KAPALUA, Maui >> If you don’t want to be a difference-maker on this year’s Ryder Cup team, you need not apply.
Ryder Cup captain Davis Love III is looking for a few good men willing to wrest the cup away from the Europeans come September.
“I’m looking at these guys who are going to make this team, more importantly, who wants to be on this team to win, not who is going to make the most points,” Love said. “So that attitude is what we want. And I’d love to see Justin (Thomas). Several guys, not to name names, have come up to me and said, ‘I want to be on a winning Ryder Cup Team. It’s very important to me.’ ”
Love was captain of the 2012 USA team that blew a 10-6 advantage on Sunday and would like nothing better than a shot at redemption.
“Our shift is we are going to put 12 guys together who are committed to winning and forget the past,” Love said. “This is one of the biggest things for me this year is to be on a winning Ryder Cup team and that’s the attitude we want.”
Bowled over
Jason Day knew the first question was coming before it was even asked.
Late last year, his wife, Ellie, was bowled over by LeBron James during a Cleveland Cavaliers basketball game they were attending. James was going for a loose basketball and knocked Day’s wife into the middle of next week, prompting a nationwide response as to how everything played out.
“It’s just amazing how fast the guys are,” Day said during a Wednesday press conference. “Really, people who think I should have jumped in front of Ellie, they must have the fastest reaction time. I’m trying to learn how to get my arm in front of Ellie every time now.
“But it’s amazing how quick it happened. You’re sitting there, and you know things have happened in the past with guys going into the crowd and stuff, but you’re not really expecting it.”
Neither was his wife.
“All of a sudden, we see a ball come down and across and I go to kind of put out my hand, because I thought it was going to go out-of-bounds and I was going to throw it back to someone,” Day explained.
“All of a sudden it comes flying from the side and no one knows what to do and he just jumps. It happened so quick, I’m going to do that? I’m not going to stop a 260-pound guy who’s 6-8 running full speed. Ellie took it like a champ, though.”
And that’s not to say it was all laughs and grins at the time. She wound up with a concussion and an overnight stay in the hospital.
“Once I saw her, she was on the ground, she was kind of freaking out a little bit about her neck,” Day said. “And once they started doing the test on her, she’s moving her legs, hands, feet, arms, I knew everything was going to be OK.”
Day recently withdrew from the Sony Open in Hawaii.
Inside the numbers
With 26 golfers shooting even par or better, including 11 with rounds below 70, this was a day you had to go low in ideal conditions.
The hardest hole for the golfers was the par-3 eighth, something not out of the ordinary. The scoring average on that tricky 203-yarder was 3.156, with only two birdies, 23 pars and seven bogeys.
There was a tie for the easiest hole between the par-5 fifth and the par-5 ninth with a scoring average of 4.344. Between the two holes, there was one eagle by David Lingmerth, 41 birdies, 21 pars and one bogey by Love.
