PLAYERS TO WATCH
Davis Love III reveals the lessons he’s learned leading the US team and why it means so much to him
Atthaya Thitikul She’s already made a name for herself as a double winner on the LPGA Tour and four-time winner on the LET Tour. She’s also already been World No.1. It’s hard to believe she’s only 19 years old. The Thai golfer has enormous talent and is surely a future Major winner.
Linn Grant After a stellar amateur career, the Swede turned professional in 2021 and has rapidly risen to prominence. She won six times in 2022 with four on the Ladies European Tour, including seeing off the men in the Scandinavian Mixed by a massive nine-shot margin.
Chiara Noja Aged just 16, Noja is the youngest German to ever qualify for the Ladies European Tour, following a win, two seconds, three thirds and four further top-tens on the LET Access Tour. In November 2022, she won the Aramco Team Series – Jeddah in a play-off over Charley Hull.
Leona Maguire The Irish golfer has already enjoyed significant success, but 2023 could just be the year she steps up a level and secures a big win – perhaps a Major Championship. This year also brings another Solheim Cup and she was leading points scorer last time out. She will no doubt be looking to replicate that feat.
Min Woo Lee The 24-year-old Australian came to the attention of the golfing public when he won the 2021 Abrdn Scottish Open, closing with rounds of 65 and 64. He showed good form towards the end of 2022, with four straight top-15 finishes to close out the season.
Rasmus Hojgaard The Dane is the thirdyoungest player to win on the European (DP World) Tour and, at just 21, he’s now triumphed three times. His twin brother Nicolai might also have made this shortlist, but Rasmus currently looks to be better placed to push on this year following a strong finish to 2022.
Tom Kim Joo-hyung ‘Tom’ Kim enjoyed a fabulous 2022. He won twice on the PGA Tour and once on the Asian Tour. At the age of just 20, he’s won 11 times as a professional. He’s 15th in the Official World Golf Ranking and he starred in the 2022 Presidents Cup.
Sahith Theegala The 25-year-old American enjoyed a superb first full season on the PGA Tour in 2021-22, making it into the Tour Championship. He’s started the 2022-23 season well, too, finishing runner-up in the RSM Classic. He’ll be a winner on the circuit before too long.
After a fifth PGA Tour triumph, Max Homa took the long trip from the Fortinet Championship at Silverado, in California’s Napa Valley in the west, to the Presidents Cup at Quail Hollow, North Carolina, in the eastern United States. Homa had just successfully defended his title at Silverado and he was the last man into Charlotte, arriving at the airport at 2.30am on the Monday morning. Waiting for Homa at arrivals were tour staffer Matt Horton and Presidents Cup captain Davis Love III. “Max was like, ‘What are you doing here?’” recalls Love in an exclusive
interview. “I said, ‘I am helping with your luggage.’ The next day Max said, ‘I can’t believe you came to meet me,’ and I said, ‘That’s what we do.’”
That day on the driving range, Homa’s caddie had to step away for a few minutes, so Love picked up the towel and took over cleaning Homa’s irons. “This is so weird,” said Homa. “You’re cleaning my clubs.” Love replied: “You’re going to catch on eventually.”
Sometimes actions speak louder than words, and these were the quiet, understated actions of a captain for whom a team of golf mega-stars wanted to give their all.
“Yes, we spoil the players a little bit, but we are also giving them the best chance to succeed on the golf course,” claims the 58-year-old skipper, who was born in Charlotte. “I am not there to tell them what to do or to be a coach. I don’t like giving speeches and I don’t like sitting guys out, but obviously I can’t play in these big events anymore and so I love to help these guys instead.
“I didn’t know I would still be a captain this long, but I really wanted to pass on what I received. It was always part of my upbringing; to do for others and to have a servant’s heart.”
