Justin Thomas understands how you feel.
If you watched the second season of Full Swing on Netflix and found yourself pulling for Keegan Bradley over Thomas for the final spot on the U.S. Ryder Cup team, Thomas gets it.
Because he felt that way, too.
“I watched it with [my wife] Jill and I was like, I kind of find myself rooting for Keegan after this,” Thomas said on the No Laying Up podcast this week. “It was tough, but I mean, it’s also like, it’s the reality. Like Keegan, if you put our years against each other, he deserved to be on that team more than I did.”
Thomas joined host Chris Solomon to break down the last year-plus of his career, including a deep dive on the Ryder Cup. It was the most we’d heard Thomas talk about the week — and his assessment was remarkably honest. Thomas’ 2023 was a down year by his lofty standards. When he missed qualifying for the FedEx Cup Playoffs he was stuck at home knowing he’d have to rely on a pick from captain Zach Johnson to make the team. Bradley’s season included two PGA Tour wins and he was ranked higher on the points list, but Thomas had been a fixture and an emotional leader of the team in recent years. Some combination of that status and his close relationships with team members earned him the nod.
“I think it’s not a secret, it’s not anything hidden why I probably ended up getting a pick and he didn’t,” Thomas said.
It’s tough to watch the series and not root for Bradley, whose earnestness and passion shined through. He said he thought about the Ryder Cup “every single second” in the lead-up to teams being selected. And when he fielded the bad-news phone call from Johnson it was tough not to feel devastated alongside him as he slumped over on his couch, comforted by his wife and kids.
Instead the spot went to Thomas, who is hardly portrayed as the villain; he’s just the guy in between Bradley and his dream. For his part, Thomas thought Netflix’s portrayal of the decision was generally fair — with one small quibble.
“It made it seem like it was the only captain’s pick,” he said. There are six, and while several were considered locks, Thomas suggested the final couple spots were more up for grabs. That’s fair; both Cameron Young (who finished No. 9 in Ryder Cup standings) and Bradley (No. 11) were passed over for Sam Burns (No. 12), Rickie Fowler (No. 13) and Thomas (No. 15).
“I feel like that last spot, if you will, easily three or four names could have been thrown around. But it’s TV. And yeah, I jokingly was like yeah, watching this, I don’t really feel like I should have made the team and [I’m] rooting for Keegan to get this pick.”
Thomas sat out the U.S. team’s opening session at Marco Simone but played the next four, providing an emotional spark but ultimately going just 1-2-1 at the Cup, which Team Europe won handily. Just three of his teammates earned more points, but Thomas was his own harshest critic.
“I mean, I feel like I let the team down,” he said. “I felt like I played terrible. I was gutted to not win more points. I was gutted to not be playing that first morning.”
Thomas added that he tried to be as communicative as possible with Johnson throughout the process and had one message:
“I was just like, if the guys on that team and the captains, if you guys think I am not a better addition to the team, then you 100 percent should not pick me,” Thomas said.
He added that, had he not been selected as a player, he would have gladly made the trip to Italy as an assistant captain.
“It would have been weird, but I would have happily done it,” he said.
In the wake of another disappointing U.S. team showing overseas — the Americans have now dropped seven consecutive Cups on away soil — there was plenty of second-guessing and armchair quarterbacking. The losing team initially dismissed criticism that they should have played more in the weeks leading up to the event; Thomas said that with the benefit of hindsight, theirs seemed the inferior strategy.
“I think it was easy in the moment for us to be like, ‘No, we’re ready, we’re rested, whatever it may be,” he said. “But looking back at it, like, yeah, obviously we should have all played more or we should have found something to play.”
Thomas added that he’s grown to admire some aspects of the European team’s approach, like the specificity of captain Luke Donald’s assistants — “there’s a reason every single person here is a vice captain” — but hopes the U.S. team is headed in the right direction moving forward. The journey to improvement starts, ironically, with Bradley, who was recently named the next U.S. team captain for the Ryder Cup at Bethpage in 2025. And forget the thought of any real-world rivalry. In true small-world fashion, Thomas was part of the group that picked Bradley for the job. He shed some light on that process.
“I was on all the conversations and knew, and it was a tough, tough secret to keep, because Keegan and I practice and play a lot down here [in south Florida] and I’ve become a lot closer with him over the past couple of years. I just respect his work ethic a lot and he really gets after it.
“So we’ll play practice rounds from time to time and we just like, coincidentally happened to play back-to-back weeks of practice rounds after I had known what was going to be happening and that was tough.
“But yeah, there’s a lot of conversation, there’s a lot of looking at it, hitting it from every single angle to make sure that this is what everybody on board felt like was the right thing and the best option.”
Bradley has emphasized that he plans to inject new life into the team’s Ryder Cup program and has already named his first vice captain, Webb Simpson, who like Bradley is 38 years old. Together their presence suggests something of a youth movement.
Thomas said that his main message to the committee was simple: patience. The position was initially offered to Tiger Woods, after all, and when he took himself out of the running the Americans were left looking for a Plan B.
“I know that was a big thing for all of us is we’re like, why, why rush this?” Thomas said. “Like, I know that this is maybe when we’ve put out the captain the last X amount of Ryder Cups. But like, what, what’s the point of us rushing this to get maybe the person that we don’t think is right, just to meet a deadline of you guys wanting to get a press release out? Like what’s more important here?
“And I think that’s something that Jordan [Spieth] and I both are trying to bring to that side of it. And especially after Rome and talking to every player on the team it’s like, ‘all right guys, like what do we need to do differently? What do we need to do better?’ … And however that is done, it doesn’t need to be by the book or whatever we’ve done it in the past.”
Change is good for the U.S. Ryder Cup team. As it turns out, that’s something else Justin Thomas and Keegan Bradley can agree upon.
You can listen to the full podcast here.
