Keegan Bradley adeptly manages team picks and player talks, deftly handling roster challenges and sudden surprises. Smylie Kaufman assesses his job as captain.
The Ryder Cup is still three weeks away and it feels as though it already has started.
The opening shot was not from the first tee at Bethpage Black in a foursomes match. It was 1,600 miles away in Frisco, Texas, where Keegan Bradley kept golf fans in suspense over whether he would be the first playing captain in 62 years.
Bradley knew all along he wasn’t playing.
He said after announcing his six picks last Wednesday — four of them are below him in the world ranking — the decision “was made a while ago that I wasn’t playing.” This was four days after he was asked at East Lake if he had clarity on his choices and replied, “No, because I think no matter what decision that I make here, I could have gone the other way.”
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But he sent a clear message when he made his picks. It was about team first.
The Americans, 1 up.
And then it was Europe’s turn on Monday, with no suspense at all. Captain Luke Donald is bringing to Bethpage Black the same 12 faces — Rasmus Hojgaard replaces his identical twin, Nicolai — that conquered the Americans in Rome two years ago.
The strongest image from the announcement at Sky Sports studio in London were the faces of the six captain’s picks, all of them wearing smiles wider than Augusta National fairways, sheer joy at being part of Team Europe.
It didn’t take long for dual images to appear on social media of the team’s picks.
One showed beaming Europeans who had been brought in one at a time for brief interviews. The other had six American on a video call for the entire Q&A with Bradley, all of them looking like they were at a policy board meeting to discuss how to distribute FedEx Cup points.
Europe no doubt picked up on this. No detail is too small when it comes to the Ryder Cup.
“It’s probably not that easy to have a smile on your face for a total of an hour’s time,” Donald said. “But yeah, very happy to obviously see our guys look very interested and excited about the challenges ahead for the Ryder Cup.”
Back to all square.
The actual competition will get here soon enough.
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All the last six days did was fuel the anticipation over the Ryder Cup. Already one of the most high-charged golf events, this one has a little extra juice given the location — Bethpage Black, the public course on New York’s Long Island with its notorious fans, regardless of ticket prices.
“Quite unusual, I suppose, to have such continuity from two years ago, but I think it’s hard to argue with these 12 guys,” Donald said.
The matches, of course, will be decided inside the ropes and judged after the fact whether the captains got the picks and the pairings right, and whether the crowd was over the top. This is New York. Depending on how it goes, Europe might not be the only team that hears from them.
There will be second-guessing with Bradley only if the Americans lose. There is little argument the 39-year-old Bradley, who grew up in New England and played college golf nearby at St. John’s, would have been playing if he had not been captain.
Rory McIlroy had suggested the Americans might not be fielding their 12 best players if Bradley did not play (he also said the Ryder Cup had become too big for a captain to play).
It’s hard to find fault with Donald’s picks because whether they earned a spot or were chosen, they represent the top 11 players from the Ryder Cup standings. The other is Jon Rahm, the two-time major champion and former world No. 1 who was unbeaten in four matches last time.
But it’s the first time a European team has brought back 11 players from the previous team. There is little risk of complacency because this is enemy territory, but the challenge now falls to Donald to make sure what feels like the same team gets a new experience without a change in the outcome.
“You want to embrace what a Ryder Cup represents, and then part of that is embracing the crowd and embracing that atmosphere,” Donald said. “And I think certainly these guys will be ready for that.”
Rookies, though, can be key. Sam Torrance famously said after his European team won in 2002, “Out of the shadows come heroes.” That was the year two of the biggest points came from Ryder Cup rookies — Philip Price taking down Phil Mickelson and Paul McGinley delivering the clinching putt.
Europe has a history of getting big performances from rookies, whether it was Philip Walton (1995), McGinley (2002), Jamie Donaldson (2014) or Tommy Fleetwood (2018).
Gone are the days of determining which team is better on paper. It’s too close. The Americans have six major champions. Europe has five. Team Europe has a collective 148-95 edge in worldwide victories on main tours.
Europe could only be considered the underdog because of how difficult it has become to win on the road. It has only one victory on U.S. soil the last 20 years, and that one required the “Miracle at Medinah” in 2012.
Even with (mostly) the same team, Donald said this wasn’t a “rinse and repeat from Rome.”
“It’s a different animal. It’s a different challenge,” he said. “Having the chance to do it again doesn’t mean we’re going to do the same things we did in Rome. I’ve really tried to look hard at exactly what this will require. I’m very aware that we have lost three of the last four away Ryder Cups by significant margins, and it’s a tough challenge. It’s a tough environment. But I’ve tried everything I can to give our team the best opportunity.”
The trick for the Europeans is to still be smiling when it’s over.
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