When you sit back from it, the situation with the American Ryder Cup team is equal parts hilarious, confusing and just plain mad. On Wednesday, US captain Keegan Bradley will either pick himself on the team to play Europe in four weeks or he will pick somebody else. As of now, nobody knows what he is going to do.
It is an extraordinary pickle they’ve got themselves into, unique in modern elite sport. You just wouldn’t see it anywhere else. Here is the premier team tournament in professional golf – literally the only one that matters a damn to anybody – and it might hinge on the sort of self-indulgent dithering that would get a schoolkid a wedgie if he tried it on at lunchtime.
For the uninitiated, here’s how it all came to pass.
Two years ago this week, Bradley did not get picked on the US Ryder Cup team for the matches in Rome. Despite finishing in 11th spot on the qualifying rankings, he was overlooked by then captain Zach Johnson, who picked Rickie Fowler, Sam Burns and Justin Thomas ahead of him.
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Bradley was devastated. We know this because Netflix told us so. He was a key character in series two of their golf show Full Swing, specifically Episode Six, the one about the run-up to the 2023 captain’s picks. In it, Bradley presents himself as that ultra-rare thing, an American golfer who is all-in on the Ryder Cup.
We are shown his still-unemptied suitcase from the 2012 matches – a relic of a historic defeat on American soil which, as some sort of quasi-Pandoran act of self-flagellation, Bradley refuses to open unless and until he is on a winning US team. “I just hope that some day I get to win a Ryder Cup and open that thing and have, like a peace-of-mind moment,” he says at one stage. “Because I’m thinking of the Ryder Cup every second of every day.”
Yikes. Cut to the beginning of Episode Seven and Johnson is calling Bradley to tell him he’s not picking him. We’re in the Bradley living room, with some NFL show on mute in the background and Bradley’s wife Jillian and five-year-old son beside him as he gets the news. The young fella cops that something is up with Mom and Dad and when he asks what’s wrong, Jillian says “Nothing. Give your dad a squeeze. He needs it.”
It’s a deeply touching, human moment, the sort of thing you pretty much never get to see in the lives of the world’s top sportspeople. So touching and human, in fact, that when it was shown the following year, it grabbed at the heart of the people tacked with picking the Ryder Cup captain for 2025. Next thing you know, Bradley got a call out of the blue, with PGA of America supremo Seth Waugh telling him he was their choice for Bethpage.
And of course Bradley said yes. Why wouldn’t he? A devoted Ryder Cup nut who had missed out on making the US team for four Ryder Cups in a row – no way could he turn that down. There was the small matter of what might happen if he was in line to make the team but he could be forgiven for thinking he’d cross that bridge when he came to it.
Because in all truth, the likelihood of Bradley meeting that bridge was slight enough in July 2024. There is always a fair bit of churn in the American team, way more than in the European team. It’s a numbers game – anything up to 50 or 60 US golfers can conceivably imagine themselves getting on a good run and making the US side, where as the Europeans are essentially picking from less than 20. Put it this way – on the day Bradley was announced as captain, absolutely nobody was predicting the likes of JJ Spaun and Ben Griffin being in Bethpage.
Given that level of ebb and flow, the most likely scenario would have been Bradley falling back down the pecking order and out of contention. He was ranked 19th in the world at the time, behind the likes of Tony Finau, Max Homa, Sahith Theegala and Wyndham Clark. None of them are anywhere near the conversation for the US Ryder Cup team and haven’t been for months. It was entirely conceivable that Bradley would be in the same boat.
Failing that, most people presumed that somewhere along the way, Bradley would kill off the idea of playing himself. There hasn’t been a playing captain in the Ryder Cup since Arnold Palmer in the 1960s. To put it mildly, the Ryder Cup now is not what the Ryder Cup was then. And frankly, to put it even more mildly, Keegan Bradley is not Arnold Palmer.
Yet here we are. Bradley has just had one of his best ever seasons on the PGA Tour, with a win and five top 10s. He finished tied for eighth in the PGA Championship, only his second major top-10 in a decade. He has been consistently in and around the top 12 in the US rankings. Any American captain would pick Keegan Bradley for the team.
Any American captain, except Keegan Bradley. Presumably. Surely. Maybe?
Because as of now, 24 hours out from the announcement, it’s still the case that nobody really knows what is going to happen. Bradley has spent the last month calling it the biggest decision of his life without at any stage giving even the slightest hint of which way he is going to go with it. He should never have let it get this far but he seems intent on stringing it all the way out.
And so here’s what he faces. Bradley has six captain’s picks, of which Justin Thomas, Collin Morikawa and Patrick Cantlay will definitely take three. The last three will most likely be between Griffin (who would be a shoo-in if he was a bigger name), Cameron Young, Sam Burns and Bradley.
So either Bradley goes with the first three and takes himself out of it, as would only be right and proper, or he gets his phone out sometime today, possibly even as you are reading this, and calls one of them - probably Burns or Young - to say, “Sorry dude, I’m going with me.”
This stuff always leaks out ahead of time but there hasn’t been a dicky bird in this case. Which means Bradley is either cynically teasing the golf world just so that there’ll be more eyeballs on the announcement or he genuinely doesn’t know himself.
Neither is good. Luke Donald has more or less been certain of the European team for months now, give or take a Hojgaard twin. Europe wouldn’t dream of a playing captain, so much so that Rory McIlroy says he has already killed off any suggestion that he might do it himself in the future. It’s just too big a job.
Yet somehow the Yanks have got themselves into the most knotted situation possible. The guy who wanted more than anything to play in the Ryder Cup played well enough to be deserving of a pick to play in the Ryder Cup. But now he has the one job in golf that should rule him out of playing in the Ryder Cup, except that it also comes with the power to pick himself for the Ryder Cup. Which, if he exercises it and the US lose, will go down as one of the all-time Ryder Cup blunders.
It is a stupendously unserious state of affairs. God bless America!
