I had to ask Keegan Bradley the question at his Ryder Cup press conference on Wednesday, because it’s been on my mind for about a month:
“Do you agree with the statement that if the Ryder Cup captain were anyone other than Keegan Bradley, Keegan Bradley would be playing on the team?”
MORE: Keegan Bradley explains why he didn’t pick himself to play in Ryder Cup
He did the right thing by giving a non-answer to the hypothetical—”how could we ever know that?”—but after his snub in 2023, and the ensuing sympathetic depiction on Netflix’s “Full Swing” that got public sentiment so much on his side that the powers-that-be made the shocking decision to name him captain, it seems inconceivable that any other captain would have repeated the snub. We’ll never know, but it sets up a somewhat agonizing thought: The only way to keep him off the team in 2025 was to name him captain. Looked at a certain way, it’s like an ironic curse from the golf gods.
Let it be said that Bradley did something very noble by leaving himself off the team, and it speaks well for how he’ll function as a leader at Bethpage Black next month. He claimed the decision had been made for some time, with other reports from the past two days indicating it was a bit more uncertain. And while we may never know the specifics of how close he came to picking himself, we can safely say it’s the decision that keeps the narrative from spinning out of control, puts any distraction to the side, and lets him lead as captain with crystal-clear focus.
He could have been a great player for the team, but there are other great players to choose from, and the captaincy job is so comprehensive and time-consuming that dividing your energies is a huge risk in a few different ways. Just ask Europe—they’ve been eager for a year for Bradley to take on both duties, and reports indicate that Luke Donald agreeing to the addendum allowing a vice captain to take over while Bradley played was based in part in Europe’s eagerness for that exact scenario to play out.
Now, not only is Bradley singularly focused on leading, but the Americans have a great and galvanizing story of sacrifice to rally behind. So, kudos to Bradley for making the adult decision, even if, as he admitted, it left him heartbroken.
But there’s another element that has to be recognized here, and it’s not so uplifting. The truth is, none of this had to happen. Bradley only found himself in this position as a result of a series of baffling and bad decisions that began a year ago, in July 2024, with naming him the captain in the first place.
As I wrote at the time, it was impossible to call Bradley’s appointment a good choice or a bad choice, because it truly came from out of left field (and was apparently floated and approved over a short phone call). He had no experience even as a vice captain, wasn’t so beloved of his peers that he stood out as a natural leader and seemed to be based entirely on the fact that Tiger Woods said no and that they felt bad for Bradley for being left out of the squad in Rome. Which, it has to be said, is a strange reason to make that choice. The biggest problem with it, though, is exactly what came to pass—he might play! As I wrote then, “What if, like last time, he has a solid argument for making the team as a captain’s pick, and finds himself having to make a tough call … on himself?”
And that’s not to pay myself on the back—it was entirely foreseeable by everybody except, apparently, those making the decision. True, the otherwise successful task force had failed to prepare a younger generation of captains beyond Zach Johnson, and true, they got unlucky with Tiger and Phil Mickelson leaving the scene. But it wouldn’t have been hard to name an experienced guy like Stewart Cink, or to pick Jim Furyk again with the vow that he’d take on a fleet of younger vice captains like Webb Simpson and Brandt Snedker and Kevin Kisner who would be ready to take over in 2027. Instead, they took the radical path, and the radical path has almost always backfired when it comes to choosing a Ryder Cup captain (see: the legacy of Ted Bishop).
At that point, Murphy’s Law reared its head and became a major figure in the Ryder Cup drama, ensuring that Bradley would end up perfectly on the bubble, in the position where he found himself today—poised to either spark a controversy or break his own heart.
That original decision, though, was just the start of the missteps. In the realm of “don’t say things that will come back to bite you,” Bradley vowed that he wouldn’t play on the team unless he qualified in the top six. That seemed like a fair solution, but when he won the Travelers in late June, he changed his tune, opening up the possibility that he could pick himself. The fact that he drafted the addendum allowing a vice captain to take over signaled the likelihood that he’d play, which only led to more speculation and confusion as he failed over the next two months to play so well that he fully justified his inclusion, or to crater so much that he fell off the bubble. Again, Murphy’s Law went undefeated.
Just after the Travelers, though, Bradley had what I thought was a golden opportunity to have the best of both worlds. By resigning the captaincy then and putting his fate in the hands of whoever took over next, he would have almost surely cemented his place on the team—again, who’s going to say no at that point?—and simultaneously assured that he’d be a shoo-in for a future captaincy. Instead, they pushed ahead with the idea of a playing captain, which hasn’t been tried in the Ryder Cup in the modern era, and ended up as a near disaster when Woods, as a playing captain, and his American Presidents Cup team nearly blew it against an inferior international squad in Melbourne 2019. (Again, we note Europe’s eagerness to manifest that reality.)
Two months later, this is the fruit of that decision—a player who frankly deserves to be on the team, and would be under any other captain’s tenure, but can’t because he was set up by U.S. leadership (and himself) to be stuck in the “damned if you do, gutted if you don’t” situation we saw this week.
He did the right thing. If the Americans win at Bethpage, his selfless act will take on a greater historical resonance, and maybe they’ll bring him back for a second act 2027 the way the Europeans have with Luke Donald. But it’s hard not to dwell on how if the proper decisions had been made at any point in the preceding year, Bradley wouldn’t have had to give up his great dream—and perhaps his last chance—of playing in the Ryder Cup.
This article was originally published on golfdigest.com
