Well, if it was a mini Ryder Cup preview of sorts, European fans might have been better off covering their eyes for the final three holes of the Travelers Championship on Sunday evening.
That’s because Tommy Fleetwood, a virtual lock for the European squad, played those final three holes in two over par. Keegan Bradley, the US Ryder Cup captain, played them in one under, pulling off a stunning heist to win this event for the second time in three years.
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As chants of USA rained down from the Connecticut crowd, Bradley beamed with pride while holding his oldest son, Logan, who was sporting a belt plastered with American flags all over it. Bradley, a Vermont native, sent the same Northeastern crowd into an uproar in 2023 with his three-stroke win but somehow outdid himself with his two-under 68 on Sunday to win by one.
“Absolutely incredible,” he said afterward. “I feel an obligation to play for the people of New England and the Northeast and represent them, and this is the best way I can do it.”
Bradley soaking in that moment must have felt like a pipe dream after the 14th hole, where the 39-year-old had just 124 yards (111 metres) left in the fairway for his approach and overcooked it into a bunker long and left. His ball buried, forcing him to go out sideways, which led to a bogey. Fleetwood had just six feet for birdie with a chance to put him away.
That’s when it all began to go wrong, the Englishman missing on the low side and settling for a par to remain in the lead. At the short par 4 15th he missed his drive well right but got a good bit of fortune with a drop off the cart path. But he’d go on to make par while Bradley holed a 36-footer for birdie to gain momentum. He found the green at the par-3 16th and Fleetwood missed long. A bogey for Fleetwood and a par for Bradley cut the three-shot cushion to one with two to play.
Matching pars at 17 kept the lead at one, a lead Fleetwood appeared destined to finally capitalise on after he split the 18th fairway with his tee shot just after Bradley did the same. Fleetwood went first, leaving his approach short and left. Bradley followed with a gut-punch approach shot to five feet.
What unfolded next was a sick-to-your-stomach scene, as Fleetwood not only came up six feet short with his birdie effort, but he left it just short of Bradley’s mark, eventually showing him the line. Fleetwood missed, suddenly putting his chances of just forcing a two-man playoff in danger. Bradley ended any hope of that with a middle-of-the-cup birdie conversion to pick up his eighth career PGA Tour win.
Bradley’s guts and guile in front of his pseudo hometown crowd should be the main story, but Fleetwood’s latest meltdown will garner most of the attention. You know all the big ones – the missed eight-footer for 62 at the 2018 US Open at Shinnecock, the final-round 74 in the 2019 Open Championship at Portrush, the gutting loss to Nick Taylor on a 72-foot putt at the 2023 Canadian Open. Those are merely a sampling of the closest close calls of the 34-year-old’s career. Late on the back nine Sunday, CBS flashed a graphic showing that, since 1983, Fleetwood has the most top-10 finishes without a win on the PGA Tour with 41. Make that 42 as of Sunday.
Fleetwood, of course, knows how to win golf tournaments on a high-level tour. He’s won seven times on the DP World Tour, most recently in January of 2024 at the Dubai Invitational. He’s been a member of two victorious European Ryder Cup teams, going 4-1-0 in 2018 in Paris and 3-1-0 in 2023 in Rome. To those in the know, he’s one of the elite players in the world. But the narrative that he cannot win on American soil will persist among his critics.
“Obviously there’s a lot of chat about it,” Fleetwood said afterward. “I think—I would have loved to have done it today, search goes on, I guess. When it happens it will be very, very sweet.”
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Not surprisingly, Fleetwood, who is among the most lovable players in the sport, was able to not go too hard on himself in the immediate aftermath, even saying there are plenty of positives to take from the week. He’s not been in serious contention much this season, so getting there this week is a very good sign for the rest of this season. With the Scottish Open and the Open Championship on the horizon, he’ll be as popular a pick as ever to win both.
For now, it still stings. How could it not with the way it ended?
“Right now I would love to, you know, just go and sulk somewhere and maybe I will do,” he said. “But there’s just no point making it a negative for the future really, just take the positives and move on.”
As for Bradley, the celebration is on, though this victory actually could make his life a bit more difficult. He’s fielded questions all year about the potential of him being a playing captain at Bethpage Black this September, something that hasn’t been done since 1963. Bradley has adeptly answered that question several times by essentially saying he’ll worry about that when the time comes.
Well, Captain Bradley, we are now closing in on the three-months-until mark for the Ryder Cup, so that time is creeping closer, and it sounds like he’s not ruling it out.
“My whole life every year I was out here I wanted to play on the Ryder Cup team,” Bradley said. “And then this would be the first year where maybe I didn’t want to. I just wanted to be the captain and, of course, you know, this is what happens.
“I’m going to do whatever I think is best for the team. Whether that’s me on the team—this certainly changes a lot of things. I was never going to play on the team unless I had won a tournament and so that’s changed, but we’ll see.”