Keegan Bradley and a different kind of Ryder Cup dream

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FARMINGDALE, N.Y. — Walking underneath a gargantuan American flag dangling between two trees, Mark Bradley was beckoned to the ropeline. The crowd clamored for players as they walked down a steep dirt hill, but one patron had his sights set on a 72-year-old man happily strolling as just part of the gang.

Bradley stopped to heed the request. The fan handed him two things. First, a USA basketball jersey with Bradley 25 on the back. The man pleaded with Bradley to give it to his son, so Bradley laughed and obliged. Better yet, he threw the jersey over his shirt and walked the final four holes in it.

Then, the fan gave him an envelope. “For Keegan Bradley, Captain,” it read.

“I wanted to open it,” Mark joked, “but I won’t.”

Not much earlier, the son of that septuagenarian club professional hopped off his cart and strolled up to Bethpage Black’s 11th green. Nobody noticed at first in the hot doldrums of a Tuesday Ryder Cup practice round. Then, seemingly all at once, the grandstand came alive. Applause? No. Shouts. Roars. And Keegan Bradley leaned over with a low, walking clap like an ol’ ball coach, cheesing to the gallery like it was heaven on Earth.

“O captain, my captain!” one yelled.

“Take no prisoners!” shouted another.

“St. John’s!” a gentleman belted for Bradley’s alma mater.

Each green Bradley approached, a similar scene. Quiet, then recognition, followed by pandemonium. He’d wave his arms with a “Come on!” as players approached, so they’d give a rowdy applause. On the 17th hole, he waved a young boy under the rope and let him in on the action. He signed the kid’s oversized golf ball to more uproar, so the kid — seizing the moment  — whipped off his cap to have Bradley sign that too.

For the past year, Bradley, the surprise 39-year-old Ryder Cup captain, has been showered with love. This time, he’s learning how to let it all in.

That evolution is why he’s here in the first place.

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He made a promise both to himself and his family. He couldn’t do that again. He couldn’t spend another year of his life with his happiness intertwined with a result, his entire identity hedging on being selected by powers he couldn’t control. The lasting image of Bradley’s 2023 was one of him sitting on the edge of a couch, staring at his phone as captain Zach Johnson told him he would not be part of the 2023 U.S. Ryder Cup team — Netflix cameras recording as his son asks him what’s wrong, only for his wife, Jill, to tell the boy to hug his daddy.

“It was too much,” Bradley said. “It was too much for me. It was too much for my family. It was too much for my kids. Even if I made it, it was just, like, exhausting.”

The problem with success is the traits that take you this far don’t suddenly fade once you make it. Keegan Bradley become a major champion and eight-time PGA Tour winner by compiling one chip on his shoulder after another, replacing each one with a new grievance, whether it be real or manufactured, to ensure he always had somebody new to prove wrong.

The way Bradley describes it, he was an island. He worked on his own. He ate alone. He had friends on tour, sure, but “everyone I was playing against was my enemy.” To him, he was the guy who nobody recruited out of high school, who everybody criticized for his spitting on the course or his twitchy pre-shot routine, who felt slighted when golf outlawed the anchored belly putter that was his favorite.

Bradley rubbed people the wrong way. His pace was slow. He wasn’t popular. He didn’t shy away from confrontation, famously getting in Miguel Angel Jimenez’s face during a 2015 match to say, “Don’t you ever tell my caddie to shut up.” Because when you tell yourself it’s you against for long enough, eventually it really is.

So when Bradley’s late-career renaissance launched in 2023, winning twice and finishing ninth in the Tour Championship, he did what he always does: He wore his heart on his sleeve. This time, though, he was vulnerable. He openly campaigned for a Ryder Cup roster spot. He did any and all interviews on the subject, making clear he wanted this as much as anything in his career. He played on the 2012 and 2014 U.S. teams, and at that point, he assumed he’d stay on them forever. Instead, he was never invited back.

But after months of striving and anguish, Johnson didn’t pick Bradley. In the moments after the announcement, he told Golf Channel that he’s “always been an outsider” and “moving forward, I’m going to have to automatically qualify for the Ryder Cup.”

So he made a promise, not knowing the life-changing calls on the horizon. He would not let himself do that again. He would enjoy the car rides, plane flights and meals with other guys on tour. He’d listen. He’d talk. Because that painful experience was the starkest reminder that this career will end one day. Eventually, there will be a whole lot of lasts, and he doesn’t know when they’ll be.

But not even Bradley could have imagined that two years from that day he’d be making his own phone calls, Jill by his side, telling somebody like Sam Burns he wanted him on his Ryder Cup team. Bradley closed his eyes, his throat choked up.

“I love you, and I’m so proud of the way you played the last month of the season with this on your shoulders.”

