Presidents Cup: International Team Sweeps Foursomes 5-0 to Lead USA 7-3

I sat in front of the screen in Busan, replaying the second foursomes session of the Presidents Cup in slow motion, and stopped at the moment Hideki Matsuyama exchanged a look with Sungjae Im after the decisive putt. Medinah fell silent — a heavy silence, the kind that settles over a crowd that has just heard something it did not want to believe. Five matches, five points, not a single gap. The International Team swept the foursomes session 5-0 against the United States, climbing to a 7-3 lead after two sessions. After nearly two decades in sports journalism, I still keep one habit: never let a beautiful session speak for an entire tournament. The Presidents Cup is a biennial men's professional golf team event in which the United States faces the International Team — golfers drawn from the rest of the world, excluding Europe. Structurally it resembles the Ryder Cup, but its history tilts hard to one side: the Americans are chasing an eleventh consecutive title, while the Internationals have not lifted the cup since 2026. This edition is being played at Medinah Country Club, Course No. 3, near Chicago — a venue that has witnessed historic comebacks. Cloudy skies, soft greens, slower rolls; the kind of conditions analysts jokingly call a course for the patient. I have never covered professional golf as a resident reporter, but the way I observe team sport does not change by discipline: chemistry is an asset, and it cannot be bought. In foursomes — alternate-shot, two players sharing one ball — what decides the match is not each player's world ranking but the rhythm between them. One player out of step drags the whole pair down. The transfer market runs on the trust of those who listen, and so does a foursomes pairing: they win through belief in each other, not through the leaderboard. That is why the story of this session lives in the pairings more than in the scoreline. The Internationals dropped a point in the opening session, then turned the tide. Hideki Matsuyama and Sungjae Im are the clearest example of what chemistry can do. Both are Asian golfers raised in a golf culture that demands strict discipline and near-Stoic composure. Standing together, neither tries to shine alone. Tom Kim and Si Woo Kim are the second case: this Korean pair has remained unbeaten together all week. What is striking is that none of them is considered the brightest star of the team — yet they are the ones setting the rhythm for the collective. Trust, in the end, is the real currency of team sport. It never shows up on the scorecard, but it decides the scorecard. The session opened with a match balanced to the point of suffocation. Yet the longer it went, the more the tide turned toward the Internationals. Their pairings held firm through the middle holes, then exploited the psychological edge as opponents began to err. The late birdies did not come from luck; they came from one player placing his partner in the most favorable spot. This is what the scorecard never shows: the first player accepts playing safe so the second can attack. On the other side, the United States had a dense array of stars: Scottie Scheffler, Collin Morikawa, Justin Thomas, Xander Schauffele, Patrick Cantlay. Their individual rankings are higher than almost every opponent's. The session's results did not reflect that. Scheffler, the world No. 1, lost 1-up. American pairings fell despite fielding better individuals, repeating an old lesson: stacking stars does not automatically create a working pairing. Foursomes tests the ability to hand the ball to each other, to accept playing safe so that a partner gets a better shot. Scorelines like 3&2, 1-up and 4&3 say this more clearly than any commentary. They do not record beautiful shots; they record the moment a pair is forced to trust one another. The 7-3 lead, pulling the Internationals close to their first title since 2026, sounds decisive. But as Medinah fell silent, I kept thinking more about what had not yet happened. This is where I have to be careful with myself. One session, five matches, is far too little to draw a conclusion about a whole tournament — especially with twenty points still undecided. A 5-0 sweep is a rare result, and precisely because it is rare, it is easily read as a trend when it may well be a statistical outlier. In sport, a perfect session often says more about the mood of an afternoon than about the true balance between two teams. One detail needs verification. Some accounts claim this sequence repeats the Internationals' 5-0 foursomes sweep at the 2026 Presidents Cup in Royal Montreal. I do not have enough data to confirm that reading, and by the rules of my trade I keep it in a to-be-checked state rather than citing it as established fact. I once wrote before I listened. Now, I listen to the gaps between the answers. A story told too smoothly usually hides an unmended hole. In South Korea, where I live and work, this story carries another layer of meaning. Names like Im Sung-jae, Kim Si-woo and Kim Joo-hyung are pillars of the International Team. Every time they score in a major team event, sports bulletins in Seoul put them on the front page. From the vantage point of a Vietnamese journalist who follows both football and golf, I see an under-discussed common thread: Asian sporting nations often win in team formats where patience and discipline are placed above individual ego. Vietnamese football rose along that path; Korean golf is doing the same. The Americans' real risk is not technical. It is mental. The silence of the home crowd is a two-way signal: today it is pressure, tomorrow it could become fuel. For the Internationals, the greatest danger is the feeling of having enough — the complacency history shows has undone many a leading team. The remaining schedule includes two sessions on Saturday. Twenty points, a four-point gap, and in a sport where a single hole can swing an entire afternoon, four points is not yet a wall. As I closed the screen in Busan, what lingered was not the 7-3 score. It was the image of Matsuyama and Im nodding to each other after a shot both knew they could not have made alone. This tournament may still run long, and today's sweep may prove to be only the peak before another comeback. If there is one lesson worth keeping, it is this: in formats that force two people to play one ball, the winner is usually not the strongest player but the one who trusts a teammate most. The question for the final two days is simple: can the United States learn that trust again before Medinah falls completely silent?