PLAYER RECORD
21 PGA Tour wins (one major): 1987 MCI Heritage Golf Classic, 1990 The International, 1991 MCI Heritage Golf Classic, 1992 THE PLAYERS Championship, 1992 MCI Heritage Golf Classic, 1992 KMart Greater Greensboro Open, 1993 Infiniti Tournament of Champions, 1993 Las Vegas Invitational, 1995 Freeport-McMoRan Classic, 1996 Buick Invitational, 1997 PGA Championship, Buick Challenge, 1998 MCI Classic, 2001 AT&T Pebble Beach National Pro-Am, 2003 AT&T Pebble Beach National Pro-Am, 2003 THE PLAYERS Championship, 2003 MCI Heritage, 2003 The INTERNATIONAL, 2006 Chrysler Classic of Greensboro, 2008 Children’s Miracle Network Classic presented by Wal-Mart, 2015 Wyndham Championship
Awards: 2017 inductee into World Golf Hall of Fame; 2013 Bob Jones Award; 2008 Payne Stewart Award
DAVIS LOVE III
The US Ryder Cup captain discusses his game, his role, his family, and his faith
LINKS PLAYERS MAGAZINE, 2016 ANNUAL EDITION
By Davis Love with Jeff Hopper
If there is an active statesman in the game of golf, it is Davis Love III. Turning 52 this spring, Love has access to both the PGA Tour and the Champions Tour. He still walks erectly, with the deportment of one in charge. And again in 2016, he will be just that, as last summer he was selected to captain the US Ryder Cup team for the second time, a rare privilege. This time, though, he’s laying fresh plans to win.
ON LONGEVITY
I remember starting on tour, I looked up to Tom Kite and Ben Crenshaw, playing with them and then watching them move on to the Champions Tour. A lot of guys got injured and weren’t able to play as long as they wanted. It’s just incredible that this is my 30th season. It’s flown by, but to be able to hang in there that long and play is a blessing.
My heroes’ kids are out on Tour beating me now. I’ve played with a lot of Billy Haases and Kevin Stadlers and guys like that and been through a wide range, all the way from actually getting to play on Tour when Jack Nicklaus was on Tour, to Tiger Woods and now Jordan Spieth. A lot of different generations. It’s been an amazing long run.
It’s funny, I always looked at Curtis Strange in the gym, trying to stay loose, Raymond Floyd always in there taping things up and getting ice and heat before he played. Now I’m the one in there. I’m the most consistent guy in the fitness trucks, because I have to be! I’ve got to stretch, I’ve got to work out some, I’ve got to keep my body moving, I’ve got to get therapy. I’ve had some big surgeries and bounced back from them, but I’ve also been very lucky that I haven’t had an injury that’s taken me out of the game yet.
ON THE GRIND
Staying competitive is tough, having the patience and the commitment to keep working hard is tough. It’s a grind out there. Staying passionate about playing isn’t just about the four hours inside the ropes of playing golf. It’s leaving your family, missing out on things at home. I’ve gone all the way through my kids, all their activities, and now I’ve got a grandbaby. So when I leave, I’m always missing out on something.
I love competing. My dad always told me, “Let’s just see how good you can get,” and I’ve never given up on that. I still want to get better. I think it’s that passion of wanting to do well and always getting better that keeps me going.
People see a couple of hours on TV, and if they see you it’s because you’ve played well. They don’t see the bad rounds, they don’t see you packing up your suitcase on Friday and trying to get a flight and flying a redeye, missing flights. Some weeks are really nice. They’re the Ritz-Carlton and you play well; some weeks are a budget hotel and a missed cut. We do live a charmed life and make a lot of money, but it’s still on the road and there are still some tough weeks. It takes a lot of patience to live your life on the road.
I go to Sea Island on vacation. It’s home, but that’s vacation for me. A lot of my friends are like, “Man, we never see you playing a lot of golf at home.” I say, “Yeah, I play golf 30 weeks a year on the road.” When I come home, I want to see my kids, I want to go fishing, I want to catch up on business.
