Mark Bradley still remembers when he was the head professional in Wyoming at Jackson Hole Golf & Tennis Club and his son, Keegan, would come out for the summer during college. The first one, he put him to work in the shop at the golf course to make ends meet but the next year Mark told his son that if he worked on his game, he’d cover his expenses.
“I never had to give him a nickel,” Mark recalls. “He found some money games with my members. He would practice and play all day and float the river at night. He loved his fly fishing for cutthroat trout.”
Mark only had to open his wallet for his son one more time. When Keegan rolled out of Wyoming to try his hand in professional golf in 2008, Mark bought him an electric-blue Ford Focus that Keegan nicknamed Be Bop with 190,000 miles on it. Mark recalls paying $3,000 and backing his son with a couple grand in cash.
“He sure as hell didn’t come from a lot of money,” Mark said. “But I had to get him a car. The mechanic told me his Honda Civic wouldn’t make it out of Wyoming.”
Keegan spent that summer listening to Howard Stern as he be-bopped around the country in Be Bop. “If you went too fast,” Keegan recalls, “the mirror on the side would fly off, so I had to tape it to my door and then sooner or later, I think one of the maintenance guys in the golf course just deadbolted it on the side of my car.”
Keegan made it to the PGA Tour in 2011 and won twice as a rookie, including the PGA Championship. His victory at the 2025 Travelers Championship marked his eighth career Tour title and fourth straight year in the winner’s circle, quite a feat for the U.S. Ryder Cup captain this fall at Bethpage Black. There have been twists and turns aplenty in Bradley’s journey but none stranger than his path to U.S. Ryder Cup captain. At age 39, Bradley will be the youngest American at the helm since 34-year-old Arnold Palmer in 1963.
“I didn’t have a single conversation about this with anyone until I was told I was captain,” Bradley said in July 2024 at a news conference in New York to announce his selection. “I don’t think I’ll ever be more surprised than anything in my entire life. I had no idea. And it took a little while for it to sink in.”
But when it did, he added: “I feel like I was made to do this job.”
Keegan Bradley has a long history with Bethpage Black
Bradley — whose Aunt Pat is a member of the World Golf Hall of Fame — grew up in Vermont, attended high school in Massachusetts, and lived in New Hampshire, too, is a New Englander to the core. But only St. John’s University in Queens, N.Y., offered him a golf scholarship. Red Storm men’s head golf coach Frank Darby, who spent 23 years running the program, brought in Hall of Fame men’s basketball coach Lou Carnesecca to secure the commitment. “I always made sure his office was the last stop,” Darby said. “The way Keegan loved basketball, that was the move.”
So, Bradley shipped off to the Empire State and developed quite the affinity for Bethpage Black while winning nine tournaments, second in school history, and making the Big East’s All-Academic team as a senior. The school didn’t have an official home course, but Darby traded basketball tickets for course access all over the Metropolitan Area. Kevin Currier, then the Bethpage superintendent, allowed the St. John’s team to park the school’s white van near the maintenance shed on Mondays when the Black Course was closed and play what is referred to as “The Short Course,” the inside loop consisting of hole Nos. 3-14.
“I love the fourth hole, the par 5, just visually,” Bradley told The Met Golfer. “When I went there the first time, I had never played a course that had hosted a major. And when you’re on the grounds at Bethpage, you are very aware that this is a major championship golf course. And when you stand on that fourth tee, you see this huge, vast piece of land, huge bunkers, heather. You can make 3 or 6 or 7 in a second.”
There was one hard and fast rule for the Red Storm on Mondays at Bethpage: Don’t cross Round Swamp Road. The remaining holes were off-limits because they could be spotted by clubhouse security there. When Bethpage Black hosted one of the PGA Tour playoff events, Coach Darby joked, “I wouldn’t bet on Keegan this week. He doesn’t know how to play Nos. 15-18.” Bradley and his teammates adhered to the rule but one Monday during his senior year, temptation got the better of he and fellow teammate George Zolotas.
“We were frothing to play them,” recalled Bradley. “We said, ‘Screw it, we’re going over.’ Imagine you’re in college and you’re looking at Nos. 15 through 18 at Bethpage Black for four years and you can’t play them. It was brutal. So, we did it. And we got in so much trouble. The police were called. I’ve never seen my coach so mad.”
But Darby said Bradley and his teammates were an easy bunch to coach and he’d often joke that he was merely their hydration guy, delivering water bottles. “They lived for golf and pizza,” Darby said. “They were always on the hunt for a great pizza parlor and found one, New Park, in Howard Beach.”
Expect pies from there to be delivered to Team USA’s team room during the Ryder Cup, a competition that first got in Bradley’s blood when he was 13 years old and attended the 1999 Ryder Cup, dubbed “The Battle at Brookline,” at The Country Club with his father. What he experienced that day – the crowds, the epic U.S. comeback highlighted by Justin Leonard’s long-range bomb at 17 – left a lasting impression.
“I couldn’t believe that I was at a golf tournament that felt like this. It felt like going to a Patriots game or a sporting event that was loud and raucous,” he said. “So, fast forward to Sunday, I was on my dad’s shoulders on the 18th green and I could see through to the Justin Leonard putt. I couldn’t exactly see it, but I saw him putt, I heard this big roar, and I saw all the red shirts run after him. And everyone in the crowd was trying to figure out what happened.
