Keegan Bradley’s unlikely Bethpage return? 1 road tells his Ryder Cup story

FOR KEEGAN BRADLEY, the road serves as a reminder.

If you’re both lucky and brave enough to get a tee time at Bethpage Black, you play No. 1 and then cross Round Swamp Road to get to the 2nd tee. Nos. 2 through 14 play out on the east side of the road, and then you cross back over for the final four holes. Round Swamp Road bisects the course and it bisects Bradley’s golfing life.

When he first got to know Bethpage, Bradley was a college kid. He and his teammates were invited to play the Black, but only on Mondays, when it was closed, and, to avoid detection, only those 12 or 13 holes (sometimes they’d skip No. 2) east of the road. Bradley and fellow members of the talented and tight-knit but notably ragtag St. John’s Johnnies would park by the maintenance building, then round that inner loop, safely out of view of the central pro shop and Bethpage State Park’s four other courses. Then they’d head back to their cars, off to find a cheap slice of pizza and a return to the golf house they shared in nearby Queens, New York.

The team’s standing Bethpage invitation, which came courtesy of then-superintendent Craig Currier, offered generous access to one of public golf’s great cathedrals. It also came with clear subtext — not from Currier, who was happy to supply the course and even the beer, but from Bethpage and, really, the world of elite golf at large — You’re welcome, as long as you don’t cross the road.

In reality, they were the perfect pair, Bradley and Bethpage, the People’s Golfer and the People’s Country Club, each of them proud blue-collar outsiders at the fringes of a white-collar sport. But Bradley didn’t know that at the time. His entire golfing life he’s been obsessed with his position at the outer edges of golf’s greatest places, clubs, teams; he’s used to being on the threshold but not quite welcomed in. He has always challenged those boundaries, as far back as college, when there was that one time he crossed the road at Bethpage and all hell broke loose. But this fall, when he crosses the same road as the captain of the U.S. Ryder Cup team? Everything will have changed.

THERE ARE TWO KEEGAN BRADLEYS. This is fundamental to understanding the 39-year-old New Englander. For the first Keegan Bradley, nothing comes easy and nothing ever has. It’s a point of pride. He grew up in a cold-weather state — specifically Woodstock, Vermont — without much money but learned to play a game built for warm-weather rich kids. For fuel, he imagined beating caricatures of country-club juniors from Florida, Texas, California. He relished the challenge.

“I had an incredible childhood,” he says. This is a line he uses repeatedly and reflexively; it’s clearly an important autobiographical note. He loved his upbringing. “I don’t think that at any point in our lives we had a lot of money, but I had this singular goal of making it as a PGA Tour player, and I really didn’t take that lightly. I felt like I had to maximize every second of my time on the golf course.” This is how Bradley talks — he’s one of the most earnest people on earth and he’s an unapologetic try-hard, afraid only of letting time and opportunity go to waste. You get the sense he’s always been this way.

“He’s just kinda into everything,” says Frank Darby, who recruited Bradley out of high school and served as his coach at St. John’s for four years. “He has this contagious enthusiasm that just brings people along with him.”

When Keegan was a kid, his father Mark bounced around from one golf pro job to the next, first in small-town Vermont, later in Massachusetts and eventually in Wyoming. The two of them would go to the course every morning and each would spend his day at his respective work: Mark as a club professional, Keegan as a pint-size touring pro in training. These days, Keegan admits, he has exceeded his childhood expectations.

“To be honest with you, being Ryder Cup captain was never on my radar,” he says. “Playing in Ryder Cups really wasn’t either. I was more like, ‘I just have to get there. I have to get on the Tour and make some money.’ ”

Bradley is thinking green but dressed in red, white and blue as he says this. He’s talking to me in between sartorial obligations at Panther National in Palm Beach Gardens, Fla., where he and the Ralph Lauren team are dialing in a fresh batch of star-spangled outfits for this year’s matches. It’s only May, but Bradley’s captaincy is in full swing. He’s already gotten used to certain parts of this: the planning, the questioning, the decision-making. But there are certainly times he still can’t believe it.

ON ONE VAN RIDE through Massachusetts with his St. John’s teammates, Bradley casually pointed out a notable roadside attraction. “That’s Crystal Springs,” he said. “We’re in the middle of nowhere and Keegan says, ‘That’s where I used to live,’ ” Darby remembers. “It was a mobile-home park. We had no idea. We heard about the kitchen table that turned into a bed. That was where so much of it started.”

When Keegan was in high school, his parents separated. He and his dad headed to Hopkinton, Mass., then to Crystal Springs, where Keegan began the final chapter of high school. It was an unlikely launching pad for a D1 career — Keegan couldn’t afford to play many big-time junior events, so, despite his talent, only one full-ride offer ultimately came through, from St. John’s. He eagerly accepted. Darby felt lucky he’d been the one to make the pitch, particularly once he’d gotten a window into Bradley’s past.

“He’s a fighter, that guy,” Darby says. “No matter if he’s on the ropes, he’ll fight to get where he wants to be. Because he knows what it’s like to want to get out of a spot.”

The kid and the college turned out to be a perfect fit. The team had no set home course, which meant constant improvisation. He and Darby each speak fondly of their real-time practice planning. During the offseason they’d head to the Johnnies’ batting cages, where Bradley would beat balls into the nets. “There were these bars on the batting cages and if you hit a perfect shot it would hit the metal and come, like, firing back at you,” he remembers.

As for during the season? “We’d get a call from Coach at about one o’clock every day about a course that we could go play where we would keep our head down, no warm-up, start on the 2nd hole, don’t look at anybody,” Bradley says, laughing. “But that said, we did play some of the best golf courses around.”