ON HIS KIDS
Dru’s getting a lot of attention now, but Lexie’s a world class equestrian. She’s done incredibly well in everything she’s tried to do. What I’m most proud of is that they get the compliments of “what a great young man” or “what a great young lady,” and they’re so polite and they handle themselves so well, whether they win or lose.
I try to pass on what my dad passed on to me: respect the game, respect other people, give with a servant’s heart, be a leader and a good friend, a good teammate. What I’m proud of for them is that they carry on what my dad stood for. I always remember thinking, Everybody wants to talk to my dad and wants to be around my dad, because he was always willing to be a friend and give lessons and be the pro. I think my kids caught on to that. They like helping people.
ON HIS FATHER, DAVIS LOVE, JR.
There’s golf pros that play on TV and then there’s golf professionals, and he was just a true golf professional that wanted to help everybody get better in the game, and that didn’t mean just in golf, it meant in all of life. He felt like golf was a good way to look at life—the etiquette, the rules, the traditions of the game. That was the way he lived his whole life.
He taught us that your scores didn’t dictate who you were as a person. How you handled yourself and the way you played the game and the way you treated people—your attitude determined who you were. Bad bounces and bad swings don’t make you a bad person, or shouldn’t dictate your attitude. Something I’ll always carry with me is that when you leave the golf course and you turn in your scorecard, that’s the end of it. He took the positive and tried to get better, but you didn’t base your attitude on that for the rest of the day. He never brought home a bad day to dinner.
No matter what I shot, he’d say things like, “Oh, you were two swings away. If you hadn’t gotten that bad bounce, you’d have had a good round.” It was always positive: “15 holes you played great. You can eliminate the other three and not let that ruin your day or your progress.” I always say he was Bob Rotella’s sport psychologist before anybody really knew. He and Harvey Penick and some of the great players and teachers, they knew about sport psychology, they just didn’t know what it was, they didn’t have a name for it.
ON LIFE OUTSIDE OF GOLF
I like looking at people’s descriptions now on social media, when it says ”Christian,” “father,” “son,” and all those things before they say what their job is. I think that describes me. Dru was asked in an interview recently, “What are you most proud of about your dad?” And he listed a whole bunch of stuff and he didn’t say anything about wins on the Tour or accomplishments. I would hope that’s how people describe me—they leave the golf part out of it until last.
The celebrity part of it is part of the job. It’s not a goal. Being there for my family and for my friends and now for my community is more important to me than what my job is. That keeps me grounded and focused.
My number one goal in life is not to be the number one player in the world. I think people have a hard time seeing that—even my mom sometimes: “If you just worked a little harder and you played a few more tournaments.” Yeah, but that’s not my number one goal in life. My focus is my friends and my family, not necessarily making money and winning golf tournaments. Stephen Bunn and Brad Payne, who work with College Golf Fellowship and with us out on Tour, say, “Golf is not going to make you happy. Let’s get that out in front real quick. It’s not going to make you happy. It’s very fickle. If that’s what you’re looking at to keep you happy, then you’re looking in the wrong place.” That applies to pretty much any job. We see it with a lot of other athletes or a lot of other business people. No matter how much you chase your job, it’s never going to satisfy you.
ON TOUR LIFE
I always looked up to Jack Nicklaus, and Barbara Nicklaus more importantly, or Maria Floyd, or Christy Kite, who were strong in their values and in their families. Bonnie Mize, her focus was not on making her husband a better player; her focus was on making her family work in a tough situation. Military families move around a lot and people get into a business and their business moves them around, but the strong Christian values of the family win out over any business problems or any job problems. I saw that with the Langers as well.
What’s important to us will carry us through no matter what this golf or this travel puts us through. Robin and I saw early on that if we made the focus our family, both at home and on the road, then we could survive the traveling part of it. It is a traveling circus, but if you end up in the right crowd and you have the right leaders to look up to, it can all work out. It was really important to us to look to the right leadership.
The Tour has changed a lot. It’s gone from my dad’s day, guys driving around in cars to tournaments, to the Floyds and the Kites and the Crenshaws, the Mizes, the Langers. Their families were out there and they were flying commercial. Now it’s a jetset lifestyle. It’s corporate aircraft and a big business and big money and a lot more celebrity status. It’s a different world now.
