New U.S. Ryder Cup captain Keegan Bradley: 'I was made to do this job'
Keegan Bradley participates in a news conference in Manhattan on Tuesday. Credit: AP/Seth Wenig
When Keegan Bradley was being recruited to play golf at St. John’s, then-coach Frank Darby believed he needed a closer to seal the commitment. He brought in Hall of Fame coach Lou Carnesecca and, he said, “The way Keegan loved basketball, that was the move.”
No such tactics were needed when the PGA of America asked him to captain the U.S. team for the 2025 Ryder Cup (Sept. 26-28) at Bethpage Black.
It’s hard to envision anyone matching Bradley’s passion for the event and commitment to a U.S. victory over Europe. He played on the 2012 and 2014 teams that lost, but still calls the first two days of the 2012 event “my fondest memories on a golf course.” And Bethpage Black has been dear to him since he and his Red Storm teammates snuck on to the closed course each Monday to play all the holes east of Round Swamp Road.
“I feel like I was made to do this job,” Bradley said Tuesday after his introductory news conference at the Nasdaq Building in Times Square. Darby and Bradley’s college teammates were all in attendance.
Bradley, 38, is the youngest U.S. captain since 34-year-old Arnold Palmer in 1963. And he aspires to be the first captain to play on the team since Palmer did it in ’63.
The Bradley captaincy came together quickly after a long courtship of Tiger Woods ended with him turning it down. Woods is on the PGA’s committee negotiating a merger with the competing Saudi-backed LIV tour and didn’t think he could give the Ryder Cup captaincy the required time.
“With my new responsibilities to the tour and time commitments involved, I felt I would not be able to [dedicate] the time to Team USA and the players if I were . . . captain,” Woods said in a statement. “That does not mean I wouldn't want to captain a team in the future. If, when I feel it is the right time, I will put my hat in the ring.”
Former vice-captains such as Stewart Cink, Fred Couples and Davis Love III appeared obvious fallbacks. But Bradley, who won the 2011 PGA Championship and is 4-1 in Ryder Cup matches, stood out to the selection committee.
“We had a couple of phone calls and talked about a variety of different attributes that we [wanted] in our next captain,” PGA of America president John Lindert said. “You start to check off the boxes and you have a PGA champion, you have somebody who went to school here [and] is familiar with the New York fan base, is very familiar with Bethpage Black, is the son of a PGA member. There are a lot of boxes that that Keegan checked off and his enthusiasm for the Ryder Cup stood out above everything else and we just felt like that was the ‘aha moment.’ When his name was mentioned . . . all hands went up and we were 100% behind it.”
Bradley has hungered to play in another Ryder Cup for a decade. He didn’t score enough points on the PGA Tour to be one of the six automatic qualifiers for the 12-member team in 2023, but was in a position to be one of the six “captain’s picks.” Then-captain Zach Johnson snubbed him in a crushing phone call that was aired in the Netflix docuseries “Full Swing.”
Ironically, it was Johnson who called to deliver Bradley the news he was the committee’s choice to be captain when he didn’t even know he was being considered.
Bradley said: “I don't think I'll ever be more surprised than anything in my entire life. I had no idea. And it took a while for it to sink in.”
Badly as he wants to play, Bradley said Tuesday he does not intend to use one of the picks on himself.
“I’m not going to pick myself,” he said. “The only way that would happen is if the team was insisting [on] it. But even if they did, I don’t see that happening. I want to make the team on points. Otherwise I’m going to [just] be the captain.”
Bradley’s commitment to captaining a winning team is clear even if the shock of the past two weeks still lingers. Darby, however, is not surprised at all.
“We saw all his criteria at St. John’s,” Darby said. “He’s all about winning and his teammates. He loves the course. He loves New York. He’s going to be a great captain.”
Roger Rubin returned to Newsday in 2018 to write about high schools, colleges and baseball following 20 years at the Daily News. A Baseball Hall of Fame voter since 2011, he has covered 13 MLB postseasons and 14 NCAA Final Fours.
