’s Phillip Parkin, 6 and 4, in the afternoon singles. In morning foursomes the second day, he and William Hoffer beat George Macgregor and Phillip Walton, 2 up.

“We beat their best team,” Crosby, the ’81 U.S. Amateur champion, said. “I played out of my wazoo.” Then he was benched in afternoon singles, “an emotional slight,” he called it. “There’s definitely some baggage for me that I got benched twice.”

But that was then and this is now, an opportunity that moves near the top of a golf career that largely wasn’t. “To be honest, the way my career went, retiring at 26 in front of my girlfriend and my dog, I took a step back and chose not to play competitive golf as an adult,” he said. “I was a poster child for the possibly sobering event of not going on to be a PGA Tour star.

“But being a Walker Cup captain is a real privilege, carrying on in my dad’s tradition, a little bit. A great way for to me to give back.”

He was never entirely certain he would get the nod, notwithstanding what he calls generational friendships with so many USGA presidents and executive committee members, including Sandy Tatum, Grant Spaeth, P.J. Boatwright, Jim Hand and Harry Easterly from his youth.

“Now I’ve come full circle,” he said. “Stu Francis [president-elect of the USGA] and Diana Murphy [a past USGA president] are great friends. Her stepdaughter went to high school with me at Burlingame [Calif.] High. Stu and I have been friends playing golf at Burlingame Country Club [in Hillsborough, Calif.] since I was 14 years old.”

Crosby’s concern about his potential candidacy was twofold. He had played professional golf, which in USGA Walker Cup circles is not a resume enhancer, and he had played only a single USGA event, the U.S. Mid-Amateur, since regaining his amateur status in 1994.

“I haven’t had a great moment in 35 years, haven’t won a tournament in 35 years,” Crosby told Golf Digest when his appointment was announced.

When Murphy called to inform him that he would captain the 2019 U.S. team, he was breathless, he said, and his captaincy already qualifies as a great moment personally. “It’s the younger generation that makes it special,” he said. Crosby, in his duties as captain, attended the Western Amateur, the Porter Cup and the U.S. Amateur, among other tournaments, scouting and acquainting himself with potential team members. “It’s already been an incredible experience, getting to meet the kids and the families, having these kids texting me.”

He received a text one night from Vanderbilt star John Augenstein, the runner-up at last month’s U.S. Amateur, who had recalled that a Crosby friend is Scott DeSano, founder of the DeSano’s pizza chain. “Hey, Captain,” he wrote, “I’m at DeSano’s Pizza.”

Another favourite is University of Texas star Cole Hammer, the No. 1 golfer in the World Amateur Golf Ranking. “I watched him win 11 straight matches last year,” Crosby said. “I’ve already filed adoption papers. I’ve told his parents they have to make room for me in the family.”

Both Augenstein and Hammer are on the Walker Cup team, and it is reasonable to expect that neither of them, nor their eight other teammates, will sit more than one session.

Crosby might recall little from his first go-round at Royal Liverpool, but he remembers too well having been consigned twice to the role of spectator.

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