Because Tour life moves so fast, it’s harder for there to be families traveling together and a closer knit group. That’s why fellowship is so important—to have the Wednesday night Bible study and everybody getting together. With Zach Johnson or the Byrds or now this new generation of players, we look for ways to spend time together: OK, what night are we all going out to dinner together so we have some fellowship, we have some accountability, we’re not all just running around crazy, trying to keep up? You can get trapped. The world pulls you so fast, and there’s so much going on, that you can lose track of who you are and what’s important.
My dad worked Sunday mornings—that was one of his busiest days. If I play well, I work Sunday mornings. It’s so important that we show the younger players that we may be playing on Sundays, but Tuesday nights and Wednesday nights and on the phone and when we are at home, we get together. At home in Sea Island, we try to get Zach and [St. Louis Cardinals pitcher] Adam Wainwright and myself and Jonathan Byrd. Even if it’s just once or twice in December and January, that foundation brings you back, and if we can grow that to where the new players come out on Tour and they’re asking, “Where do I get yardage books, and how do I find the Tour Bible study?,” that’s important.
ON HIS RYDER CUP CAPTAINCY
It’s one of the most amazing experiences to get to be the Ryder Cup captain one time. To come out of this whole new task force committee and to have the veteran players and captains say, “Look, we have to change what we’re doing, we’re going to start a new game plan to move forward and start winning the Ryder Cup, and by the way we want you to be the guy to start it off”—that was one of the most humbling and rewarding experiences. I’ve won the Ben Hogan Award and the Payne Stewart Award and a lot of golf tournaments, but that was probably the most emotional, most humbling thing that’s happened to me.
Raymond Floyd and Tiger Woods and Jim Furyk and Steve Stricker and Phil Mickelson and all these guys sat in a room and said, “We want you to do it.” That was incredible, and it was also, Wow! I’ve got a lot of responsibility here! It might actually be time to consider yourself a grown-up now.
I’ve been on the board of the Tour a bunch, I’ve been put in a lot of leadership positions. A lot of that comes from my dad, it comes from my attitude, it comes from my faith, it comes from trying to do the right thing in any situation, looking out for what’s best for other people before myself. Everybody realizes that I’m not in it for me. I’m in it for the Tour or for the team or my fellow competitors.
They know I’m going to put everything I have into it and I care about them as much as winning. But I don’t think anything will ever top the confidence that these guys have put in me. Now, we’ve got a lot of work ahead of us! Will we win the next 10 Ryder Cups? I’m betting we don’t. But we’re going to put a great program together and I’m incredibly honored and excited to be a part of it, because it is a new beginning. The first time around was great; this time around is going to be even better.
ON RYDER CUP DYNAMICS
The players always want to win. We always come together as a team. We get criticized when we lose. There’s no doubt that we have blown some big leads and we have lost some matches and we have hit some bad shots coming down the stretch. It’s not because we get to Sunday and we say, “You know what, we really don’t care if we win this or not. Let’s just take it easy today.” No. The pressure, the momentum switches and you start to realize, Oh my gosh, we might lose this Ryder Cup for Tom Kite—and Justin Leonard and Davis Love don’t play well. That’s getting into the results and not playing the game. If you start off the beginning of the week thinking, Gosh, I hope I don’t screw this up, I hope we don’t lose, you’re not going to play well. We have to be positive and we have to stick with our game plan.
If American players play to their ability, we should have a chance to win every time. The fans are right: on paper we should not lose. But it’s not played on paper. The pressure gets intense. Guys will tell you that Friday morning of the Ryder Cup is like the last hole of a major championship, but it lasts all weekend. It’s an incredible amount of pressure to play under, but the best players, the Jordan Spieths and the Rickie Fowlers, they want it. They want to play under that pressure. They want to see how they perform, and they relish it.
