MONTREAL – Sahith Theegala heard the laughter.
Seated alongside U.S. Presidents Cup teammates Xander Schauffele, Keegan Bradley and Scottie Scheffler in the interview room, Theegala, a rookie in international team competition who teamed with Collin Morikawa for a 1-up victory over Adam Scott and Min Woo Lee in the second of five Four-Ball matches on Thursday, talked as if he’d done this a million times.
“Match play is a funny, funny thing,” he said. “There’s always some Mongolians and things go the ways that you don’t think it would go. But yeah, it was really intense. To finish how we finished was awesome, to get a point.”
Mongolians? Laughter ensued along the raised platform where the players sat. You could tell that Schauffele and maybe even Scheffler couldn’t wait to get back to the team room and share the knowledge Theegala dropped on the media during their group session. It likely will follow him until at least the next Presidents Cup in 2026. But it almost slipped through the cracks of the remaining allotted time of questions and answers before the players would be whisked out of the room and a handful of International Team players would replace them. Thankfully, Shane Ryan of Golf Digest was granted the last question and he wondered, “Sahith, can you tell me what Mongolians are?”
“I heard them laughing when I said that,” Theegala began. “I realize I didn’t say the full phrase. Not race intended or country intended, but Mongolian Reversal, I don’t even know how it originated.”
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Who really does? But Theegala noted that the first time he heard the saying a long time ago happened to be when he was watching TV and former three-time U.S. Presidents Cup Captain Fred Couples uttered the phrase. [I’m pretty sure I was in attendance at a press conference in which Couples used this term.] A quick Google search of the saying and Fred Couples returned a handful of returns, including the great Michael Bamberger writing that he was going to keep using the term Mongolian Reversal “because Fred Couples uses it, too.” The equally great Gary Van Sickle credited Couples too for the term in a 2006 story.
Then Theegala explained to Ryan what it meant.
“I guess it’s just when your opponents are in a better place than you on the hole and you do something cool like make a long putt. It looks like your opponents were going to win the hole when you hit the approach shots in, but you make the long putt and they miss the short putt, and all of a sudden looking like you’re losing the hole to winning the hole,” he said.
In a gesture not often heard at an athlete’s press conference, Theegala added, “Thank you for asking to clarify that.”
Blessed with enough self-awareness to realize that this terminology he picked up from Couples may have gone the way of such politically incorrect terms such as Indian burn and Chinese fire drill, Theegala closed by saying, “Mongolian Reversal, yes. Don’t cancel me, please.”
Theegala is salt of the Earth and also spent time praising both his parents for the reason he was sitting on the stage in the first place. After not getting the chance to ask a follow-up question, I approached Theegala as he was exiting the press conference and wondered, what was the Mongolian Reversal in his Four-ball match?
He wasted no time responding. “The seventh hole,” he said. “Collin drained a putt and then Adam missed from 10 feet. It didn’t look we’d win that hole and we could’ve gone 2 down in the match but instead we were back to all square.”
Fred Couples never said it better.
