Two Advil PM, One Red Bull, and the Locker-Room Equation at the 2026 Presidents Cup

On the back nine of the 2026 Players Championship at TPC Sawgrass, while leading a tournament with a 10.5 million dollar purse, a 21-year-old Korean golfer took two Advil PM and then drank a Red Bull. He did not collapse. He finished three shots clear and became the youngest winner in Players history.

Four years later, that story was finally told on a podcast, by a teammate who shared a room with him.

Si Woo Kim will play his fourth Presidents Cup in late September 2026 at Medinah Country Club outside Chicago. The International Team enters as a clear underdog against the United States. Kim brings a 6-5 record from three previous appearances and a 2026 season with 11 top-10 finishes.

Those are numbers anyone can look up. What cannot be looked up lives inside the team room.

Context: a product that is hard to sell

The Presidents Cup was born in 2026, played every two years, pitting the United States against an International Team — the rest of the world, excluding Europe. In format terms it is an almost exact replica of the Ryder Cup: four days, roughly thirty matches, four-ball, foursomes and twelve singles on the final day, with every point worth the same.

Commercially, it is a very different asset from the Ryder Cup. The Ryder Cup has Europe — an opponent with identity, history and a market. The Presidents Cup has "the rest of the world", a geographic concept rather than a community. A Korean golfer, a South African golfer, a Canadian golfer and an Australian golfer wear the same shirt, hear an anthem that is not theirs, and play for something more abstract than a nation.

That makes the product dependent on something very hard to price: narrative.

And in any product dependent on narrative, you need characters. Characters are not necessarily the best players. Characters are the ones who create an image the audience wants to repeat to someone else.

That is why I chose Si Woo Kim as the centre of this analysis. He is not the world number one. He is not the face used to sell tickets in the American market. But he is one of the few International Team players capable of turning a week of competition into a story that lingers after the leaderboard has been wiped from the screen.

Based on my experience following matches across several Presidents Cups, this is the most important variable no organiser has ever managed to write into a sponsorship contract.

Core: the paradox of a match-play golfer

Start with the most misleading fact: 11 top-10 finishes in the 2026 season.

To a reader of rankings, that signals form. To an analyst, it signals something else: the ability to survive four days of competition without losing yourself. Elite golf does not reward the best player in a hole. It rewards the player who makes the fewest mistakes across seventy-two holes. Eleven top-10 finishes in a season is the output of a stable operating system, not of inspiration.

But the Presidents Cup does not operate on that logic.

This is rarely discussed. Team match play breaks competition into short units: eighteen holes, head to head, with a clear winner. A golfer with consistent top-10 finishes in stroke play can be entirely harmless in match play, because match play does not measure averages — it measures the ability to produce a moment at precisely the right hole.

Kim's 6-5 record across three Presidents Cups shows he is not an overwhelming points machine. Eleven matches, six wins, five losses. But that figure has to sit beside another reality: the International Team has lost seven of the last nine Presidents Cups going into 2026. Inside a side that keeps coming up short, a player who holds a win rate above fifty percent is a scarce asset.

That is why the International captain puts him among the men expected to carry points. In locker-room language, they call them "horses".

And this is where signal has to be separated from noise.

A cup does not measure strength; it measures a group's capacity to endure chaos.

A team in match play does not win by adding up total skill. It wins through the ability to distribute emotional resources across four days, twelve people, two mornings and two afternoons each day, in which any match can flip on a single putt at the 17th. Inside that structure, a player's value sits on two levels: the scoring level and the operating level.

The scoring level is what media reports.

The operating level is what no one keeps statistics on.

Christiaan Bezuidenhout, the South African who roomed with Kim at the 2026 and 2026 Presidents Cups, spoke about his teammate on an episode of the Subpar podcast produced by GOLF, hosted by Colt Knost and Drew Stoltz. He called Kim "a beaut of a man", known to the whole team simply as Woo. But the most valuable detail came at the end of his answer.

Bezuidenhout said that at the Players, on Sunday, on the back nine, while leading, Kim took two Advil PM and a Red Bull. Then he added the line I consider the single most important fact in the whole story: the team always has to make sure there is Red Bull in the team cabin, on the bus, and in the hotel.

An ordinary reader laughs. A professional reader stops.

Because that is an operational detail.

People look at the transfer price tag; I look at a player's biological clock to predict the day of default.

