Former North Carolina Tar Heels golfer Ben Griffin has had a very good 2025 season on the PGA Tour, winning two tournaments and finishing in the top 10 in two major championships. Thanks to that year, he’s now received one of golf’s bigger honors, as he will be part of the US team at this year’s Ryder Cup.
Griffin did not automatically qualify for the team by finishing in the top six of the USA’s Ryder Cup points system, but he wasn’t far off, finishing 10th. Team captain Keegan Bradley rewarded that performance by using one of his six “captains picks” on Griffin, making him one of the 12 golfers that will take on Europe in New York in a couple weeks.
It did come somewhat right down to the wire for Griffin to make the team. Not only was Bradley in charge of picking the last six names, he was in contention to be one of them. It’s been a long time since the US has had a captain who also played in the Cup, but Bradley was legitimately in the running, finishing 11th on the points ranking. However in the end, he opted to just focus on the captaining duties, as trying to do that and playing would by all accounts be very tough to do. While we don’t know who the last player picked for the team would’ve been in place of Bradley, Griffin was almost certainly closer to that than the first name on the list.
In making the team, Griffin is the first UNC golfer to make the US squad since Davis Love III in 2004. Love was part of winning Ryder Cup teams in 1993 and 1999, and was the non-playing captain when the US won in 2016. Even more successful than him was Raymond Floyd, who won with the 1969, 1975, 1977, 1981, 1983, 1991, and 1993 teams, while he captained the US to a tie in Europe in 1989.
With the match happening this year in New York, the US team should be slight favorites over Europe. The European team winning in the US in 2004 and 2012 is the only times a visiting team has won in quite a while. However having handled the US fairly easily in Italy back in 2023, the European team comes in with the momentum — or at least as much momentum as you can have in a competition that has two years between events. However, Griffin and his teammates will hope to change that when this year’s edition gets going September 26-28 at Bethpage Black in New York.
Read the full article here
