Love left bereft by painful memories of Medinah

Days after that fateful Sunday in Chicago, Davis Love III is still wondering and second-guessing himself on the ‘Miracle of Medinah’.

“I don’t get mad at whoever is writing articles saying we should have done this, should have done that, because as soon as we get done, we all go inside and we talk about the shots that guys hit; can you believe this guy did that and that guy did that,” Love said after a nine-hole practice round for this week’s Justin Timberlake Shriners Hospitals Open.

“What’s hard for me is why you would second-guess the first two days. I can see second-guessing Sunday, because we got pounded. But we pounded them the first two days.

“We thought about [Keegan] Bradley playing Saturday afternoon without Mickelson. We thought about that a lot. That was our Plan B for that day, to take Strick [Steve Stricker] out and put Keegan in.

“But Tiger [Woods] and Keegan hadn’t even played together. I didn’t think much about it.

“You think about it now: Does that make Keegan nervous? How well does he know Tiger? How many times has he played with him? You could have asked him that. How would you do with Tiger? Go back and look at your chart and see if he listed Tiger as one of the guys he wanted to play with. Who wouldn’t want to play with Tiger?”

Love knew European captain Jose Maria Olazabal would front-load his singles pairings to produce early victories. Yet after two days of flawless execution of the US plan, Love didn’t seem to have a solid strategy for the singles.

“I kind of thought, put a couple big guys up front and a couple big guys in the back,” Love said of his philosophy. “But if anything, I was over-confident that everyone was playing well and it really didn’t matter.”

Love told how he got early Sunday calls on his radio from assistants Scott Verplank and Jeff Sluman (Fred Couples wouldn’t use a radio) seeing players struggling and asking the captain to come put out the fire.

“If those guys can tell that they’re panicking, they’re panicking.

“What could I have done differently to make them more comfortable is really what it boils down to. Did we put the order out there in a way that made the guys, when it went bad, uncomfortable?”