Did Keegan Bradley just tell a competitor he loves him?

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Bradley stood in awe of the next generation.

Scottie Scheffler, Xander Schauffele, Sam Burns and Wyndham Clark were ribbing each other and joking around at the gala two days before the 2024 Presidents Cup. At that moment, Bradley was their teammate, but two months earlier, he was the surprise pick to lead the United States in the 2025 Ryder Cup. He was both a competitor and an observer, trying to learn what it would take to do this job. What he saw that night in Montreal were four players living their prime years in a way Bradley didn’t know was allowed.

“I’m looking at these guys interacting like I would watch my friends all interact,” he said. “I’m thinking, these guys are going to play 20 tournaments next year, 70 percent of the tournaments are probably going to come down to this group standing right here, and they’re totally just friends.”

Bradley was already on a path toward opening up. That week, when he fittingly earned the winning point, he cemented it.

Even when he was exhausted and just wanted to sleep, he stayed up in the team room chatting and telling stories. When the old Keegan would go off to practice on his own game, he’d now stay an extra five to 10 minutes on the couch to hear more. “I got to speak with Russell Henley in a very intimate way,” Bradley said then. “I had a great respect for him before, but now I have even more.” So from last September to this one, it’s been about building on that.

Gary Woodland was in Bradley’s circle more than most. They broke out around the same time in 2011. They sometimes traveled together and spent time together off the course.

“I’ve never seen him like this,” said Woodland, one of Bradley’s vice captains this week in New York. “We’ve been together a lot, but he’s opened so much. You can tell how much it means. He’s emotional. I’ve never seen that side of Keegan.”

Guys like Woodland and fellow vice captains Brandt Snedeker and Kevin Kisner were in Bradley’s crew, but that friendship was always at arm’s length.

“He’s opened up with us on a more personal, deeper level,” Woodland said. “Like, I would have called him a good friend. But now? I’d call him a really close friend.”

Justin Thomas is seven years younger, but they’ve been competing together for nearly a decade. They all just knew how Keegan was.

“Keegan would be the first to tell you he’s always been kind of quiet, been to himself, and I think this captaincy has been the best thing that’s happened to him,” Thomas said. “It’s brought out a different side of him. We keep joking you have to talk to all of us and you can’t just kind of hide from us anymore. You’ve got to hang out with us and whatnot.”

Then something else happened. His golf kept getting better. He was in the top 10 at the PGA Championship and won the Travelers Championship, a signature event. It became abundantly clear that if anyone else were the Ryder Cup captain, Keegan Bradley would be on his team.

One dream got in the way of another. He always promised he wouldn’t pick himself unless he automatically qualified, but the players he was finally getting close to were in his ear, telling him he should play. By almost any metric, he was one of the 10 best American golfers. Would Bradley go from snubbed to the first modern playing captain? Reports and rumors swirled in the final days before the team was announced last month that he planned to pick himself.

He did not.

“I grew up wanting to play Ryder Cups,” Bradley said. “I grew up wanting to fight alongside these guys. It broke my heart not to play. It really did. You work forever to make these teams, but ultimately, I was chosen to do a job. I was chosen to be the captain of this team. My ultimate goal to start this thing was to be the best captain that I could be.”

Maybe it was selflessness. Maybe it was reluctant self-awareness. But Bradley wants, deep in his bones, to be on that first tee playing golf. As recently as Monday, he confessed he catches himself staring down fairways thinking how badly he wishes he were playing this weekend. Regardless of the reason, Bradley chose the team over himself.

No matter what happens in his career from here on out, what takes place this weekend in New York may become the most notable piece of his legacy. Captains are usually remembered, sure, but Bradley has tapped into something different in the national golf psyche. Most of his personal achievements in life were met with polite claps, but this version of him leading the United States elicits passion.

A self-described loner has become the people’s captain at the “people’s country club.” He’s shown that a 39-year-old dog can learn new tricks, warping everything about his self-constructed identity and turning the heat of his intensity into warmth. Maybe people don’t change, but they can change which parts of themselves they tap into.

So when Bradley speaks to his team, he often tells them to take it in.

“My last Ryder Cup was the deciding point with Jamie Donaldson and I certainly didn’t think that was my last shot in a Ryder Cup,” he said. “You really want to enjoy every second of these because you never know when it’s done.”

There’s a decent chance Bradley has hit his final shot at a Ryder Cup. A chance that everything he was chasing these last few years is part of the past but accidentally stumbled Bradley into the best version of himself.

Because suddenly, there Bradley was again, walking onto the green to a sea of people chanting his name. And then there was Bradley, directing them to applaud for his team. They are no longer his enemies. These are his people.

(Top photo of Keegan Bradley: Jared C. Tilton / Getty Images)