To lead their Ryder Cup team in Italy – the land of Caravaggio and Canaletto, of da Vinci and Botticelli – the Europeans have chosen Luke Donald, a golfer who has a degree in art theory and practice, and paints in oils. He is more Italian than any other captaincy candidate, more Italian in fact than many of those whose surname isn’t Rocca, Molinari, Migliozzi or Manassero. Were you to wander around Rome, you might even have run into Donald and Diane, his wife, mooching around the Eternal City. “We have spent quite a lot of time in Rome,” Donald said, “walking around the streets, enjoying the culture.”
Donald, 44, was chosen to replace Henrik Stenson, who opted for LIV Golf, not for the love Donald has for Rome and Italy but because he has qualifications for the biennial event that will take place in 13 months that even a Milan tailor could not improve on.
First, he gets it, more than most. “People who don’t really watch golf tune into the Ryder Cup because it has meaning,” Donald said. “We’re playing for pride, for our countries, our continent. There’s no money swapped hands. It’s true sport.” He remembers what Darren Clarke said to him on his debut in 2004. “Once you play in one, you’ll never want to miss another.”
Truth is, he loves team events as Italians love pasta. He played on four Ryder Cups, all of which were victorious. He was never on a losing Walker or Ryder Cup team, and in those six events he was defeated in only five of his 23 matches. “He is a great guy to play with in a Ryder Cup because he is so solid,” said countryman Ian Poulter, Donald’s teammate in 2004, 2010 and 2012. “I found him easy to play with [in Ryder Cups] because he always had one frame of mind, and that was a he-is-going-to-beat-you frame of mind.”
Two shots of the hundreds Donald hit in his Ryder Cup career remain clear in the mind’s eye. A 7-iron on the 17th at Medinah in 2012 that ended inside Tiger Woods’ in the afternoon fourballs and underpinned his and Sergio Garcia’s one-hole victory over Woods and Steve Stricker. And a bunker shot the next morning on the same hole when Donald was sent out first against Bubba Watson, the reigning Masters champion, and won on the 17th green, thus starting Europe’s recovery.
From when he played first on the European Tour, then the PGA Tour, leading up to his year of years in 2011 when he was top of the money lists on both sides of the Atlantic and ascended to No. 1 in the world ranking, Luke Donald often was held up as a model professional, the one whom young pros should copy. He had a game that matched his personality perfectly. “If you are Tiger Woods, you overpower a golf course. You go for par-5s in two,” Thomas Levet, the former Europe Ryder Cup player, said. “That is not the way Luke Donald plays. Luke has realised where his strengths are, and he sticks to them. That is very, very intelligent.”
Thoughtful, methodical, understated and determined in person, Donald played thoughtful, methodical, understated and determined golf underpinned by deft iron play and outstanding putting. “My game’s always been more from the hole backwards, and I was pretty good at it,” said Donald, who once played 483 holes without a three-putt.
Luke is the youngest of four children, with a sister and two older brothers. “Physically we were very close,” Colin Donald, his late father, said in 2011. “We would give each other head massages and back scratches. It was our custom to eat together in the evenings. No snacking from the fridge or disappearing into their rooms to watch TV or play on the computer, as there was no bedroom TV or computer. I don’t know whether I should tell you this, but Luke was breastfed for a year.”
Christian Donald, one of Luke’s older brothers, cautions that Luke’s quietness should not be taken for a lack of determination. “I remember when Luke was 9, he did something wrong. Dad tried to teach him a lesson by not talking to him. After five days, Dad had to give up. Luke, aged 9, had broken my dad.”
See the man, listen to the man, watch the way he plays golf and you will know him. So, it is easy to predict whose style of captaincy Donald’s will resemble. It will be more Langer at Oakland Hills in 2004 than Woosnam at The K Club in 2006; more McGinley at Gleneagles in 2014 than Clarke at Hazeltine in 2016. “Langer crossed all the t’s and dotted the i’s,” Donald said. “I felt like I always knew where I was with him. He was very detail-orientated, and I think a lot of the rookies were very motivated to play under him. I like to figure things out in my head without blurting them out. José (María Olazábal, the 2012 captain) was a quiet leader, and I think that will be my stance, too.”
Donald already has chosen two of his assistant captains: Thomas Bjørn, successful when leading Europe in the 2018 Ryder Cup, and Edoardo Molinari, with whom Donald played in the 2010 match. It is the latter’s analyses of Matt Fitzpatrick’s statistics that helped Fitzpatrick become the U.S. Open champion. “Edoardo is a very smart guy,” Donald said of his Italian assistant. “We’ve already had a couple of conversations, and he has great ideas about how to get the most out of players and how to play the golf course.”
A few months ago, Donald was approached by those recruiting players for LIV Golf. They wanted him as an announcer, at which he would have been good if inexperienced. “I quickly said I wasn’t interested in that,” Donald said. “As an individual player, you always have aspirations of playing at the highest level. I still have aspirations of competing and playing at the highest level, but it’s a fickle game. If you had asked me after Medinah (in 2014) whether that would be my last Ryder Cup, I would have said you were crazy. That’s how fickle the game is.”
Donald was asked what he thought the hardest part of his job was going to be. “It will be to get these 12 guys into the team room in a very motivated, unified way,” he said. “There’s obviously been some distractions going on, but there’s been lots of captaincies in Ryder Cups where there’s been issues. We saw that last year with Pádraig (Harrington) and … COVID. We saw that with Sam Torrance and Curtis Strange having to deal with the terrorist attacks of 9/11. We’ll get through them and deal with them as best we can.”
Top: European Ryder Cup captain Luke Donald (right) and Guy Kinnings, Europe's Ryder Cup director
E-Mail JOHN