At Wentworth 10 days ago, where 11 of his 12 Ryder Cup team were competing in the BMW PGA Championship, Luke Donald, the Europe captain, was both the centre of attraction and very Luke Donald-ish in his behaviour: quiet and polite, thoughtful, a man easily overlooked in a crowd, one more comfortable on the fringes of a group rather than in the middle. The questions came at him thick and fast: Can Europe win? Have you worked out your pairings for the four-ball and foursomes? How will Europe deal with the rowdy spectators?
Donald had heard them and many more in the 24 months since he agreed to continue as Europe’s Ryder Cup captain and attempt to become the first Europe captain to win successive home and away matches this century and the third European to win the biennial competition in the US in the past 25 years. He dealt with them much as he used to handle a 100-yard pitch to a flag positioned on a slippery putting surface and near a water hazard. He thought quickly about how to play the shot, executed it neatly and unfussily and watched as his ball came to rest 2 feet below the hole, not above it.
Donald, 47, might have been inexperienced in Rome two years ago when he had 13 months after Henrik Stenson went to LIV Golf in which to prepare himself and his team for the biennial match. At times then the quietness of his character might have suggested a slight diffidence. Now, while retaining his calmness and quietness, he exudes confidence, which comes from knowing what he has to do and feeling certain that he has done it or will do it in the last days before the match starts on Friday.
“Luke’s great, maybe the greatest captain. He never stops thinking,” said Paul McGinley, the victorious captain at Gleneagles in 2014 and now a strategic adviser to Donald. “Send him an email and you get a reply straight away. He is enjoying it.”
The last European to captain a team to successive Ryder Cup victories and the only European to have led three successive Ryder Cup teams without losing was Tony Jacklin at The Belfry in 1985 and Muirfield Village in 1987; the 1989 match at The Belfry was tied. Jacklin remains the only captain to have achieved this since the competition’s modern era began at The Greenbrier in 1979 when golfers from mainland Europe were added to competitors from Great Britain and Ireland. And he did so helped by some world-class players such as Seve Ballesteros, Nick Faldo, Sandy Lyle, Ian Woosnam and Bernhard Langer, who, having been born within 11 months of one another in 1957 and 1958, were in their pomp.
“What do players want from their captain? That he won’t be outsmarted. The players know he won’t be. They know he knows.”
Paul McGinley
Donald’s team of 12 good men and true, called Europe’s best-ever team by Keegan Bradley, Donald’s opposite number, contains four Englishmen (Tyrrell Hatton, Justin Rose, Tommy Fleetwood and Matt Fitzpatrick), a Spaniard (Jon Rahm), a Dane (Rasmus Højgaard), a Norwegian (Viktor Hovland), a Swede (Ludvig Åberg), an Austrian (Sepp Straka), a Scot (Robert MacIntyre) and Irishmen Shane Lowry from the Republic and Rory McIlroy from Northern Ireland. The team is naturally spearheaded by the Masters champion, McIlroy – the only player on either side to have won all four of the game’s major championships – includes five major champions in McIlroy, Lowry, Rahm, Fitzpatrick and Rose and in all, 11 of the 12 men who won at Marco Simone in 2023.
There is a reason for this. An investigation into why Europe does not do well in Ryder Cups in the U.S. revealed that rookies often are overawed overseas hence the experience packed into Donald’s team this time. The same investigation questioned why Europe blooded a new captain for each match, a man who had to learn as much as he could in a short space of time and having learned it was then expected to step aside for another novice captain. Once Donald’s men won in Rome, he was approached on the Sunday of victory to continue.
“Luke is much more confident than he was two years ago, in himself and in what he says to the team and the way he says it,” McGinley said. “What do players want from their captain? That he won’t be outsmarted. The players know he won’t be. They know he knows.”
Among past winning captains of Europe’s teams, he has none of the height nor heft of Colin Montgomerie, the Europe leader in 2010. Though No. 1 on both the PGA Tour and the DP World Tour in 2011, Donald did not win a major championship. For articulacy he would yield to McGinley, who masterminded Europe’s victory at Gleneagles in 2014.
But underestimate Donald and he will take you to the ground with a slight smile on his face and an almost apologetic air as he does so. He is as understated in life as he was understated on a golf course. “If you gave me the worst caddie in the world I think I’d be fine because I know my game,” he once said about his style of play. “I know how to get ’round a golf course. I have this awareness of where I am, this is the shot to play and this is how to play it. That came pretty naturally to me. I have an active mind. There is a lot of thinking going on.”
Diane, his vivacious, Greek-born wife and the mother of their daughters, Elle, Sophia and Georgina, is the yin to his yang. She was in her element two years ago when she was behind the ambitious and ultimately successful attempt to close Rome’s Spanish Steps for team photographs. It was her idea to put dad jokes on the players’ pillows so when they returned to their rooms at night they would have a quiet laugh to themselves. “I always say she talks so I don’t have to,” Donald said. “I am more of a quiet sitter and listener.”
“Luke is a man of few words but when he does speak everything that comes out of his mouth makes a lot of sense,” McIlroy said.
To understand Donald, it would have been helpful to have met his late father, Colin. “Most golf fathers you see are dressed in golf gear swinging a club,” Donald’s contemporary, Paul Casey, once said. “I never saw Luke’s dad out there with a club in his hand. I don’t know if he even plays golf. When Christian (Luke’s brother) was my caddie I’d get texts from Mr. Donald saying, ‘You’re looking strong. You’re looking fit.’ He’d talk about a lot of stuff other than golf. I really liked him.”
When Luke was growing up his father deliberately put him in uncomfortable situations to make him more experienced. “He made me go into a shop with him when he had his dressing gown on,” Donald said. “Once I had to wear bright green trousers to a singing competition. They were baggy and didn’t look good. I didn’t want to wear them but I think any time you do stuff like that you get better. It’s like nerves on the first tee. No point in shying away from it.”
No point in shying away from an obvious aspect of the forthcoming Ryder Cup – the rowdy spectators. “A lot of my thinking revolves around crowd management and how we react as a team,” Donald said. The result? The Europe players have been equipped with virtual-reality headsets that could be programmed to say insulting or distracting things to the wearer.
“I am trying to approach this [match] in a … different way in terms of communications with the players,” Donald said. “Instead of just waiting until the team is formed to get my message across, that process started 15 months ago.
“It’s always up to the home team how they set the course up,” Donald continued, “and I expect the course to have minimal rough, fast greens. But there’s enough data for us to understand what the course requires. Long driving is a benefit. Good putting is a benefit. Iron shots from 150 yards and outside are important. That is all a kind of the information we have and that is part of the process of how we put the team together and the pairings. So we might get there … and find greens at 9 on the Stimpmeter. Who knows? It’s their prerogative.”
At that he gave a slow smile, one that suggested he was at peace with himself, more relaxed and confident than he had been 24 months earlier. He knew he had done all he could to bring his men to the boil later this week.
“We’re ready,” he seemed to be saying. “We’re ready.”
E-MAIL JOHN
Top: Luke Donald poses with the Ryder Cup in the cockpit at London’s Heathrow Airport before Team Europe departs for New York.
ANDREW REDINGTON, GETTY IMAGES