Ryder Cup captains Keegan Bradley and Luke Donald have vowed to put their friendship to the side as they battle it out for glory this week.<\/p>\n
United States captain Bradley and his European counterpart are good friends, having spent a lot of time together off the course over the last 14 years.<\/p>\n
But they are on opposite sides at Bethpage Black in New York this week, with first-time captain Bradley trying to win back the title Donald oversaw for Europe in Rome two years ago.<\/p>\n
While they spoke lovingly of each other in Monday’s press conference to kick-off the build-up to the hotly-contested tournament, there will be no love lost when the first tee shots are hit on Friday morning.<\/p>\n
“For me, there\u2019s not many people I like more in the golf world than Luke Donald,” Bradley said.<\/p>\n
“I came on tour in 2011 and he was number one in the world. He was the first real top player to treat me with the respect that I couldn\u2019t believe.<\/p>\n
“I got to go out and play with Luke Donald who\u2019s the best player in the world. He played with all of my buddies. I loved hanging out and having a drink with Luke Donald.<\/p>\n
“I wanted to be the first one to tell Luke that I\u2019m the Ryder Cup captain here, out of respect to him, because we\u2019ve talked a lot about the Ryder Cup throughout our lives.<\/p>\n
“But we want to go out there and win. We want to put our teams in the best position to go out there and do well.<\/p>\n
“I really feel lucky to have Luke on the opposite side. Because we send each other texts, we joke around, but we know once the competition comes, we want to win.”<\/p>\n
Donald insisted he would sit down for a drink with Bradley on Sunday night, whatever the result.<\/p>\n
“I\u2019ve known Keegan (for) 12, 13 years now. We sometimes play practice rounds together on the road, we\u2019ve had dinners together, we have mutual friends,” the 47-year-old said.<\/p>\n
“Again, Keegan is someone that I\u2019ve rooted for. If he did well in a tournament, won a tournament, I would text him.<\/p>\n
“And likewise, I think we definitely have a good strong friendship and I think there\u2019s a mutual respect there.<\/p>\n
“We understand both being in the arena. We understand exactly the difficulties of professional golf and we celebrate our victories together, I think.<\/p>\n
“It\u2019s nice to have a captain \u2013 your captain opposite you \u2013 someone that you know and respect a lot. I think we\u2019re also very, very competitive and that\u2019s not going to change this week.<\/p>\n
“I think we\u2019ll have a drink on Sunday night no matter what the result, but this week is about trying to get our teams to win and we want to win.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Ryder Cup captains Keegan Bradley and Luke Donald have vowed to put their friendship to the side as…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":155395,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[39],"tags":[5904,101,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-155394","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\/155394","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=155394"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/155394\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/155395"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=155394"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=155394"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=155394"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}