No matter how lopsided scores get at the Presidents Cup, Davis Love III is probably too sporting to get a head start on jotting down the thanks due in his victory speech. It promises to be a lengthy list since every member of his team will have contributed points to the ledger by Sunday, not to mention the caddies, host club officials, backroom assistants, and the phalanx of EVPs, SVPs and lowly VPs who’ll descend from PGA Tour HQ for the closing ceremony. Yet it would be remiss of Love not to single out for faint praise Greg Norman, a one-man Superfund clean-up crew who has done for the U.S. what successive captains and a task force couldn’t: decontaminate the team room dynamics that have undermined it for decades.
Postmortems of this Presidents Cup will rightly note that the International side was depleted by the moves to LIV Golf of players like Cameron Smith, Joaquin Niemann and Louis Oosthuizen. While that’s indisputable, it remains debatable what impact those losses really had since the Internationals weren’t exactly riding a hot streak before the defectors signed on to work for a Saudi regime more accustomed to deploying teams of hitmen than of golfers.
