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.
Fairness to Trevor Immelman demands acknowledging that things would likely be more competitive had he been able to call on those missing stars. But it’s clear that LIV’s most significant impact at the 14th Presidents Cup isn’t a negative one on the Internationals, but a positive one on the Americans. The U.S. team is obviously enjoying itself at Quail Hollow, but that doesn’t owe solely to the score. Sure, a romp breeds good humor, but this is a group flush with genuine camaraderie and wholly at ease with each other.
It’s easy to overlook just how long interpersonal toxicity has been an accepted part of the U.S. team room. The chill (and occasional distaste) between Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson loomed large during Europe’s Ryder Cup dominance in first dozen years of this century. Mickelson’s role in hobbling U.S. squads came to a head like a pustule in 2014 at Gleneagles, culminating in a press conference during which he piloted a Greyhound over Tom Watson’s back while posturing as a well-intentioned onlooker.
Four years later in Paris, eleven members of the Stars and Stripes found themselves asking ‘Pourquoi, Patrick?’ after Reed publicly blamed the team’s drubbing—and his own losing record—on skipper Jim Furyk and Jordan Spieth. Not content to be a…
..
Click Here to Read the Full Original Article at Golfweek…