MEDINAH, Ill. – After more than a decade the sting has softened enough that Davis Love III can revisit that Sunday at the 2012 Ryder Cup, but as Ulysses Everett McGill, the lead character in the cult classic film “O Brother, Where Art Thou,” theorized, “I figured it could only have painful associations.”
The “Miracle at Medinah” stands as a particularly painful chapter in American team golf and for Love, who captained that U.S. team that took a 10-6 lead into Sunday singles play only to watch it unravel spectacularly, a return to the Chicagoland gem brings mixed feelings.
The sting has softened, not vanished.
“I’m kind of glad they renovated Medinah, scrape the funk off and put some new paint on it,” Love laughed. “I don’t want them to touch Hazeltine.”
Hazeltine National in Minnesota hosted the 2016 Ryder Cup where Love and the U.S. team earned a degree of redemption for the 2012 loss, beating the Europeans, 17-11.
This week’s Presidents Cup at Medinah rekindles that sting for Love and others who endured that lost, including this week’s American frontman Brandt Snedeker who was a rookie on Love’s team.
“I think you learn way more from your losses than your wins, and what happened Sunday at Medinah that year taught me a lot,” said Snedeker, who went 1-2-0 in 2012 including a 5-and-3 loss to Paul Lawrie on Sunday. “It taught me how much these guys care, seeing my idols of the game and who I was a teammate with crying in the locker room on Sunday night when things didn’t go our way.
“I think you learn from those experiences. You try to build up a team around those experiences. I’ve built my career around that.”
Love, who will return to Medinah as a fan for this week’s matches, has been a part of that learning process as a captain, vice captain and eventually a member of the task force that was created following the U.S. team’s loss in Scotland in 2014.
“Brandt is one of the guys who was apologetic and felt like he let the team down and the captain down, still to this day,” Love said.
Love also said there have been plenty of conversations with Snedeker since he was named captain of this year’s team, just not the back-and-forth you would expect.
Medinah No. 3 has been completely redesign by International captain Geoff Ogilvy and his architectural team and looks nothing like it did the last time it hosted the world’s best players and there are no players from that 2012 match on this year’s team. Instead, Love characterized his conversations with Snedeker as much more general.
“Most of the stuff we’ve talked about is the mundane things that have to be done,” Love said. “All the little things that you never think about as a player.”
The most important lesson from the 2012 collapse has become part of the American team blueprint. With a commanding four-point lead heading into the last day, Love admits that his singles lineup was too random and haphazard.
“What I tried to do at Medinah was try to find out why we weren’t doing so well on Thursday and Friday [in foursome and four-ball play], we didn’t have a plan for Sunday,” Love said. “I feel like I let them down by not telling them this is how we do it.”
As a result, the Europeans won the first five matches in singles play and by the time Tiger Woods, a three-time winner on Tour in ’12 and the U.S. team’s top-ranked player, tied his match with the Francesco Molinari the outcome had already been decided.
Like Snedeker, Love also learned how emotions and pressure manifest at international team competitions.
“I have said it since we’ve started working inwardly a lot, it’s really simple, if you ask [sport psychologist] Bob Rotella to explain it, we try too hard. We want to win,” Love said. “What’s the first thing that goes when you’re nervous, your putting. We don’t over perform in putting in team matches.
“We try too hard. We want to support our captain and teammates, to say they don’t care, that’s what you say when any team is losing.”
As Ulysses Everett McGill would figure, Love certainly has “painful associations” with Medinah and Europe’s “miracle,” but more than a decade later the mistakes that made that miracle possible have become valuable lessons.
