Presidents Cup 2026: Si Woo Kim and the Data That Never Makes the Scoreboard

Sunday, the back nine, The Players Championship. Si Woo Kim is leading the tournament the golf world calls "the fifth major." In the middle of the deciding round, he pulls out two Advil PM and a can of Red Bull.

The man telling this story is Christiaan Bezuidenhout, the South African who shared a team room with Kim at the 2026 and 2026 Presidents Cup, and who will be beside him again at Medinah next week. He told it on the latest episode of GOLF's Subpar podcast, alongside co-hosts Colt Knost and Drew Stoltz.

"He's a beaut man. Everyone on the team loves Si Woo. We call him Woo on the team," Bezuidenhout said. "He's a great guy. He's funny. He told us a story. When he won the Players, on Sunday on the back nine, he took two Advil PM and a Red Bull — on the back nine of the Players while in the lead. We have to always make sure we have Red Bull in our team cabin, in the bus, in the hotel. He loves a Red Bull. He's one of a kind."

I read that three times, then a fourth to make sure I hadn't mistranslated.

Advil PM is an over-the-counter sleep aid; its active ingredient is diphenhydramine. Red Bull is caffeine. A golfer leading the biggest tournament of the season, walking into the back nine — the stretch where a one-metre putt weighs like a boulder — takes a sedative and a stimulant at the same time.

The media will file this under "colour." I think it is one of the most technically revealing details of Presidents Cup week.

Medinah, where the stronger side once collapsed

The 2026 Presidents Cup runs from 24 to 27 September at Medinah Country Club in Chicago, Illinois. This is Si Woo Kim's fourth Presidents Cup. Across his first three, he has gone 6-5.

The format runs 30 matches over four days: four foursomes and four four-ball matches on each of the first two days, eight and eight on the third, and twelve singles on the final day. The first side to 15.5 points takes the cup.

History tilts so brutally toward the United States that it is almost cruel. In 14 editions, the U.S. has won 12. The International Team has won exactly once — in 2026 at Royal Melbourne under captain Peter Thomson — and halved once, in 2026 at Fancourt. Across nearly three decades, the International Team owns one victory.

But Medinah is not a neutral course in the memory of team golf.

In 2026, the Ryder Cup was played here. The United States led 10-6 going into Sunday singles. Europe won eight of twelve singles and flipped the whole thing, finishing 14.5-13.5. Ian Poulter banked four points across the final two days. Martin Kaymer sealed it with a putt on the 18th. Tiger Woods lost the anchor match to Francesco Molinari. They call it the "Miracle at Medinah," and fourteen years later the name still sticks.

The Presidents Cup has never been played at Medinah. 2026 is the first time. For a team with almost no chance on paper, being sent to the course where the favourite once fell apart is not a small thing. Medinah's Course No. 3 is one of the hardest tracks in America, stretching beyond 7,600 yards from the back tees, with thick rough and quick greens. The harder the course, the tighter the talent gap compresses — and that is the only condition under which the weaker side can hope.

Kim arrives in the best form of his career. He has posted 11 top-10 finishes in 2026. In elite golf, top-10 frequency is a more honest measure than trophy count, because it tracks consistency across four rounds, four course types and four weather systems. A player with 11 top-10s in a season shows up near the lead almost every week.

Based on my own experience following these matches, that is the kind of form that converts well into team play, because team golf does not reward the man who plays the best single round — it rewards the man who never plays a bad one twice in a row.

Inside the team room, a "horse" is not just a point-scorer

The International captain divides his squad into two groups. The "horses" get sent out most often — regularly in both foursomes and four-ball — to maximise points. The rest are slotted by pairing, by course, by opponent.

Si Woo Kim belongs to the first group. That is why he is called a pillar.

But Bezuidenhout tells a different story, and that story describes a role the scoreboard never shows.

The International Team stocks Red Bull in three places: the team cabin, the bus, the hotel.

Skim it and it reads like a gag. Read it closely and it is an organisational decision. A team that builds a supply chain around one man's habit has declared that man's comfort a performance variable. No team does that for someone they are not planning to bet points on.

Bezuidenhout says "everyone on the team loves Si Woo." Across seven days of living, eating, travelling and playing together, the man who keeps the goodwill of twenty men from ten different countries is usually the man who sets the emotional temperature of the room. That role never appears in the minutes. Anyone who has been inside a competitive collective knows it exists.

Bezuidenhout is a credible witness for this kind of information. Born in 2026, he was suspended for two years as a teenager over a banned-substance incident and needed nearly a decade to climb back to the top. He has been in the International team room two editions running. He is not a reporter hunting a story. He is the guy sitting next to him.

One small detail: Bezuidenhout uses the word "beaut," Australasian slang for a decent human being, to describe a Korean golfer inside a squad of South Africans, Japanese, Australians, Canadians, Koreans and Colombians. The phrasing itself is a data point about team-room culture.