“The fans all ran out on the 18th green … and I said, ‘I really want to run out there.’ And he goes, ‘All right, I’m going to stand by this crooked tree here, and you run out there and I’ll meet you right here.’
“It was a moment that literally changed my life forever. I cherished being there. The energy of the tournament and the passion of watching the guys play and seeing Michael Jordan walk the fairways there, just was a moment in my golfing life that altered everything.”
Bradley was paired with Phil Mickelson in Ryder Cup debut
He earned his way onto the U.S. 12-man squad for the first time in 2012 and, as a rookie, was paired with Phil Mickelson. They kept trying to celebrate every time they won a hole, and kept botching their attempted high-fives and hugs. But there was plenty to celebrate. Bradley spent the day pumping his fist and waving to the crowd. He compared the roar at one of his birdies to New England Patriots fans cheering for a Tom Brady touchdown pass. “I wish I could go 36 more,” Bradley said. “This might have been the best day of my life.”
Never had Mickelson won two points in one day at a Ryder Cup and Bradley became the first Ryder Cup rookie to win two points on his first day since Sergio Garcia in 1999.
“That week changed my perspective on golf forever,” said Bradley despite the U.S. blowing a 10-6 lead going into the singles competition at what became known as “The Miracle at Medinah.”
“The Ryder Cup suddenly became very important to me. During that week, I had some of my best memories coupled with some of my darkest in my golf career.”
As a player, he would make just one more appearance on the Ryder Cup team — a disappointing defeat at Gleneagles in Scotland in 2014 — but provided a fiery temperament and a 4-3 overall match record. All these years later, his black travel bag from 2012 at Medinah, embroidered with the Ryder Cup logo and his initials, sits in his garage and remains sealed shut, a permanent reminder that he has unfinished business pertaining to the biennial competition with Europe.
“Losing the Ryder Cup at Medinah was one of the worst days of my life,” Bradley said. “It was too painful at the time for me to open the suitcase.”
A day became a week, which became a month, and he finally made a promise to himself that he wouldn’t open it until he was on a winning side. [In 2013 and again in 2024, he did play on winning Presidents Cup teams.]
“That’s the way he is,” Bradley’s father said.
More than a decade passed before next Ryder Cup chance
Bradley assumed he’d get many more chances, but before he knew it, more than a decade had passed without another shot at Ryder Cup glory. He managed to keep his playing privileges, but his game was no longer elite after the USGA banned anchoring in 2016 and his putting became problematic. His father remembers getting a text from his son one year during the PGA Tour event at Riviera Country Club near Los Angeles, where a frustrated Bradley wrote, “I can’t compete if I don’t putt better.”
Indeed, Bradley ranked as one of the worst players on Tour with the short stick. “He spent five years knocking flagsticks down because that’s the way he kept his card because he made nothing,” his father said. “But he worked at it and he became a good putter again. People say, ‘If he could putt better … ’ Well, let me tell you something, you don’t win $50 million and eight tournaments if you can’t putt.”
Bradley ranked a career-best 20th in Strokes Gained: Putting in 2023, the year he finished 11th in the U.S Ryder Cup point standings and was snubbed for a captain’s pick. (Three players behind him – No. 12 Sam Burns, No. 13 Rickie Fowler and No. 15 Justin Thomas – were chosen instead.)
U.S. Captain Zach Johnson’s phone call to Bradley, informing him that he was being left off the team was the most poignant scene of the Netflix documentary “Full Swing.” Bradley could tell immediately by Johnson’s response when he answered the phone that he wasn’t on the team.
“That moment was real, I was crushed,” Bradley said. “It took us a while to get over that, our whole family. We were devastated.”
He said he assumed that might be his last chance to make a Ryder Cup team. Jordan Spieth participated in the meetings to determine the 2025 U.S. Ryder Cup captain following another road defeat, in Rome. The job belonged to Tiger Woods if he wanted it but he declined the captaincy this time because he had too much on his plate as a member of the PGA Tour’s policy board. Several names were bandied about until Bradley’s name was raised. “It was an automatic heck, yeah!” said Spieth.
It was Johnson who had the honor of relaying the news that he would be the next Ryder Cup captain in a phone call on June 23, 2024.
Bradley had returned to his Newburyport, Mass., summer home after the Travelers Championship when he received that call. Three days later, he stood on the deck, where his parents, sister, brother-in-law and wife, Jillian, were gathered and he broke the news about his captaincy. “I gasped,” Mark said. “None of us were even thinking about it.”
Then Keegan asked them to keep the news under wraps until it was made official.
“It took a lot not to blurt it out,” his mom, Kaye, told Links magazine.
So, the diehard Boston sports fan will be in New York Yankees and Giants country in late September to enjoy a full-circle moment when he returns to the course that he snuck on as a college student only this time as the captain of the U.S. side. And if things break the right way for Team USA, Bradley finally will exorcise his Ryder Cup demons and be able to open his bag from 2012.
“I certainly would love to be able to do that with the guys,” he said.
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