How to pronounce Ludvig Aberg

Zach Johnson has existed in an odd space of golf’s collective consciousness for much of his career: always there, easily overlooked, oddly successful. Davis Love III, one of Johnson’s closest friends, is bemused. “Zach gets introduced on the first tee at a tournament and you kinda go, ‘Oh, wow, dang — he won two majors and (12) tournaments?’”

But now everything is different. Johnson is in Rome this week as United States captain for the 2023 Ryder Cup — what feels like an epochal moment for one of the game’s oft-ignored figures.

He’s here, in part, as a product of duress. Early in 2022, around the outset of professional golf’s turf war between the PGA Tour and LIV Golf, a group of Johnson’s peers — Love III and other U.S. Ryder Cup leaders — urged him to accept the captaincy. As Love puts it, Johnson was seen as “someone who everyone trusts.”

Johnson didn’t see any of this coming. “Given (the candidates) ahead of me in age and, I would say, clout, I thought there were a couple of other guys that would probably be chosen,” Johnson says. “To be honest, I thought I might be in line for a Presidents Cup a few years down the road, potentially, but not this.”