Surprise Decision by Ryder Cup Task Force: Maybe All We Need Is Love

The not-quite-official announcement of Davis Love III as the next US Ryder Cup captain was a little reminiscent of the Monty Python skit: "You never expect the Spanish Inquisition!!"  

We never expected Davis Love.

That is nothing against Love, who is one of the game's stand-up guys, one of the people who takes the time to sit on PGA Tour policy boards and make considered decisions about the future of the entire PGA Tour.

Love is well-liked among fans, among Tour players, at the PGA of America, among executives at the PGA Tour, among sponsors, even among members of the hard-to-please media. And maybe that's the reason he ended up with the job. However, it would have been a lot better if he hadn't been on the committee, from the standpoint of the optics of the situation.  

In the end, Love was the guy the committee could agree on as captain.  He is the guy everybody liked, the guy they trusted. However, it left questions about the two who were thought most likely, the two most often mentioned by several committee members: Paul Azinger and Fred Couples.

That means there were obviously doubts on the part of committee members or divergent views about Azinger or Couples, for whatever reasons. We will never know what was said behind closed doors.

We thought Mickelson dangled a couple breadcrumb clues at the Farmer's Insurance Open when he still endorsed both of them.

"When you look at the next captain, you got to have somebody that's strong enough with, confident enough in who they are, to withstand the scrutiny that's going to come their way," he said, joking with the reporters about where the criticism would originate, mainly in the media. "And you also have to have the ability to let your ego down and let a system that has worked in the past—that allows us to be more prepared, like the Zinger system in 2008—get a lot of the credit."

He was asked about Fred Couples and said, "Fred is absolutely one of the guys that would fit that bill, that is able to let his ego go, let somebody else take the credit, but is willing to stand up and take the hits. Fred's that guy. There's a couple other guys that fit that mold, too. And that would really provide great leadership."

Last fall, Phil Mickelson said that the Azinger style of captaining was important for specific reasons.

"There were two things that allow us to play our best I think that Paul Azinger did, and one was he got everybody invested in the process," Mickelson said after the 2014 Ryder Cup. "The other thing that Paul did really well was he had a great game plan for us, you know, how we were going to go about doing this. How we were going to go about playing together; golf ball, format, what we were going to do, if so-and-so is playing well, if so-and-so is not playing well, we had a real game plan. Those two things helped us bring out our best golf."

A comment Jim Furyk made last fall about the composition of the task force may also help in understanding the naming of Love.

"They all have pretty dominant personalities," he noted about the 10-man group. "They have a lot of experience; they're informed. They either have been captains, they want to be captains or they have had a lot of experience in this event."

The committee included Raymond Floyd, Rickie Fowler, Tom Lehman, Davis Love III, Phil Mickelson, Steve Stricker, Tiger Woods and three officials from the PGA of America. We don't know if the PGA of America had any veto power or more votes or if they bowed to the wishes of the players. No one has said anything.

But Furyk and Mickelson both insisted that any decision was bigger than personalities.

"I think that when you look at who the next captain is going to be and you have to look in a big picture like over the course of the next 10 Ryder Cups, the next 20 years, as opposed to short-term," Mickelson said. "One of the things that the task force is really looking at is details on how to set a game plan so that there's continuity from Ryder Cup to Ryder Cup, and you have great player development and leadership and that's consistent with each other."

Furyk said the focus was looking forward, not backward.

"One of the things that we always talk about is now, now, now, now, now, in anything we do, in business and in golf. But I think in the Ryder Cup we have always talked about we have got to win the next one, and my goal would really be, we've got to be a little more farsighted than that," Furyk explained. "A lot of these ideas that come out in this meeting may get set in motion, they may help a little bit in two years, but they may help a little more in four years, and they may help a ton in eight years."

Mickelson was enthusiastic about the process.

"How we got there doesn't matter," he said about the past. "We're there now, and we're going to make it a really great experience for the next generation of players as they go through the next decade or two."

So while it was cathartic to have the task force, and while a variety of past captains and present players were represented, nobody expected the pick to be someone from the task force, itself, no matter whom it was. 

Kathy Bissell is a Golf Writer for Bleacher Report. Unless otherwise noted, all quotes were obtained firsthand or from official interview materials from the PGA Tour, USGA, R&A or PGA of America.