Keegan Bradley’s 2023 season was his best since his rookie year on the PGA Tour. He won the Travelers Championship, tied for seventh at the Tour Championship and nearly made his third U.S. Ryder Cup team.
But when asked to grade his year, Bradley didn’t hesitate: “F.”
“You’ve got to go and win that and this grade’s different,” Bradley said, referring to his role as Ryder Cup captain of the American team that lost at Bethpage Black. “It’s really tough to grade. I was talking to my coach, he said, ‘Remember, you won this year?’ I was like, ‘No, I don’t remember that at all.’ It was a unique year. I think a year that really no other player has ever experienced. I’m proud of the way I played certainly, but the end of the year was difficult.”
What’s particularly tough for Bradley is knowing he likely won’t get another opportunity to address what he calls a “gaping hole in my career now that I don’t know that I’ll ever be able to fill.”
“This isn’t something that you lose the Masters, you lose a tournament, I’m going to work extra hard to get back and win,” Bradley explained. “Being the captain of the Ryder Cup team is not something you can work hard for; it’s just something that’s sort of elected on you. I don’t know. Of course, I would love to do it again, I would love to avenge that loss, but that’s not up to me.”
The PGA of America hasn’t announced Bradley’s successor for the 2027 Ryder Cup at Adare Manor in Ireland. Tiger Woods seems like the logical choice, though Woods recently said “no one’s asked me about” captaining the next U.S. team.
Bradley deferred to Woods on the matter.
“I think if Tiger wants to do this, he’s going to do it,” Bradley said. “Tiger is not only a hero to all of us that would be on his team, but he’s also an incredible leader and a person that everyone would love to play for. But I’m pretty sure when he wants to do this, he’s going to get to be able to do it.”
Bradley also addressed recent comments from U.S. team member Justin Thomas about disagreements between team members and the Bethpage grounds crew over green speeds during the competition.
“I don’t know why they weren’t at all what Keegan had asked for,” Thomas said. “I watched them argue with us that they were 13s [on the Stimpmeter]. It’s like, ‘Guys, we play golf every week. Like, look on TV at how many guys are leaving putts short. … You can’t have a putt roll 3 feet, 4 feet past the hole. Like these greens are slow; speed them up.”
Bradley had commented during the competition that he’d “never seen Bethpage greens play this soft ever.” But on Tuesday, he tried to diffuse the situation.
“The Sunday before the Ryder Cup, we lose control of the golf course, the home team,” Bradley said. “They were given specifications of where to keep the greens, and they felt that they had done that. They did a great job. It’s so difficult to figure out. There’s so much going on, and you want the greens at a certain speed and they’re telling you that they are. You’ve got to take their word for it. But the greens are so flat that it’s difficult, I think, to get the pace that we were looking for. But the course was in great shape.”
“You know, the Europeans, they just played so great. I wish that we could blame somebody, but we can’t. Blame me. I blame myself for that loss. It would be nice to blame [the greens], but we can’t.”
