Jamie Donaldson: ‘I hit the winning shot at the Ryder Cup – but I wish it had been different’

Jamie Donaldson stands over his ball in the middle of the 15th fairway at Gleneagles.  

The crowds around his match with Keegan Bradley are now tens of rows deep as anticipation grows that this is where the winning Ryder Cup moment will be witnessed. 

Donaldson is feeling good. He’s in the form of his life and now he has the perfect yardage, perfect conditions, and perfect pin position for his shot shape. 

The mammoth gallery dare not breathe as he glides his wedge through the ball. A single meek cry of “get in the hole” breaks the silence. Donaldson glares at his ball longingly. Standing. Waiting. Wishing.

“Be good,” he pleads. 

It is. The ball pitches feet from the hole, skips past its intended target before spinning back and finally settling on a spot that will not require any more strokes. 

Pandemonium ensues. 

Legend has it the eruption from the European fans was felt from Ayrshire to Aberdeen. Donaldson’s teammates who have come to witness this special moment embrace. Paul McGinley runs up to the Welshman and jumps on his back. Tom Watson offers his hand, first to the player, then to his rival captain. The Ryder Cup, in his mind at least, is over. 

For Donaldson, it was a moment five years in the making.  

Two years before, he had made his European Tour breakthrough with victory at the Irish Open. A few months later, he added the Abu Dhabi HSBC Championship to his CV.  

In between those wins was a long drive from his home in Cheshire to the Home of Golf for the Dunhill Links.  

The soundtrack to that journey was provided by a miracle taking place on the other side of the Atlantic at Medinah. 

“It was just so exhilarating,” Donaldson tells bunkered. “That was the best Ryder Cup ever. Imagine driving six hours listening to that and you arrive as it finishes. I get out of the car and I’ve got goosebumps all over my body. I was bouncing around.”  

Pulling on the yellow and blue was already pencilled in to Donaldson’s plan. Now it was inked. 

“From then I just desperately wanted to play in one. That really kick-started things.” 

But it’s no mean feat. The qualification process to get into the Ryder Cup is, as Donaldson puts it, “brutal”.  

“I just found it difficult,” he explains. “You have to play unbelievably well for more than a year.”  

Top-ten finishes in Portugal, Turkey and South Africa, as well as the WGC-HSBC Champions and DP World Tour Championship, put Donaldson in a really good position as the calendar ticked over into 2014. Then came a runner-up finish in the WGC-Cadillac Championship and a tie for 14th at the Masters.  

“Those events at Doral, Turkey and Sun City catapulted me up the standings,” Donaldson explains. “They were massive. Because they were so elevated in points and money, you felt as though you’d won three tournaments. Yet I only just got in at the end.” 

And he needed to. Donaldson had risen into the top 30 in the world for the first time and was confident of a spot in McGinley’s team.  

The Irishman, though, was keeping his cards close to his chest. He would only have three picks, and with the likes of Lee Westwood and Ian Poulter struggling to book their spots in the team, he couldn’t assure Donaldson a place.  

“I spoke to McGinley on the phone, and he said, ‘Listen, you’re a rookie. I can’t guarantee I’ll pick you. You’ve done unbelievably well to get this far, but you need to make sure you get into that team.’ He told me to play in Prague and Italy and see if I could get in.”  

So off Donaldson went to the Czech Masters, knowing a top-eight finish would be enough to book a ticket to Gleneagles. 

“I ended up winning it,” he smiles. “There was massive pressure, but I quite enjoyed the process knowing that you’ve got your foot in the door, but you’re not in. It was all done then. So I didn’t have to go to Italy. 

“It was…” 

Donaldson pauses to gather his thoughts. 

“Yeah,” he says, and lets out a huge sigh as he relives the moment in his head. “It was total elation. I was just so happy to get in.” 

And McGinley? 

“He just rang me up and said, ‘Well done. You’ve done what you had to do. Now get ready for it.”  

