'Golf Course Rat' to Ryder Cup Captain

Keegan Bradley was as surprised as anyone about being selected

Not long ago, out of the blue, a friend from Vermont sent me a photo of an honor board at a golf course in his area, Crown Point Country Club in Springfield, population approximately 9,000. The name of the club’s “Memorial Stroke Play Champion” in 2000 had caught his eye.

Even at age 14, Keegan Bradley—major champion, 2023 Ryder Cup snub and “Full Swing” documentary sympathetic character—had game.

That same summer, Bradley took Cedric Spire to the 40^th hole of the Crown Point Club Championship before losing. The result made it into the sports-section agate of the Rutland newspaper. Remember those?

Keegan’s father, Mark, was the pro at Crown Point, which opened in 1953 with seven the nine holes playable, the founding members having hand-picked rocks from the land to make them so. Six years later, Crown Point was expanded to 18 holes. It was where Bradley started to grow into a golfer, an excellent one, the best male Vermonter ever. (Patty Sheehan, with six majors among 35 LPGA victories in her Hall of Fame career, stands alone as the Green Mountain State’s finest golfer.)

“I was such a golf course rat,” Bradley told the Connecticut Post in 2011. “I’d hang out, chip and putt and play golf all day. I absolutely loved it. No one was forcing me to do this and sometimes my parents were more the other way saying, ‘You’ve got to take a day off, be a normal kid.’ But I was so into it, I loved it.”

Bradley has come a long way from sleepy Springfield, and his journey took a very unexpected turn Tuesday with the announcement that he is captaining the 2025 United States Ryder Cup team, a position first imagined for Phil Mickelson, then Tiger Woods.

Now, instead of being filled by a superstar, the role goes to Bradley, another surprise in a career that already has seen some.

When Bradley won the 2011 PGA Championship at Atlanta Athletic Club, the second of his six career titles, the PGA Tour rookie was the very rare winner of a major debut. When he was left off last year’s American Ryder Cup squad, which went on to resounding defeat to the Europeans at Marco Simone in Italy, it seemed to have more to do with friends than form.  

The Black River runs through Springfield, Vt. Bradley will helm the Americans on the Black course at Bethpage State Park on Long Island, where he and his St. John’s University golf teammates used to get the wave to play when the layout was closed to the queued-up masses.

Galleries for U.S. Opens at Bethpage have been large and loud. There is anticipation that the Ryder Cup there will the most boisterous vibe in the event’s history; the challenge will be keeping it from becoming the most boorish. The vibe will be worlds away from the silent Mondays when Bradley and his college buddies got to see what they had on one of the world’s most difficult courses.

Bradley, at age 38 the youngest to captain the Americans since 34-year-old Arnold Palmer was playing captain in 1963, has been on two U.S. teams, those who lost at Medinah in 2012 and Gleneagles in 2014. He went 4-3-0, though, the winning record playing a factor in the deep disappointment of not being a captain’s pick by Zach Johnson last year.

Admitting at Tuesday’s announcement to having been shocked about being asked to lead the United States, Bradley goes from being stranded at the guard gate to having the keys to the kingdom. Before he makes pairings and revs up the New York crowd, he’ll be charged with some challenging picks and difficult phone calls. Bradley has long had a feel for the game, not unlike his aunt Pat, one of the best to ever walk an LPGA fairway. The bet is that he will have it for this task too. The big surprise might be just the ticket to big success.