Twice the US Ryder Cup captain, in 2012 and 2016, Love steered the Presidents Cup team to a 17.5 – 12.5 victory over Trevor Immelman’s Internationals at Quail Hollow. It was the ninth consecutive American win in the competition, in which Jordan Spieth starred with five points from five matches – winning four points from four when partnered with childhood friend Justin
Thomas – and Homa posted four points from four matches on his US team debut.
Major breakthrough
A winner on the PGA Tour 21 times, Love became a Major Champion at the 1997 US PGA at Winged Foot in New York. Love bettered Justin Leonard by five shots that week, having battled through heavy rain in the final round. A rainbow appeared over the clubhouse as Love holed the final putt of a particularly emotional victory, as Love’s father, Davis Love Jnr, was a renowned club pro and PGA of America member who died in a plane crash in 1988 at the age of 53. It was all the more fitting that
“I relished the captain’s role because I wanted to give something back”
Davis Love III’S brother Mark was on his bag for the crowning moment.
“I still think back to being the son of a club pro and winning the US PGA Championship at Winged Foot under a rainbow,” admits Love. “It will always be one of the greatest memories of my golfing life.”
Six times a Ryder Cup player, six times on the Presidents Cup team, six times an assistant captain across both teams and one of the most popular and respected golfers in America, Love was even
more certain to become a United States team captain than he was to win at Harbour Town on Hilton Head Island, which he did five times on the PGA Tour between 1987 and 2003.
“With an amazing track record, we couldn’t have been more proud to play for Davis Love,” said Tony Finau.
“Davis is a great captain,” added Thomas. “He has been there and done it as a player.”
“I am a pro golfer, meaning that I play in professional tournaments, but my dad was a golf professional, which to me means something completely different,” reflects Love, in considering his approach to team captaincy. “My dad was a custodian of the game; he was there to teach, to help his members enjoy playing golf and to be the host of the club, the teacher, the starter on the 1st tee. He was all those things to his members and I always admired that. My father’s members and students looked up to him and got enjoyment from the game through him.
“As a player on tour, you don’t really get to contribute to others like that. You might help a younger player or some kids, but for me, being a captain was a way of doing this.”
When his captaincy debut arrived in the 2012 Ryder Cup at Medinah, Love was a figure of organisation, calm and control. This was in contrast to his European counterpart, Spaniard Jose Maria Olazabal, who didn’t communicate with his team or the media with the assurance of Love, and who struggled with the emotion of captaining the players just a year after his great friend, compatriot and past Ryder Cup firebrand Seve Ballesteros had died (aged 54).
“I relished the captain’s role because I wanted to give something back to the players,” adds Love. “I have played for some great captains – the greats of the game like Arnold Palmer, Hale Irwin, Ken Venturi, Jack Nicklaus – and then there have been friends like Tom Kite, so I wanted to do for the players what these guys had done for me. As Tom Watson said at my first Ryder Cup [in 1993]: ‘We are going on a great adventure,’ and I wanted to carry that on.”
A decade ago, Love’s plan and pairings seemed faultless until late in the day on the Saturday, when Ian Poulter summoned a flurry of some of the finest match-play golf ever seen to steal the American momentum. Still, the home side took a four-point lead into Sunday’s decisive singles matches.
But instead of top-loading his singles order with his in-form players to win the early points and regain the momentum, Love left too much form too late in his order, including Tiger Woods. Europe held the momentum and mounted the biggest
comeback by an away team in Ryder Cup history. It is remembered as ‘The Miracle at Medinah’ in Europe; not so much in America.
“In 2012, at the end of that Ryder Cup, I had the feeling that we had done something wrong, that I had done something wrong, and that I had contributed to the bad Sunday we had,” admits Love.
“I sat down with Darren Clarke [European assistant captain at Medinah] late that night, out the back of the hotel with a cigar, and he asked: ‘Why didn’t you load the boat? That is what we have done to you guys and that is what you did to us at Brookline in 1999.’”
“I explained that we did this, that and the other with our singles order and he said: ‘That’s B.S. Always load the boat early.’”