And how. Donaldson finished seventh at the European Masters and fourth at the Wales Open the day before heading to meet up with his new teammates. 

“I peaked perfectly for the Ryder Cup,” he explains. “That was the best thing about it. I could not have been more ready. I could not have been more on a high. I was playing the best golf of my life and I was absolutely on top of the world.  

“I went to play a few practice rounds and I just couldn’t miss. I just had my ball on a rope. I was buzzing.” 

Donaldson grounds himself and then adds: “It was a lovely feeling.”  

There’s an ongoing joke in the golf industry that Ryder Cup week is the longest of the year, and by the time the golf arrives on Friday there is an almighty sense of relief after what feels like months of build-up and endless press conferences with teams and captains alike. It turns out the players feel it, too. 

“That’s the hardest bit,” Donaldson recalls. “Practice is absolutely rammo, and then there’s the media obligations and the dinners and all that sort of stuff.  

“It’s so taxing. By the time the Ryder Cup starts, it’s actually relaxing. It was a relief. Obviously it didn’t change the fact that, when you’re walking to the first tee, you are shaking like a shitting dog.

“But while you’re very, very nervous, you’re also very, very up for it. We’re going to war here, that’s what it feels like. Like Poulter said, he gets so pumped for a Ryder Cup that he feels he could knock out Mike Tyson.  

“The adrenaline that goes through your body walking to that first tee is like nothing you can imagine.” 

Having sat out the opening morning’s fourballs, Donaldson was paired with Ryder Cup veteran Westwood – who had needed one of McGinley’s captain’s picks to make the team – in the first of the afternoon foursomes. 

“He gave me a list of people and asked me who I wanted to play with,” Donaldson says of McGinley. “I’m not going to mention any names, but I said, ‘They’re all great, but is that it? Is there anybody else I could possibly play with?’ And he said, ‘Well, there’s Westwood as well.’ I went, ‘Oh yeah, perfect.’ He’s just more relaxed, and I’m trying to be on a level instead of being up and down.  

“Lee and I were playing a practice round and all these people were watching, and he said, ‘At the end of the day, it’s just another game of golf isn’t it?’ And when someone of his experience says that to you, it just totally chills you out. He didn’t do or say much, he was just so calm throughout the whole process, like his heartbeat never went up. He was a brilliant partner.”  

Before their match, in which they would face Matt Kuchar and Jim Furyk, the pair slipped out onto Gleneagles’ first two holes for a quick warm-up while the morning’s match were taking place at the other end of the resort’s PGA Centenary course.  

“Jose Maria Olazabal and Padraig Harrington are walking with us, and we rip one down the middle of the first and hit a lob wedge to a foot, and we go on the second and rip five-wood to about two feet. Olazabal’s fuming. He says, ‘Calm down! Save it for the match!’ I said, ‘There’s plenty more where that came from, Ollie!’  We were just so revved up.  

“I remember Westwood saying, ‘Don’t get crazy with anything – just hit fairways and greens.’ He said that, a lot of the time, three- or four-over can win. So we played Kuchar and Furyk, and we were four- of five-under when we won. Westwood turned to me and said, ‘There you go, I don’t know anything about the Ryder Cup!’”  

After that two-hole victory, Donaldson and Westwood paired up twice more – a 4&3 defeat to Furyk and Hunter Mahan on Saturday morning, then a 2&1 win over Kuchar and Zach Johnson later that afternoon. 

Team Europe ended the second day with a comfortable 10-6 lead. But it was far from over. That is the same scoreline, of course, by which the Americans had led going into Sunday’s singles two years before.  

“McGinley sits us all down and says, ‘Right, this is where you’re playing tomorrow. Don’t forget your number!’”  

Graeme McDowell is first, Henrik Stenson second, and Rory McIlroy third. Donaldson is doing quick maths in his head and starting to think the winning point could come down to him. 

“He gets to me, and he goes, ‘You’re ten. That’s the anchor role. You’re playing really, really well.’ He tells me, ‘I was ten in my first Ryder Cup. It came down to my match. I hit the winning shot. It will probably come back down to your match. So get ready.’ He walked off, and that was it.”  

