his initial appointment<\/a> three years ago, he has developed into a statesman-like leader whose strong qualities are admired by his players, peers and supporters.<\/p>\n“He’s obviously had a phenomenal career as a player, but I would certainly say there has been a public change in his confidence being in the captain’s role,” former Ryder Cup player Oliver Wilson, who has known Donald since they played US college golf together, told BBC Sport.<\/p>\n
“He has realised he’s really good at this and there are so many reasons why he’s really good at this.”<\/p>\n
Donald is described as a natural introvert by those who know him well, but they say he also carries an air of assurance which he transmits to his players.<\/p>\n
That is considered his greatest asset.<\/p>\n
Donald is regarded as a good communicator and ensuring everyone knew their role bred confidence they would achieve their goal.<\/p>\n
“When I was talking to some of the vice-captains earlier in the week, I was blown away by the confidence,” Wilson added.<\/p>\n
“It was a quiet confidence, but it genuinely caught me off guard. Normally people are a a little cagey. There was none of that. <\/p>\n
“It was more like ‘we are going to win, we are the better team, this is why we are going to win, we’re just going to execute our plan’.<\/p>\n
“I’ve never experienced that in a Ryder Cup environment. I was even fired up.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When Donald led his side to success in Rome, the clamour immediately began for him to stay on…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":167851,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[39],"tags":[5904,101,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-167953","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-golf","8":"tag-golf","9":"tag-sports","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom","12":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/167953","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=167953"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/167953\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/167851"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=167953"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=167953"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=167953"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}