FARMINGDALE, N.Y. — The criticism started pouring in well before the U.S. made a Sunday rally at the Ryder Cup. It was a monumental day that saw Europe win just one match outright out of 12, but for the U.S. it was a hole too deep, a deficit too large.
While it says here—and has been said many times previously—that Ryder Cup captains get too much blame, and perhaps too much glory, Keegan Bradley is well aware that his U.S. captaincy will be second-guessed for as long as guests line up outside Bethpage Black. They’ll play a storied public course that now will be remembered as the place where Europe prevailed 15–13 after what turned out to be a fun, drama-filled final day.
The Cup was lost, of course, before that Sunday rally, a seven-point deficit nearly impossible to overcome. How the U.S. got in that position with another poor performance in team competition will understandably be dissected and debated by all the armchair captains but really does require a deep dive by those in charge of selecting the next captain.
Sign Up Now. SI Golf Newsletters. Sports Illustrated’s Free Golf Newsletters. dark
“I think anytime at a Ryder Cup the captain is to blame or to be celebrated,” Bradley said Saturday night. “So we all have to do a better job, but most importantly I have to do a better job as a captain, and I feel like the guys have played pretty well. The Europeans have just played like way better.”
There’s a simplicity there that is often overlooked, especially because analytics are such a big part of the process today. Sometimes the opponent is better. That was certainly the case on Friday with Jon Rahm, Rory McIlroy, Tommy Fleetwood and Justin Rose. They played incredible golf.
And that made it harder on the likes of Scottie Scheffler and Bryson DeChambeau, who were far from awful but ran up against some stiff competition.
Still, Bradley’s decision to pair up Collin Morikawa and Harris English, a team the number-crunchers at Data Golf said was poor, and send them out not once but twice was skewered almost from the moment is was first revealed. There are plenty of data points to study in the weeks and months leading up to the competition, and that was a curious call to say the least.
There was plenty of conjecture about whether J.J. Spaun should have played more or whether Ben Griffin should have sat all of Saturday or whether Cam Young should have been in the first session. He was not, then played the rest of the way and went 3–1. Was it smart to put your top two players together, Scottie Scheffler and Bryson DeChambeau, in an all-or-nothing four-ball pairing on Saturday afternoon?
That latter team ran into the freight train of Tommy Fleetwood and Justin Rose, but the bottom line is Scheffler went 0–4 in the team competition—the first player since Peter Alliss in 1967 to do so—and DeChambeau went 1–3 over the first two days. That duo combined to go 2–7–1 overall.
Was it their partners’ fault? Certainly some of it falls on them. But to suggest that either should have played with someone else just goes down the second-guessing rabbit hole, which is easy to do in the aftermath.
Another mistake? Course setup. The home team controls that and Bradley said on Sunday evening that he erred.
“We tried to set the course up to help our team. Obviously it wasn’t the right decision,” he said. “I think anytime you’re the leader of a team or the captain or the coach, or whatever, we talked about this last night, you’re going to get the accolades and you need to take the blame for when things don’t go well.
“I definitely made a mistake on the course setup. I should have listened a little bit more to my intuition. For whatever reason, that wasn’t the right way to set the course up. The greens were as soft as I’ve ever seen greens without it raining. Especially here, it can get pretty firm, and they never firmed up.”
In the end, the foursomes failure will again need more consideration. The teams of Scheffler-Henley, Schauffele-Cantlay and DeChambeau-Thomas on the first day seemed logical, they simply got beat. When DeChambeau had Young as a partner Saturday, it was their only foursomes win—and the first in DeChambeau’s Ryder Cup career. Schauffele, a big question mark coming in due to lack of play, went 3–1 while his longtime partner, Patrick Cantlay, who managed just a 1–3–1 record.
After getting waxed 7–1 in Rome it was 6–2 here in foursomes. A 4–4 result and the U.S. wins the Ryder Cup. One more win, anywhere, in the team competition and Sunday would’ve been all the more dramatic.