Donaldson would later learn his opponent would be Keegan Bradley, a stand-out on his Ryder Cup debut at Medinah. He didn’t sleep much that night. 

“You don’t anyway, due to the adrenaline, and I was just buzzing. He had planted that seed and I’m thinking, ‘My God, it’s going to come down to me.’”  

The match got off to a somewhat tetchy start. Donaldson and Bradley both missed the green at the opening hole before chipping up to gimme range. 

“I said to Keegan, ‘Mate, shall we just pick them up?’ And he went, ‘No. We’re putting.’ He thought I’d offered because I was nervous and didn’t want to putt it, which wasn’t the case. It was because we’d done nothing wrong and you don’t want to win the first to somebody missing a tiny putt. He thought it was a bit of gamesmanship.” 

Donaldson went on to build a healthy lead, but at no point during his match did he know what was going on elsewhere.  

“McGinley was a brilliant captain,” he explains. “And the thing he was drilling into us was to not look at the leaderboards. Just win your point, that’s all you do. He told us we would play differently if we reacted to what was going on in other matches. No complacency, don’t mess about, just win your point. 

“But suddenly everybody’s turned up on our hole, so while I haven’t confirmed so it’s pretty obvious what’s going on. You just go through your routine to try and focus on your job and win your match, because that’s all he asked you to do.  

“But in the back of my head, I’m thinking this could be for the Ryder Cup.” 

Now we’re back where we started. Donaldson is walking down to the 15th green. He allows himself a finger in the air to the raucous masses, but he refuses to get carried away. His job, after all, is not done.  

“At the time, I wanted to just do cartwheels and start pratting about,” he laughs. “I know it’s close, because everyone’s gone ballistic, but you don’t know how close it is. And you’re not there to showboat, you’re there to win your point and the only thing that matters is the team winning. 

“Walking down, I couldn’t tell. I was thinking it looked stiff, but you could get down there and find you’ve got three feet, and he could have holed his 20-footer across the green and you’ve just been doing cartwheels down the fairway. 

“I had to stay focused until I got to the green, saw it was stone dead. 

“I wish Paul had said, ‘It’s all over, JD, it’s stiff, you’re done.’ But he didn’t. I couldn’t have hit a better shot at that time, but it would have been nice to have ended slightly differently. There was just so much pressure and the demons were flying. 

“If I went back again, I know I would never hit it that close.” 

On the green, Bradley removes his red and white cap and shakes Donaldson’s hand. McIlroy, fresh from thrashing Rickie Fowler in the third match to put the first point of the day on the board, emerges through the crowd to bear-hug his teammate as the photographers swarm to capture the moment. 

Now Donaldson could start, as he puts it, “pratting about”. He watches Sergio Garcia add another point, before half-points from both Poulter and Victor Dubuisson make it a comfortable 16.5-11.5 win, and kick-start the soon-to-be-infamous night-long celebrations that culminate in many of the team appearing on television the following morning a little worse for wear.

“It was total carnage,” Donaldson says, laughing. “It was a massive drinkathon into total oblivion. We were just battered – as you may have seen on Sky Sports.” 

As for that shot. Donaldson joins the likes of Seve Ballesteros, Colin Montgomerie and, of course, McGinley on a short list of players who have had the honour of sealing the Ryder Cup-winning point.   

Not that he likes watching it back. 

“I can’t,” he says. “I start looking at technical faults in the swing and ripping holes in it.” 

Jamie Donaldson is an ambassador for Peter Millar.

Alex Perry is the Associate Editor of bunkered. A journalist for more than 20 years, he has been a golf industry stalwart for the majority of his career and, in a five-year spell at ESPN, covered every sporting event you can think of. He completed his own Grand Slam at the 2023 Masters, having fallen in love with the sport at his hometown club of Okehampton and on the links of nearby Bude & North Cornwall.

Associate Editor