US captain Keegan Bradley opens up on his 'real shot' at playing in Ryder Cup

It seemed a bit of a baffling appointment at the time and even more so now. Since being named as the US captain for next year’s Ryder Cup, Keegan Bradley has won a FedEx Cup Play-Off event - the BMW Championship in Denver - and, just over a week ago, clinched a Presidents Cup win for Team USA in Montreal.

“Yeah, it’s been a crazy couple of months,” admitted the 38-year-old, speaking alongside his European counterpart, Luke Donald in a Year to Go media conference in The Times Center in New York for the 2025 match at Bethpage Black.

“My life is consumed with golf and sometimes when things happen in my life I am shocked and the past three months have been some of the craziest, most exciting, most nerve-racking months of my entire life. I have to pinch myself a lot. This stretch of my life has been really incredible.”

Bradley, a former US PGA champion, sits 26th on the US Ryder Cup points list, but, having climbed to 14th in the Official World Golf Ranking on the back of his third win in less than two years on the PGA Tour, the youngest US captain since Arnold Palmer could also be the first playing one in the match since the great man in 1963.

“It's always a goal of mine to play on the Ryder Cup teams,” added Bradley, who made his debut in the transatlantic tussle at Medinah in 2012 before being on the losing side again two years later at Gleneagles, where Jamie Donaldson’s win over him in the singles clinched a win for Paul McGinley’s men.

“It's so far off now that I'm not going to worry about it. Once we get closer to the tournament and I'm up there on the points list, then we'll start to think about it. But I'm focused now on being the captain of the team and that's it.”

Has he considered what the challenges of trying to combine playing and being the captain would be as the Americans bid to reclaim the trophy after being on the end of a 16.5-11.5 defeat at Marco Simone Golf Club on the outskirts of Rome last year?

“Well, you know, just getting the pairings in after the session, managing, preparing the guys, getting the pairings ready. I think it would be a really difficult job,” he admitted. “But I made a promise to myself that I'm not going to worry about this until the time comes if I do.

“It's really difficult to make the American team every year; you have to go out and really perform. Right now, my focus is on being a captain, but I'm still a full-time player. I'm still playing in all the majors and all the big events next year. So I have a real shot at doing this. For now, I'm focusing on my guys and getting them ready to go.”

Bradley has named former US Open champion Webb Simpson and Brandt Snedeker, who’d just won the FedEx Cup when he was taken down by Paul Lawrie in the singles at Medinah, as his first two vice captains while it remains to be seen if the likes of Jim Furyk, a losing Ryder Cup captain in 2018 but now a winning Presidents Cup captain, or Tiger Woods might be added to the backroom team to provide some experience.

Asked by The Scotsman if a Plan B was already in place if he did make the team as a player, Bradley said: “You know, every vice captain that I am choosing will know that this is a possibility. So they will know what's going on in that way. I also have John Wood (the former PGA Tour caddie has been appointed as the US team manager) who has come on.

“But I think my vice captains are all going to be more than capable of doing this, and I hope some day they will all be captains. But we're so far away from that that I'm really focused on being a captain right now.”

Bradley compiled a 2-1-0 record in the Presidents Cup, beating Si Woo Kim in the last-day singles to get Team USA over the line. “It was really important for me to be around the team,” he said of that experience back in a team event. “First, I was going to be a vice captain and then I obviously played.

“It was important for me to remember the nerves of these tournaments. It was important to remember the preparation that goes into it and I was able to watch what Jim and the vice captains did creating an atmosphere for us to succeed and do well. Be prepared, know who you were playing with and have a real plan.”

Donald, who is bidding to join Tony Jacklin as the only European captain to record home and away wins in the event, may not have said it, but the uncertainty around who he will definitely be locking horns with on 26-28 September in Farmingdale is something that, you would think anyway, can only end up helping his side as they bid to end a run of the last five encounters all producing wins for the home team.

“Keegan obviously has been playing great,” observed the Englishman, who revealed that Sergio Garcia is giving serious consideration to rejoining the DP World Tour and also dropped a heavy hint that Nicolas Colsaerts will be joining Edoardo Molinari and Thomas Bjorn in his backroom again.

“He's one of the best players in the world. He just secured the winning point in the Presidents Cup and the way he's been playing, I think there's every chance of playing his way on to a team; he's playing that well.”