Bradley would be the first playing captain since Arnold Palmer at the 1963 Ryder Cup.
This isn’t hard. For all the ceremonial weight we attach to the Ryder Cup, all the nationalistic chest-beating and come-get-some attitude, this is fundamentally a friendly exhibition whose only real stakes are pride in the moment and legacy hereafter.
Granted, pride and legacy are the beating heart and eternal soul of golf, so you can see why Keegan Bradley, captain of the United States Ryder Cup team, might be a bit hesitant to choose himself as a member of his own team. What if the United States team loses? What if a pairing sanctioned by Bradley goes horribly wrong? What if Bradley himself plays poorly?
Counterpoint: What if America wins? What if Bradley becomes a golf legend?
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Sports in general, and golf in particular, have become so risk-averse that there’s a deep resistance to doing anything just because it’s cool. And let’s be honest: Keegan Bradley leading the U.S. team while serving as the first player-captain since Arnold Palmer in 1963? That would be cool. Bradley claiming both captaincy and a player’s slot two years after suffering the most humiliating thanks-but-no-thanks in golf history? Definitely cool. Bradley leading the United States to victory next month in front of a raucous partisan crowd at Bethpage Black on Long Island? Impeccably, unimpeachably cool.
Beyond the coolness factor, though, there are defensible statistical reasons for picking Bradley. He’s ranked 11th overall in the Ryder Cup standings, and also 11th in the Official World Golf Rankings, both of which attest to a substantial run of high-level success. He finished seventh in the FedEx Cup standings, and he has a win and six top-10 finishes over 21 events this season. He ranks 12th on the PGA Tour in overall strokes gained, and inside the top 10 in strokes gained both tee-to-green and around the green. There are better putters than Bradley in the hunt for a slot — Sam Burns comes to mind — but Bradley brings an overall package that rivals any of the others competing for the final six slots on the team.
The logistics of the player-captain role are tricky, without a doubt. Captaining the Ryder Cup is like preparing to take every single exam from all four years of college all at once, on an A-plus-or-failure scale. No detail is too minute to explore, from the personality quirks of each player to the brand of balls they use. (Highly useful information when setting foursomes pairings, for instance.)
However, that’s why captains have vice-captains, and that’s why captains have literal years to prepare for this moment. Bradley can (and hopefully has) set up an entire tree of contingency plans for every scenario, every potential score after every round. Chances are he won’t play more than two to three rounds of team golf, and by the time the singles roll out on Sunday, there’s nothing more for the captain to do anyway but watch and see how it all plays out.
This is literally the best-case scenario — really, the only-case scenario — where a playing captain makes sense. Home-field advantage is so immense in the Ryder Cup that it basically neutralizes almost every other asset and element of the team construction. The home team has won eight of the last nine Ryder Cup matches and 11 of the last 13. Bradley will be playing in front of the friendliest crowd possible — he’s a Northeastern guy, and he’s heard “U-S-A!” chants along every fairway for the last year. Plus, at some point the players gotta play. We’re not saying that you could set the Ryder Cup lineup and then earn eight or nine of the 28 points … but we’re not not saying that, either.
“No matter what decision that I make here, I could have gone the other way easily,” Bradley said after finishing up his final round at the Tour Championship Sunday. “The only thing I care about is on Sunday of the Ryder Cup, that we win the Ryder Cup. Then I'll know I made the right decision. … Whatever decision we make, we're going to have to live with it.”
There’s a risk, yes, that Bradley could end up the goat — not the GOAT — of the Ryder Cup. The captain always takes an outsized share of the blame when the team loses. But if the United States can’t figure out how to win on home soil, with Scottie Scheffler and other world-beaters in the lineup, well … the problems go a whole lot deeper than the 11th player on the roster.
Do it, Keegan. Pick yourself, and be a legend.
Category: General Sports