Let us unpack that combination. Advil PM contains diphenhydramine, an antihistamine with sedative effects that clearly induces drowsiness. Red Bull contains caffeine, a central nervous system stimulant that increases alertness and reduces fatigue. Placing those two in the same time window is a pharmacological paradox: one pulls the nervous system down, the other pushes it up.

What is interesting is not whether the combination works medically. What is interesting is that a professional, at the highest-pressure moment of his career, chose to intervene in his own nervous state using two opposing tools. He is working with two variables: arousal and inhibition. In sports psychology, this is the arousal regulation problem — finding the balance between over-excitement and over-numbness.

A golfer on the back nine of the Players, leading, faces two opposite risks. Over-excitement speeds up his tempo, deadens his hands and makes decisions impulsive. Over-numbness slows the body, dulls reflexes, and turns short putts into a heavy burden.

Kim's handling of it shows he understands his body is not a constant. It is a device that can be tuned.

And the detail about Red Bull in the cabin, on the bus, in the hotel is not a joke about a beverage preference. It is a supply-chain detail. The International Team has to guarantee that a specific commodity is always available at every point of contact a player has across four days of competition, from the hotel to the course. In a tournament where team results are decided by a handful of points, that is a level of attention to detail many professional sports organisations simply do not have.

I have followed team events and noted one thing: winning teams are usually not the teams with the best squads, but the teams whose smallest logistics are most tightly managed. One drink in the right place at the right time is worth a putt on the 18th.

This is the moment to look at the economic layer behind it.

The economics of a single point

The Presidents Cup runs on a different financial model from the Ryder Cup. The Ryder Cup is one of the highest television-rights revenue events in golf, with pulling power for tickets and sponsorship on both sides of the Atlantic. The Presidents Cup, though also a large biennial event, struggles with a structural problem: it lacks a symmetrical opponent.

That creates a commercial paradox. The more lopsided the competition, the more television value depends on drama rather than quality. A 19-11 American win sells very little advertising at the 16th hole on Sunday. A match still alive into the final singles tie sells a lot.

As a product, therefore, the International Team needs more than good golfers. It needs characters who make viewers believe the underdog can flip it.

Si Woo Kim meets that need exactly, and he meets it along a different route from a media star. He does not generate appeal through statements. He generates it through behaviour. He is the man who took two sleeping pills and an energy drink and then won the Players. He is the man a teammate recounts with a mixture of amusement and respect. In the attention economy of modern sport, that is an asset class with a high return and a low maintenance cost.

But an operator does not stop there.

The contrarian angle: chemistry cannot save a structure

There is a popular belief in team sport: locker-room spirit decides results. The Bezuidenhout and Kim story is told warmly, and it reinforces that belief. I do not deny its value. I simply put it in its proper place.

A good locker room is a consequence of a good structure, not its cause. When a group is organised so that everyone feels they own a share, cohesion appears as a by-product. When the structure gives no one a share, cohesion becomes performance.

The International Team's real problem is not the locker room. It sits in the schedule, in the ranking points system, in the money flowing into the tours, and in the fact that most of its players must travel half the planet to play an event that awards them nothing in ranking terms. A golfer can choose to rest and protect himself for a ranking event. He is given nothing extra for winning a match-play tie at Medinah beyond honour and a week of lost energy.

That is the largest asymmetry in this product, and no amount of Red Bull can fix it.

At a deeper level, the word "horses" also deserves careful reading. Calling a player a workhorse means handing him expectation, and at the same time creating a single point of failure. If a team builds its strategy around two or three individuals carrying points, then one of them losing form in a single four-ball morning cascades through the whole structure. In a format where every match has a binary outcome, the more concentrated the system, the greater the variance.

And variance is exactly what the underdog needs.

Here is the final paradox of the Presidents Cup: the International Team does not need to play better to win. It needs to generate enough chaos in a short enough window that the quality gap cannot express itself. In other words, it needs a week operated as meticulously as a machine, designed to produce uncertainty.

Every crisis begins with a fact left out of the financial report.

In this case, the fact left out is this: an energy drink placed in the right spot can be part of a strategy, and a song sung off-beat in the locker room can be a sign of a system already cracking.

What remains

A great champion is not someone who never falls, but someone who knows precisely when he is about to fall, so he can prepare a controlled landing.

Medinah will not be decided by who plays the best. It will be decided by who understands his own body best at four in the afternoon on Sunday, when the hands are tired and the leaderboard has frozen.

And if the International Team does what no one thinks it can, people will remember a putt. But those of us in the trade will remember a can of drink placed in the right compartment of the bus from early morning.

Is that really what we mean to measure when we talk about the strength of a group?