Davis Love III brought a special brand of leadership to the 2022 Presidents Cup at Quail Hollow. His job was to prepare and lead 12 American golfers into match play competition against 12 Internationals, not to be the spokesperson for the PGA Tour in its ongoing, foreboding battle against the breakaway LIV Tour led by Greg Norman. But this crisis has engulfed tour golf at the highest level and, rather than ignore the unwelcome distraction in Charlotte, N.C. in September, Love ran at it head-on and spoke on behalf of everyone involved in the Presidents Cup, the biennial event owned and operated by the PGA Tour.

“We have 12 guys on each team who support the PGA Tour and who want to play in the Presidents Cup and who are fired up to be on these teams,” stated Love, 58, in a preview press conference. At the opening ceremony he talked about 24 golfers at Quail Hollow who were “committed” to the PGA Tour. Carefully selected words saved for the most impactful moments. Love stepped into the breech so that his players didn’t need to. He took care of the politics so they could concentrate on the golf. In other words, he displayed Captaincy.

A few weeks later—after Love had steered the United States to a 17.5 – 12.5 victory over Trevor Immelman’s Internationals, and before he joined Kingdom magazine and friends at the 2022 Kingdom Cup on Hilton Head Island—he had more to say on arguably the most significant rift ever to blight the tour golf fraternity.

“Our guys [playing on the PGA Tour] are just fed up with it,” starts Love, who has become a model for modern American team captaincy, having now captained the Presidents Cup team once and the Ryder Cup team twice (on the losing team at Medinah in 2012 and then basking in redemptive glory at Hazeltine in 2016).

“Those guys made their decision and it’s over. We won’t be wondering if Dustin will be able to play or not next year—that will be the furthest thing from our minds—we’ll be wondering if Keegan Bradley is going to play his way onto the team again.

“I think Greg Norman misled some golfers to think that they would get World Ranking points and that everything would be hunky dory, and that the PGA Tour would settle the lawsuit out of court; that the PGA Tour can’t suspend players. I think some of the younger guys who went to LIV might now be questioning how things are working out.”

“There was never a discussion or a question or even a mention by our team of the LIV players during the Presidents Cup. No one even said: ‘Man, too bad we don’t have Dustin [Johnson].”

Former world number one Johnson surely would have found a place on Love’s team had he not resigned his membership of the PGA Tour to join LIV in June.

Other defectors to LIV who could have figured on the Presidents Cup team include Bryson DeChambeau, Brooks Koepka and Patrick Reed, while the Internationals might have drawn on the talents of [British] Open champ Cameron Smith, Branden Grace, Charl Schwartzel and Joaquin Niemann, among others.

As the American team focus now shifts back to the Ryder Cup, to be held at Rome’s Marco Simone Golf and Country Club from September 30, 2023, there is little prospect of any LIV golfers making a prodigal return.

“From the American side, there is no intention of letting the LIV golfers playing on our teams,” adds Love. “It is pretty cut and dried right now.

“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: ‘We are going on a great adventure,’ and I wanted to carry that on.”

Love’s plan and pairings seemed faultless until late in the day on the Saturday, when Europe’s Ian Poulter summoned a flurry of some of the finest match play golf ever played to steal the American momentum. Still, the home side took a four-point lead into the Sunday’s decisive singles matches.

“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 difficult, all-consuming, multi-faceted art 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.”

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.

“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.”

A case in point was the Sunday night before the recent Presidents Cup. Max Homa, fresh off his victory in the Fortinet Championship at Silverado, California, didn’t get into Charlotte until 2:30am on the Monday, yet Love joined tour staffer Matt Horton to collect Homa from the airport.

Recalls Love: “Max was like, ‘What are you doing here?’ 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’s a captain for whom a team of golf mega-stars wants to give their all.

“It’s been fun for me,” says Love. “The guys who have played around me on the Ryder Cup know that I am just there to help. I am not there to tell them what to do or to be a coach. I am there to do whatever I can to help them to succeed.”

As long as the leadership, thinking and compassion
of Davis Love III remains in the picture, the succession of American team captains could not be better grounded—a bright future, indeed.