For Bradley, it turned out to be a bittersweet end. His team rallied for him on Sunday when it was too late. He was thrust into the role, surprisingly, a job he never dreamed he’d get some 10 years after last playing in the Ryder Cup.
After Tiger Woods turned down the position late, the PGA of America abandoned its 10-year plan of continuity. Bradley had never been an assistant. He had two assistants who had never even played in a Ryder Cup. Only Jim Furyk, who has been a part of nearly every U.S Ryder Cup and Presidents Cup team since 1997, was a constant.
Some of that is over-analysis, as it ultimately comes down to the players. But there are little bits that make up the whole, and Europe under Luke Donald checked every box.
“I’ve got a real weird relationship with this tournament,” Bradley said. “A lot of heartbreak. But I still love it, and I love the guys. I love being out here again. I don’t know if I’ll ever get to do this again. I’ll remember this the rest of my life.”
It might sound crazy to bring Keegan Bradley back as Ryder Cup captain after a defeat but the U.S. has done it before. Davis Love III got another shot after the brutal 2012 loss at Medinah, and there might very well be support to give Bradley another go if he wants it. Why? The players loved him. You heard nothing but praise and admiration for the job the eight-time PGA Tour winner did, including from Scottie Scheffler, who has an influential voice.
“Keegan has been amazing,” Scheffler said. “All our vice captains have been great. This has been a really special team, and it’s been a lot of fun. This week did not go how I anticipated it going for myself, and I’m a little bit bummed, but these guys on this team, they picked me up when I needed it last night, and we’ve got a great team.”
There are plenty of reasons to go in another direction, including Bradley’s own playing preference. He’d love to play on another team. He probably should have been on this one. In 2027 at Adare Manor in Ireland, he will be 41. Time flies.
Of course, the easy choice here is Tiger Woods, who had this year’s job if he wanted it. But it’s fair to wonder: does he want it? Woods seems to have a significant behind-the-scenes role as a board member on the PGA Tour, and he’s barely been around the last few years.
Since serving as a vice captain at the 2016 Ryder Cup and the 2017 Presidents Cup, and then as a playing captain at the 2019 Presidents Cup, Woods has not been part of any of the five teams in the following years. Why not? It’s perhaps fair to say that Woods doesn’t need on-the-job training, but if he were to be the captain in 2027, shouldn’t he at least assist Brandt Snedeker next year at the Presidents Cup?
Beyond those two players, who else? Nobody who served as an assistant to Bradley is a strong candidate. Furyk has been a Presidents Cup and Ryder Cup captain. Gary Woodland and Kevin Kisner have played on one team each. Webb Simpson now has had two stints as an assistant but would seem a longshot. Snedeker is already set to be the Presidents Cup captain next year.
The emotion poured out of Shane Lowry after making the 6-foot birdie putt on the 18th hole to tie Russell Henley—who led 1 up going to the hole—and it secured the half-point needed to assure 14 points Europe needed to retain the Cup.
It was a wild weekend for Lowry, who received along with Rory McIlroy on Friday and Saturday an intense level of fan abuse, much of it personal and over the line. On more than one occasion, Lowry took a half-step toward the crowd before being restrained.
On Sunday, the Ryder Cup figured to be decided well before it got to Lowry’s eighth match of the session, but as the afternoon progressed he was aware that his result could be important.
“I’ve been so lucky to experience amazing things in this game,” Lowry said. “That was the hardest couple of hours of my whole life, honestly. I just can’t believe that putt went in.
“I said to Darren [Reynolds, his caddie] walking down 18, I said, ‘I have a chance to do the coolest thing in my life here.’ The Ryder Cup means everything to me. Honestly, I’ve won the Open in Ireland [in 2019]; it’s amazing, it’s a dream come true. But the Ryder Cup for me is everything.
“To do that there today on the 18th green in front of everyone—it was so hard out there. I mean, fair play to the U.S. lads; we knew they were going to come out fighting.”
More Ryder Cup on Sports Illustrated
Source link