Two sleeping pills and an energy drink: reading it as a biological protocol

Over the past twenty years, sleep science has become mandatory in every professional training programme. Golf is hit harder than most sports, for three reasons.

First, golf has no clock. A round lasts four to five hours, and focus must be sustained across the whole stretch with no half-time to reload.

Second, golf is a sport of millimetre precision. Precision degrades first when the brain tires, and it degrades in ways the player himself cannot detect — which is the most dangerous part.

Third, the elite golf calendar is a chain of constant travel across time zones. A player competing in Florida one week, Texas the next and Korea the week after lives in permanent circadian debt.

Diphenhydramine, the active ingredient in Advil PM, is a first-generation antihistamine with strong sedative effects and a half-life of roughly four to six hours. The caffeine in a 250ml can of Red Bull is about 80mg, with a half-life of roughly five hours.

Taking both on the back nine is a crude but logical protocol. The caffeine is enough to fight off drowsiness during the window that demands alertness. The diphenhydramine is enough to cool the nervous system once the round ends and push the body into deep sleep. When the two metabolise at roughly similar rates, the caffeine outlasts the stretch needed to finish the nine.

This is my inference, built on public pharmacokinetic data and a second-hand account on a podcast. Si Woo Kim may simply like Red Bull and happen to have a headache. But one thing I am certain of: reading this story as a joke is to miss the information.

The more interesting angle sits elsewhere. A golfer willing to take a sleeping pill on the back nine of the season's biggest event, while leading, is a man with an unusually high level of faith in his own system. He does not trust inspiration. He trusts a process he has rehearsed enough times to bet a trophy on it.

The contrarian angle

For about a decade now, every time a Presidents Cup or Ryder Cup approaches, golf argues the same argument. One camp says team chemistry is decisive, that a good room can flatten the talent gap. The other says emotion cannot hit a golf shot, that the Presidents Cup is settled by depth and world ranking.

Both camps are half right, and both make the same mistake: they treat "team chemistry" as a moral variable — present or absent — rather than an organisational variable that can be measured.

The International Team buys Red Bull for one man. It does not do this for the other eleven. That is a decision you can measure, argue about and challenge.

But a different fact matters more: in Presidents Cup history, the twelve Sunday singles matches are always where every gap becomes fragile. Twelve singles spread across twenty-four golfers. Inside those twelve, the distance between the world No. 5 and the world No. 20 is usually far smaller than it feels.

That is where Medinah 2026 came from. Not in the four morning foursomes, but in twelve Sunday singles, when every putt by every player could swing the entire week.

That is also why the International Team needs a player like Si Woo Kim — a man who can play four team matches, then a Sunday singles, and hold the whole room steady for the three days before that.

There is a temptation I always have to warn myself against: turning a beautiful anecdote into a solid thesis. I believed the textbook for five years, and one World Cup shattered the whole thing. Every statistic is capable of lying; my job is to catch it in the act.

So I keep only the measurable part: Si Woo Kim is 6-5 across three Presidents Cups. He has 11 top-10 finishes in 2026. He has played three editions in a row and been recalled for a fourth. That is the driest part of the truth, and it cannot tell the most interesting part.

What I am actually curious about

There is a question nobody seems to be asking this week, and it is the one worth tracking at Medinah.

If the International Team wins, where will the cause be?

The habitual answer is: in the big putts. But putting is an outcome, not a cause. Putting depends on whether a player slept enough, ate right, felt safe inside the collective.

From a failed starting block to the commentary booth: every scar is a map. I once fell at the 350-metre mark of a 400-metre race because I trained on inspiration instead of a plan. The lesson was not "never break the plan." The lesson was: anyone who breaks the plan must build a private system tighter than the plan, or he collapses at the final metre.

Two Advil PM and a Red Bull on the back nine of the Players is exactly that kind of private system. It is absurd to outsiders. It is logical to insiders. And the entire International Team has learned to operate around it, to the point of stocking Red Bull in three separate locations.

That is what the scoreboard never shows, and it is what every winning team must have.

What remains

Next week at Medinah, Si Woo Kim walks out as one of the International Team's point pillars. He will play alongside men he has lived with for seven days. In the team cabin, on the bus, at the hotel, there will be Red Bull waiting for him to take one can.

The International Team may lose again. History says the odds are high, and history is usually right at tournaments like this.

But elite sport is a language every player has to learn, and its grammar is not written in any textbook. It lives in small details repeated often enough to become shared infrastructure.

A team that turns one man's personal habit into a collective responsibility is a team that has understood what every team sport teaches: talent gets you into the room, but only understanding keeps you there.

Next week at Medinah, I will be watching the scoreboard. But I will also be watching whether the drinks get restocked on time.