Davis Love III

Davis Love III is a professional golfer and a golf course architect, born on April 13, 1964 at Charlotte in North Carolina. His full name is Davis Milton Love III, and he went to the University of North Carolina. He has won 21 times on the PGA Tour, and his major came at the 1997 PGA Championship, which he took at Winged Foot Golf Club. He won the Players Championship twice, in 1992 and 2003. He was 51 when he won the Wyndham Championship in 2015, the third-oldest winner in the history of the PGA Tour. He captained the United States side in the Ryder Cup in 2012 and again in 2016, when it won, and in 2022 he led the American team to victory as captain in the Presidents Cup. He was inducted into the World Golf Hall of Fame in 2017.

He set up his design firm, Love Golf Design, in 1994, together with his younger brother Mark Love, who had also caddied for him, and it is based on St. Simons Island in Georgia. By the account of the official site it began with the two of them drawing course plans at the kitchen table with their father when they were boys, and their first commission was Ocean Creek Golf Club on Fripp Island in South Carolina, a course completed in 1997. Among his best-known work is the Dunes Course at Diamante at Cabo San Lucas in Mexico, which, Diamante says, rose as high as 36th in Golf Magazine’s world ranking. His remodelling work includes the Retreat Course at Sea Island Golf Club in Georgia and Atlantic Dunes at the Sea Pines Resort on Hilton Head Island in South Carolina. As for what guides the design, the official site says the firm is drawn above all to the classical work of Donald Ross, A. W. Tillinghast, Alister MacKenzie, Charles Blair Macdonald and Seth Raynor, and that it carries their strategy into new courses and renovations alike.

Most of his courses are in the southeastern United States. Outside the country, besides Diamante in Mexico, the official site lists Punta Bergantine in the Dominican Republic as a project under way. GoGolf does not at present list any course designed by Love III.

See the other golf course architects here.

Photo: Tour Pro Golf Clubs（Flickr） / CC BY 2.0