ON PLAYING WITH HIS POTENTIAL TEAM MEMBERS
It was kind of cool in Las Vegas in October. Dru was out there with us for the weekend. I missed the second cut, but he was there hanging out in the locker room when I was packing up and a couple of the players came up to him and said, “We think it’s so cool that your dad’s still out here playing with us.”
To be able to play with Patrick Reed or to be able to play with Jimmy Walker and to get to know them before the matches, that’s the best thing. Jimmy Walker and I had a great two days playing together in Vegas. Invaluable. I played two rounds earlier in the year with Bill Haas and Bubba Watson in West Virginia, in bad weather, playing together in the rain, gutting it out, watching them play. Then I went to Korea for the Presidents Cup and I was with Bill Haas down the stretch for the last five holes coming in, when the wind’s blowing. And if his caddie or he has a question, I can say, “Remember that shot you hit into the wind? Just hit that one again.”
The more time I can spend with these guys on Tour, the better. It’s not just some old guy popping in as the captain. They’re going to say, “Hey, I just played with him three weeks ago. I know him. I’m comfortable. I can tell him what I think. Or I can tell him, ‘You remember, I’m hitting it good. Put me in.’”
ON THE FAITH THAT GROUNDS HIM
I grew up in the church. When I was born my mom was secretary to the pastor. When we moved to Atlanta, she was very involved in the Baptist church. Sunday school and church were a big part of our lives, whether it was youth groups or anything like that. She was always very supportive and intentional: “We’re going to church, we’re going to Sunday school, and we’re going to get donuts before. That’s what we do on Sunday. And lunch after church.” So it was a big part of my life growing up.
I was always in and out of Tour Bible study. I considered myself a believer, but I don’t think I was as compassionate or as committed as I could have been. At Payne Stewart’s funeral, Paul Azinger said, “We’re in the land of the dying going to the land of the living.” I lost a friend in Payne. I’d already lost my dad. I’d already been through a lot and I had seen the Christian strength around me forever, but I think when Paul said that, we all sat there and said, “This is reality. That could happen to any of us at any time.” I look back now at almost 52 and go, “What was I thinking?” When you’re young you don’t ever think about it, but you could go at any time. I was baptized at a young age, I was always around the church, but I realized that day that I needed to move from curious to committed. It was a big switch for me to say, “This is what I’m going to live for,” rather than every once in a while I’m going to pop into church and think that I’m a good person.
I’ve seen things and been through stuff that I never thought I would go through, and the only way you would survive that and come out with a positive attitude is by grace and by faith. Losing my dad was one thing, losing my brother-in-law was another thing—the way it happened, the time of life when it happened, that really hit me. My mom had a stroke not long ago and our associate pastor drove to Jacksonville every week to see her. He was the only person who came down, an hour and a half away. And when you see that, you know the power of prayer and the support of the community of faith is the only way you’re going to survive. I’ve had unbelievable stories of friends and family and fans that have come through cancer and sickness and triumph and tragedy and you know God’s hand is in all of it.
As Tour professionals, we touch so many people because we’re “famous” or “celebrities” or “in the public eye.” You realize that your platform is so incredible that you do touch a lot of people. When you see Zach Johnson win that British Open and hear what he says afterwards, think of the millions of people that touches and influences. With the huge amounts of money we can raise from our tournaments to help out so many people, it’s just amazing the blessings that we get to be a part of and see.
ON PAYNE STEWART’S LEGACY
We’ve ordered yardage book covers for the Ryder Cup team. We’re going to put a picture of Payne on the inside. You know, Tom Lehman and myself are two of the five captains of this team—we’re not going to bring our faith forward so much that it’s intrusive in trying to dominate this team, but we’re going to be leaders. You know what I like about Zach Johnson and Jonathan Byrd? People say, “They’re so happy. What makes them so happy?” That’s what I want. We’re going to put Payne Stewart forward and we’re going to put ourselves forward and we’re going to be leaders and tell the players, “We want you all to say, ‘When I grow up, I want to be like that guy.’” That connection with Payne will give us a chance to say, “Payne Stewart won here at Hazeltine, but let us tell you about Payne Stewart. We all remember him for his crazy clothes, but let’s remember him for why we honor him now.”
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