{"id":150261,"date":"2025-09-12T01:08:06","date_gmt":"2025-09-12T01:08:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/150261\/"},"modified":"2025-09-12T01:08:06","modified_gmt":"2025-09-12T01:08:06","slug":"heres-how-close-keegan-bradley-came-to-being-a-ryder-cup-playing-captain","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/150261\/","title":{"rendered":"Here’s How Close Keegan Bradley Came to Being a Ryder Cup Playing Captain"},"content":{"rendered":"

NAPA, Calif. \u2014 Keegan Bradley has settled into his role<\/a> as U.S. Ryder Cup captain, his golf clubs at home in Florida and his urge to play alongside those he will lead two in weeks at Bethpage Back, at least, tempered.<\/p>\n

Bradley has acknowledged how much he wanted to play on a team he\u2019s tried so hard to make over the years. Those close to him were well aware of that struggle.<\/p>\n

How close did it come to happening?<\/p>\n

It appears the possibility was quite real\u2014until some of the players who were ultimately picked gave both Bradley and his vice captains the comfort to know that the team would be just as good without him.<\/p>\n

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\u201cWe kept telling Keegan, you\u2019re not making this easy on us,\u201d says Gary Woodland, one of Bradley\u2019s five vice captains who is playing at this week’s Procore Championship. \u201cBeing part of this process for the last three months, I don\u2019t know how he played the way he did. It’s one of the most remarkable things. Maybe Tiger could have done it. But I just don\u2019t know if anybody could have played the way he played with everything he\u2019s had on his plate.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd then he wins Travelers, that threw a wrinkle in everything. He\u2019s beating the best players in the world stressed out of his mind with all this stuff. At the end of the day, we kept telling him he can\u2019t make the wrong decision.<\/p>\n

\u201cBut him not playing is one of the most selfless acts I\u2019ve seen in this game. I\u2019ve known Keegan for 15 years, I know how much this means to him. We travel together a lot. It\u2019s all he talks about\u2014the team. That\u2019s it. And knowing he\u2019s good enough, 11th\u00a0in the world, knowing he knows that course, it fits him. He\u2019s poured his heart and soul and into this. I think it\u2019s unbelievable.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bradley, 39, was famously left off the 2023 team that lost decisively to Europe in Rome. He played on the 2012 and 2014 teams and went 4-3-1 as the U.S. lost both matches. Whether or not he would have made a difference in 2023 is, of course, the stuff of considerable conjecture.<\/p>\n

The U.S. lost 16 \u00bd to 11 \u00bd. It went 1-7 in foursomes\u2014a format Bradley was unlikely to play. It\u2019s best player, Scottie Scheffer, went 0-2-2.<\/p>\n

But the handling of Bradley, which became more widely-known from a Netflix documentary, led to plenty of second-guessing.<\/p>\n

And then he was surprisingly named the U.S. captain in July of 2024<\/a>. He won the BMW Championship after barely qualifying for the FedEx Cup playoff event.<\/p>\n

This year, he had six top-10 finishes, including his victory at the Travelers Championship in June.<\/p>\n

And he is ranked 11th\u00a0in the Official World Golf Ranking, meaning he is ahead of five players on his team and nine on the European side.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen he won Travelers, it seemed hard to imagine a 12-man Ryder Cup team without him on it,\u201d says Webb Simpson, another vice captain. \u201cHe still played great golf. But a few guys played really well at the end of the year. Cam Young. Ben Griffin kept playing well. I think looking back, he\u2019ll remember it as a really hard but the right decision.\u201d<\/p>\n

Simpson said he never specifically advised Bradley on whether or not to play.<\/p>\n

But Simpson attended a function in conjunction with the Tour Championship in Atlanta and came away moved by how other players on the team were backing Bradley is he chose to play.<\/p>\n

\u201cInternally the support that these players have for him is unreal,\u201d Simpson said. \u201cI\u2019m not surprised. I told my wife, it\u2019s got to be a good feeling knowing your players are looking at you saying we want you to play because we think we\u2019re one of the best players in the world. But we trust you as captain. Could it get any better?\u201d<\/p>\n

