“I grew up wanting to fight alongside these guys,” Bradley said Wednesday at the PGA of America headquarters in Frisco, Texas. “It broke my heart not to play. It really did. You work forever to make these teams, but ultimately I was chosen to do a job. I was chosen to be the captain of this team. My ultimate goal to start this thing was to be the best captain that I could be. This is how I felt like I could do this. If we got to this point and I felt like the team was better with me on it, I was going to do that. I was going to do whatever I thought was best for this team. I know 100 percent for certain that this is the right choice, and these six guys, again, played so incredibly coming down the stretch here and made my decision a lot easier.”
It’s noble that Keegan put the U.S. team ahead of himself. But I can’t help feeling like he got robbed of his Ryder Cup dream: pic.twitter.com/UiuNJUCesU
But was that the right decision? The sport’s most outspoken analyst thinks so.
Brandel Chamblee said five of the captain’s picks weren’t surprising to him, and it essentially came down to if Bradley would pick himself, which would likely leave off Maverick McNealy or Sam Burns. But when Bradley was rattling off his picks on live TV Wednesday and skipped over himself in the standings to get to the next player, it was a clear hint he wasn’t calling his own number.
“I think he may well have won the Ryder Cup in making that decision,” Chamblee said on Golf Channel after the picks were made. “When you start to look at a captaincy or at a team, it’s never any one thing that makes a great player or a great captain, but it’s an assembly of a lot of little things like a mosaic.
“And in the same way you got the sense when Luke Donald, in opening ceremonies in 2023 got up and spoke Italian for two or three minutes, you thought, this Ryder Cup is over,” he continued. “Because if he spent and thought about it in that kind of detail how to open the ceremony, what was the rest of the week going to be like and how thorough had he thought about things? So Keegan Bradley just thinking about the decision to pick himself, that’s what a leader does, make a personal sacrifice for the collective good of a team. It’s the kind of thing a leader would do that would get his team to sort of run through a wall for him. Imagine the rest of that week; he’s going to look at them and be like, I stepped aside to focus on every little detail to help you guys, and how empowering that must be for his team.”
Bradley admitted Wednesday there was a time earlier this summer when he expected to be on the team. It wasn’t until lately he started to lean the other direction and said he’s had his mind made up for a while now.
“I think that’s just how he’s kind of approached this entire captaincy is he wants to do whatever is best for the team,” said Justin Thomas, who was one of the captain’s picks. “He wants to communicate everything as well as he possibly can. I know he’s gutted, and I think all of us are gutted for him, but at the same time, I would say him leading us to a victory will be cooler than any experience he could have as a player, and that’s probably what he feels like is best for us. So we have all the faith in the world, and we don’t doubt him for one second for that.”
Chamblee, who added Bradley’s press conference on Wednesday was one of the best he’s ever seen a U.S. captain give, said he’s heard some people discredit the difficulty of being a playing-captain, but he doesn’t agree with that.
“He’s the leader of the team, the captain of the team,” Chamblee said. “To have cross purposes that week and to be simultaneously trying to get ready to play golf and simultaneously trying to get the rest of the team in the right frame of mind, the captaincy, I have heard a few people try to dismiss it [and say] it’s not that difficult or it’s not that complicated, and I couldn’t disagree more.”
He also thinks Bradley’s decision will go a long way in motivating the U.S. squad, which lost the previous Ryder Cup 16.5-11.5 in Rome.
“There is just so many moving pieces,” he said. “Group dynamics is an interesting philosophy. And that’s what he’s called upon to navigate that week — and it’s more difficult than playing.”
