NORTH BERWICK, Scotland \u2013 At last year\u2019s Genesis Scottish Open when Rory McIlroy was asked about the possibility of a Ryder Cup playing captain, he was skeptical it could be done in the modern era of one of sports biggest events.<\/p>\n
On Friday at the Renaissance Club, McIlroy was asked again if it was possible for U.S. captain Keegan Bradley to do both \u2014 play and captain \u2014 this year at Bethpage Black.<\/p>\n
\u201cHopefully it is impossible,\u201d McIlroy joked. \u201cKeegan has played great. He\u2019s had a great year. He had the win at the Travelers. I\u2019m not in those conversations and from an outside perspective, it\u2019s going to be interesting to see what the U.S. team does with that.<\/p>\n
\u201cI definitely think the U.S. team is better with Keegan playing than not playing. I definitely think he\u2019s one of the best 12 American players right now. It\u2019s going to be an interesting couple months to see how that all shakes out.\u201d<\/p>\n
Bradley is currently ninth on the U.S. points list with the top 6 automatically qualifying. Automatic qualifying ends on Aug. 17 and Bradley will announce his six captain\u2019s picks the next week.<\/p>\n
McIlroy was also asked about the philosophical differences between how captains for the U.S. and European teams lead.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s a different perspective, absolutely,\u201d he said. \u201cIt really feels like it\u2019s a player-led team in America, and obviously we have our input as a player on the European team, but we do have that one figurehead in [captain Luke Donald].<\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s important. I think even going back to Rome, when the Americans got off to a pretty rough start, I think because [then-U.S. captain Zach Johnson] gave the team so much ownership, they had no one to look to. They were looking at each other instead of having a focal point, tell us what to do. That is something that Europe has done very, very well. But also the players have allowed the captain to be a captain as well.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"NORTH BERWICK, Scotland \u2013 At last year\u2019s Genesis Scottish Open when Rory McIlroy was asked about the possibility…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2267,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[71],"tags":[427,99],"class_list":["post-2266","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\/2266","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=2266"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2266\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2267"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2266"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2266"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2266"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}