“If you pick up the phone to Tiger, Steve Stricker and Jim Furyk and ask them what we should have done differently at Medinah, they would all say that we should have put out the players who were playing best first in the singles.
“I relaxed before the singles, thinking ‘we’re in good shape here.’ It was like, ‘Who wants to go first? Who wants to go last?’ We just put out a line-up to see what happens. The short answer is that we had a plan for Friday and Saturday but didn’t have a plan for Sunday. We should have led
“Winged Foot will always be one of the greatest memories of my golfing life”
with Tiger, Keegan Bradley and Phil Mickelson, the guys who were on a roll.”
Ringing the changes
Leadership of the American Ryder Cup reached a crisis after the 2014 event, when Tom Watson led the US team for the second time and saw his team soundly beaten by Paul Mcginley’s Europeans at Gleneagles. Mickelson publicly questioned Watson’s leadership and it all got awkward. Love was then integral to an American re-organisation that followed the successful European model of bringing possible future captains through the ranks of assistant captaincy and ensuring a seamless handing down of knowledge and experience.
“We have a structure and a training ground for future captains now, a full game plan,” says Love. “Back in 2012, we hadn’t created the system that we have now with assistant captains and captains and passing on the knowledge.”
Unfortunately for Europe, step one of the American revival was to reinstate Love as Ryder Cup captain for the 2016 chapter at Hazeltine. There was a sense of irony as Love’s great friend Clarke was European captain that year. And perhaps Clarke regretted the advice he had given Love four years before, as come the singles at Hazeltine, the in-form Patrick Reed defeated European talisman Rory Mcilroy in a riveting opening match to quell another European fightback. Love had top-loaded his singles order. It was close for a while, but Love’s United States team eventually came out convincing winners, lifting the Ryder Cup for the first time since 2008.
“Thanks to Darren and other conversations we have had, whether we are four ahead or four behind, we want to grab the singles momentum early,” adds Love. “We have done that ever since. In Charlotte [in the 2022 Presidents Cup] we were four ahead going into the singles, but we had a specific singles order to get us as many points as possible early on and then to have a guy or two at the end in case something went wrong.”
Now that Love has mastered the all-consuming, multi-faceted craft of team captaincy, he is ready to take a step back.
“I feel like I have over-stayed my welcome at a friend’s house
and it is time for me to go home,” says Love with a laugh and some typical modesty. “I know Zach [Johnson] has a great plan for Italy and I am going to help him out where I can, but I am done with captaincy now and I can pass it on to the next generation.
“Zach has been in the programme and he is ready. Now Zach needs to pick the assistant captains he knows can help him and who also can be future captains.”
Johnson can look forward to receiving this kind of advice from his good friend Love, if he has not already: “Bob Rotella, my sports psychologist, told me early on: ‘If you act like it’s no big deal, and act like you have it all figured out – even if you don’t – it will calm down the players.’ That was great advice and I said to my assistant captains at the Presidents Cup: ‘Don’t go rushing around in a panic. Act like we have this all figured out.’ When we get excited, it’s very easy to run around. Fred Couples might be cool no matter what happens, but for people like me and Zach, we need to act it out a bit.”
The US Ryder Cup team captained by Stricker steamrolled Europe to a 19-9 final score at Whistling Straits the last time around – the biggest margin of victory in the Ryder Cup since the British and Irish team expanded to all of Europe in 1979.
The visitors may arrive at Marco Simone Golf and Country Club in Rome in September as favourites to win, but the United States have not won in Europe since Love’s playing debut back in 1993 at The Belfry, when Johnson was still in high school. It is a tough assignment, but as 46-year-old Johnson said when he was unveiled as captain last March: “I wouldn’t have it any other way.”
Says Love: “I said this about Jim Furyk too when he was captain after me [in 2018], but now you are going to get someone who is organised and really smart. Zach is very good at giving the people around him specific roles and he relies on them to do their jobs while he does his.”
While the leadership and compassion of Davis Love III remains in the picture, the succession of American team captains could not be grounded any better.