BMW PGA Championship<\/a> having previously announced his intention to play, and he will be the only member of Donald\u2019s team absent from Wentworth.<\/p>\n Article continues below ADVERTISEMENT<\/p>\n
But Donald has revealed that Straka\u2019s wife had given birth prematurely last month, and that the player had given him assurances that he will be fully focused on Europe\u2019s quest to retain the Ryder Cup in New York.<\/p>\n
\u201cEverything is okay,\u201d said Donald when asked about Straka\u2019s situation. \u201cI don’t think an official announcement has been made, but him and his wife welcomed their baby a few weeks ago, prematurely.<\/p>\n
\u201cEverything is going extremely well with their baby, but he just doesn’t want to be so far away. I think that’s only fair.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ve had many conversations with Sepp. He’s very motivated, and he’s going to be continuing to work hard on his game. He’ll join us for the practice trip, but that’s the reason why he won’t be at Wentworth.\u201d<\/p>\n
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One of Donald’s top priorities ahead of the contest is to make certain his players are equipped to deal with the partisan New York fans at Bethpage, and he will encourage his team to heed the advice given to them by tennis great Novak Djokovic.<\/p>\n
The record-breaking Serbian has often been a target for hostility and intimidation, but he was on hand in Rome two years ago to share his advice on how to silence the crowd.<\/p>\n
“Novak was very gracious to come to our team room two years ago in Rome,” Donald added. “I think he’s someone that’s been the best in his sport, the most majors won as a men’s professional tennis player, but probably not always the crowd favourite.<\/p>\n
“He spoke to us in Rome about some of the ways he deals with that, and I think a lot of the players obviously would have heard that and taken that on board.<\/p>\n
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“It’s just great to have people who have excelled in their sport, that are the best of the best, telling you ways to think about things. You definitely get a different perspective because of that. It’s just very gracious of him to give us that information and his time.”<\/p>\n
Subscribe to our Newsletter<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"European captain Luke Donald has allayed any concerns over Sepp Straka and expects him to be \u201cvery motivated\u201d…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":118050,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[443],"tags":[49,48,622,82],"class_list":{"0":"post-118049","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-golf","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-golf","11":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/118049","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=118049"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/118049\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/118050"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=118049"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=118049"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=118049"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}