First-tee announcer apologises and quits after leading anti-Rory chant<\/a><\/p>\n\u201cOh, man, the greens are not where we wanted,\u201d Bradley said on Saturday night. \u201cThey are super-soft. The greens are great. They roll great. But you\u2019re actually \u2013 you\u2019re actually better off out of the rough to a bunch of these flags, a bunch of these pins\u2026 I\u2019ve never seen Bethpage greens play this soft \u2013 ever. Even when we\u2019ve played here and it\u2019s rained, this is something that I\u2019ve never seen. Chip shots are spinning backwards.\u201d<\/p>\n
On Sunday, he made similar comments.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe tried to set the course up to help our team,\u201d Bradley said. \u201cObviously it wasn\u2019t the right decision,\u201d Bradley said. \u201cI think anytime you\u2019re the leader of a team or the captain or the coach, or whatever, we talked about this last night, you\u2019re going to get the accolades and you need to take the blame for when things don\u2019t go well.<\/p>\n
\u201cI definitely made a mistake on the course setup. I should have listened a little bit more to my intuition. For whatever reason, that wasn\u2019t the right way to set the course up. The greens were as soft as I\u2019ve ever seen greens without it raining. Especially here, it can get pretty firm, and they never firmed up.\u201d<\/p>\n
Again, there\u2019s only so much you can do about a course getting soaked with rain, but the greens could have been cut shorter to get their speed up. In fact, a member of the US team was overheard on Friday saying the greens needed to be made much faster. There\u2019s just one problem with that: home captains lose control over the course setup the Sunday before the event starts. Here\u2019s how it\u2019s spelled out in the captain\u2019s agreement (with dates for last time at Marco Simone in Rome):<\/p>\n
It is recognised that the home side has the opportunity to influence and direct the setup and preparation of the course for the Ryder Cup. It is hereby agreed that any such influence, direction and\/or preparation will be limited to course architecture\/course design, fairway widths, rough heights, green speed and firmness, and will conclude the Sunday prior to the matches (Sunday, September 24th 2023). From Monday, September 25th 2023 all daily decisions related to course preparation\/setup including frequency and height of mowing tees, fairways and greens, determining if the greens should be rolled to maintain speed, firmness and smoothness, and selecting tees and pin positions, will be the responsibility of the Match Committee alone. The Match Committee is made up of one representative from both Ryder Cup Europe and the PGA of America. This is done to maintain the integrity of the Ryder Cup.<\/p>\n
Would cutting the grass less in the rough and more on the greens have changed the outcome? We\u2019ll never know. But Bradley probably shouldn\u2019t look at the dry weather forecast for Long Island next week.<\/p>\n
FULL GOLF DIGEST RYDER CUP COVERAGE HERE<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"[PHOTO: Michael Reaves\/PGA of America] Like any Ryder Cup captain, Keegan Bradley faced plenty of decisions this past…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":187625,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[566],"tags":[64,63,755,85],"class_list":{"0":"post-187624","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-golf","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-golf","11":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/187624","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=187624"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/187624\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/187625"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=187624"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=187624"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=187624"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}