There will be many who wonder if the U.S. team is better off with Bradley on it.<\/p>\n

But clearly, the noise surrounding him playing would be intense. The Ryder Cup begins on Sept. 26 and there will be four days of a news conferences leading up to it. You can almost guarantee that on each of those days, Bradley would be confronted with some question, some possible distraction, centering around his own play on the team.<\/p>\n

Patrick Cantlay, who plays often with Bradley at home in Florida, said he never discussed the situation with him away from the course.<\/p>\n

But Cantlay made it clear a few weeks ago and again this week he\u2019d have had no problem with Bradley playing.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think he\u2019s one of the best players in the world and if I was captain I\u2019d have taken him to be on the team,\u201d Cantlay said. \u201cI know for sure the 12 guys have respect for him and he\u2019s earned it. He has a lot of responsibilities that week. Balancing the two would have been incredibly difficult. He\u2019s going to have a lot on his plate.<\/p>\n

\u201cI knew it was a decision that was weighing on him and I\u2019m not sure there was a right answer. But I wasn\u2019t surprised. Being the captain and the amount of responsibility he has that week is a tall order. I think he could do it. But it would be a challenge.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bradley was unaware of the circumstances behind the last U.S. playing captain at the Ryder Cup\u2014Arnold Palmer in 1963. He marveled when he learned that Palmer was appointed captain after a team vote just a few months prior to the event at East Lake in Atlanta\u2014after team was already determined.<\/p>\n

Palmer played all six matches. The U.S. won easily. The Ryder Cup was a far different deal.<\/p>\n

Bradley, for example, was considered to have been chosen late for the role and it was still made 14 months in advance of the event.<\/p>\n

There was plenty of reason to believe that Jim Furyk could have shouldered some of the responsibilities of the captain if Bradley elected to play.<\/p>\n

Furyk is involved with the U.S. Ryder Cup effort for the 14th consecutive match, dating to his first appearance as a player in 1997. He played in nine Ryder Cups, was an assistant three times and was also the captain in 2018. Last year Furyk was the winning U.S. Presidents Cup captain.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t\u2019 believe I ever told him that he should or should not play,\u201d Furyk said. \u201cI just tried to lay out what it would look like on both sides. And that goes into the responsibilities before the week of, responsibilities throughout the practice rounds, responsibilities during the tournament. I tried to be very clear and lay out what the week would be like. He\u2019s the captain. His team. It\u2019s obviously his team. And the five of us were going to support him either way you look at it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Furyk said that Bradley was confronted with a difficult decision.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt would have given us a lot more responsibility,\u201d he said about the assistants, including himself, Woodland, Simpson, Brandt Snedker (next year\u2019s Presidents Cup captain) and Kevin Kisner. \u201cIt\u2019s his team so I don\u2019t want to project. I get the order and I\u2019m here to help. The five of us would have had to take on more responsibility.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe difficult part is how would you like to spend the last 14 months every waking moment he\u2019s thought about getting ready for the Ryder Cup? He\u2019s put together a plan. How he got his players. He\u2019s formulating it all. It\u2019s hard to hand that playbook over to someone else. You want to carry it out. And you know what, he’s busted his ass this whole time. He deserves to do that.\u201d<\/p>\n

Furyk added Bradley\u2019s greatest asset to the team may still be forthcoming.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019d like to think that story is unwritten,\u201d Furyk said. \u201cHe\u2019s going to make some incredible moves and do some incredible things during the week and at the end of the week the team is going to say that is part of the puzzle.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"NAPA, Calif. \u2014 Keegan Bradley has settled into his role as U.S. Ryder Cup captain, his golf clubs…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":150262,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[71],"tags":[427,99],"class_list":["post-150261","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-golf","tag-golf","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150261","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=150261"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150261\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/150262"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=150261"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=150261"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=150261"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}