PONTE VEDRA, Fla. — A third of the way through this season to forget, Keegan Bradley’s Players Championship began with two tee shots that only deepened his frustration.
On Thursday, on his very first hole at TPC Sawgrass, Bradley’s opening tee shot bounced off a cart path and dove into a bush, requiring him to take an unplayable. On the next tee, he sailed his drive into the right trees and the ball never reappeared. The lost-ball penalty led to a quadruple-bogey 9 and outward 42.
“It’s been a weird start to the year,” he said.
The Ryder Cup hangover. The zero top-25s. The future uncertainty.
“But this is the type of day that can turn it around,” he said.
Bradley was speaking after a 6-under 66 Friday that served as his second-best score of the year and pushed him safely inside the cut line at the Tour’s flagship event. It was a much-needed round for a player who hasn’t fared well in this tournament (just two top-10s in 14 tries) or this season as he attempts to navigate his new normal.
Bradley is still mourning last fall’s Ryder Cup and his prominent role in it. The team he fielded and the decisions he made and the stunning loss he absorbed. Six months later, he’s still “heartbroken,” and the pain doesn’t seem to be lessening with time.
“Unless you’re the captain of the Ryder Cup team,” he said, “you just have no idea what goes into it and the emotional toll that it takes on you.”
Bradley was the first U.S. captain to lose at home since Davis Love III in 2012, but his was an unprecedented captaincy. When he was named the Americans’ leader in the summer of 2024, Bradley was very much in the prime of his career, a top-20 player in the world who had aspirations of qualifying for his own team. He nearly did a year ago, winning the Travelers Championship in June to surge into the mix, but he failed to keep pace during the remainder of the regular season and opted to pick players other than himself for the 12-man roster.
At 39, Bradley understood that he was potentially forfeiting his last realistic chance to play on a U.S. team. But he made what he thought was the best decision for his team. That’s what made the result at Bethpage Black so difficult to stomach: Under Bradley’s leadership, the Americans were completely overmatched and trailed by a historic deficit heading into Sunday singles. A final-day rally only prolonged a loss that had felt inevitable since the opening session.
“I’m trying my best to separate myself and move on, but it’s hard,” he said. “I think about it a lot. I think about the guys a lot, and I’m still in the process of getting past all that.”
Bradley is also a unique case when it comes to recent U.S. leadership. Past captains have almost always been past-their-prime competitors who viewed the Ryder Cup as a lifetime achievement award. They served their two-year term and then largely faded from view, back to the PGA Tour Champions or semi-retirement.
Not Bradley.
After his standout season, he’s qualified for all of the PGA Tour’s biggest events and trying to remain among the best players in the world. It hasn’t gone well this season, as he’s fallen off in every major statistical category and failed to produce a result better than 29th this season. He is exempt through 2028 but not satisfied with all of a sudden being an also-ran on Tour.
“I’m the first person to have to deal with this – to get back out there, try to be one of the best players in the world and make the next team,” he said. “So I’m still navigating how to do that. But it’s on my mind.”
That 2027 U.S. team is still under construction.
The European side announced last week that Luke Donald had re-upped for a third stint, as the Englishman attempts to become the first to win three successive Ryder Cups. The PGA of America, meanwhile, is still awaiting word from Tiger Woods on whether he’ll accept the job — the exact wait-and-see scenario that led to Bradley’s surprise appointment two years ago.
A member of the Ryder Cup selection committee, Bradley said he’d love another crack at the captaincy, but he also isn’t expecting to call his own number.
“I think any Ryder Cup captain that loses would like to do it again,” he said. “But that’s not up to me. The distraction of me playing, maybe playing isn’t really what the position is about. So who knows in the future?”