Darby agrees. “In 23 years of coaching, we never did have an organized hitting session, because we couldn’t really be on the range,” he says. “So, for these guys, it was all about playing.”

Sometimes a dozen holes at a time, on the Black course.

Bradley is still in awe, remembering his first time playing Bethpage. That had been part of Darby’s recruiting pitch — We play Bethpage Black! — even if he’d left out the part about missing a third of the course. Still . . .

“Tiger had just won the U.S. Open [in 2002], and it looked like a U.S. Open every day out there,” Bradley recalls. “They would have these plaques in the fairway where Tiger hit it, and we would go re-create his shots.”

“I mean, the first time people see that place they freak out a little bit,” says Currier, the super who took joy in serving as low-key host. “It is just a big ballpark, the elevation changes, and just the scale of it — it’s just so big.”

The benefit of playing on closed-course Mondays was that they had the place to themselves. “It was almost like a religious experience when we were out there, because not many people ever get to play Bethpage with no one on it,” Bradley says. “It felt like we weren’t that far off from playing the Tour. You’re on the course, you’re seeing the shots — that was the closest I had ever felt to being where I wanted to be.”

But then, of course, there was the time he did cross the road.

“I’m at St. John’s for four years, and you never get to play 15 through 18 at Bethpage. It’s just, like, torture,” Bradley remembers. “So we’re talking about it during the round, then we finally were like, ‘Screw it.’ And we got in so much trouble, me and my teammate George. It was ugly. That’s as mad as I’ve ever seen my coach. Darby got in trouble, Craig Currier got in trouble, a police officer came, because, like, people thought we just snuck out on the course. It was a huge mistake, but it was sneaky worth it.”

UNLIKE THE MODERN ERA of fast-tracked college stars, Bradley didn’t get any swanky sponsor invites to big-time PGA Tour events during or after his St. John’s career. Instead, one of his first pro events was the 2008 New York State Open, held, appropriately, at Bethpage Black. (He finished T9. I’d bet against you recognizing any other name in the field.)

“We were joking that he wouldn’t know anything about the last four holes,” Currier says.

During and after his college days on Long Island, Bradley would drive his duct-taped Ford Focus to a nearby Nassau County course, Wheatley Hills GC, where he’d work a handful of hours each weekend to make money and earn practice rights. The members appreciated his toil in the bag room but mostly wanted to watch him play. They’d drag him out to fill their foursomes and, eventually, try to help with mini-tour fees. In one desperate moment, Bradley needed to pay for Q-School, and Wheatley member Dr. Glenn Muraca wired him $6,000, no questions asked. Bradley would have been fine, it turned out. He won that week’s tournament and was never in golfing debt again. But that still didn’t make it easy. Nothing has been.

One stretch during the summer of 2010, in the midst of his rookie Korn Ferry Tour season, would have broken a more frail golfer; Bradley missed five cuts in a row by a total of seven shots. But two weeks later he placed second, picking up valuable points. And that fall, with the season winding down, he strung together four consecutive top fives that launched him to the PGA Tour. But he arrived with a chip still planted firmly on his shoulder. And it stayed there, early success be damned.

It was still Keegan versus the world. Slights came from near and far. When, in 2016, the USGA banned his preferred belly putter, he took it personally. His mind still wanders to an alternate reality in which he didn’t have to start over on the greens. When, at the WGC-Cadillac Match Play event in 2015, Miguel Ángel Jiménez had words with Bradley’s caddie, Bradley took that personally, too, getting about as close to an on-course rumble as we’ve seen on Tour this generation.

After Bradley made his first two Ryder Cups, in 2012 and 2014, he assumed he’d make ’em all. That wasn’t the case. His play leveled off after the putter ban, and he was on the outside looking in at Ryder Cup rosters for 2016, 2018, 2021 and, most painfully, 2023, when he finished 11th in the standings and fielded a devastating rejection phone call from Team U.S.A. captain Zach Johnson as Netflix’s Full Swing cameras rolled. Bradley later admitted to feeling that this was even more evidence he wasn’t a part of the in-crowd. He hadn’t even been invited to the Tour’s important-player meetings in 2022; essentially forgotten as the 23 “top” pros gathered to discuss the game’s future. That motivated him.

“I always feel like I’m being overlooked,” Bradley says now. “Like, ‘He was in that meeting?’ So I lost a ton of weight. I changed my diet. I doubled down on everything. I was determined to show that I was one of the best players in the world.”

Where things remain toughest for him is on the course itself. That’s a difficult truth: Just playing golf is an ordeal for Bradley. He laments taking the game so seriously in college and laughs that it’s gotten “100 times worse” since then. He’s anxious, he says. He works to manage that anxiety. It’s exhausting.

“Playing golf is hard for me. I do not go out and play easy rounds,” he says. “I am anxious every day of my life. It’s a lot of work to manage the stress.”

An hour or two after his rounds, he sometimes has trouble holding a conversation. “I’ll be looking at people and I cannot compute,” he says. “My brain is just . . . fried.”

That is perhaps the most succinct explanation as to why Bradley passed on selecting himself to play for this year’s Ryder Cup team. To Darby’s point, when he’s in, he’s all the way in. There’s not room for much else.

Expect to see the Bradley who delivered a succinct monologue at the end of Team U.S.A.’s Presidents Cup win last September in Montreal. Two months earlier, he’d been made a shocking selection as the 2025 Ryder Cup captain — and he had a message for his future U.S. teammates and Team Europe too.

“I’ve been doubted my whole f—ing life,” he said. “That’s when I do my best work. We are gonna go to Bethpage and kick their f—ing a–.”

ENTER KEEGAN BRADLEY’S second side, a side he only sort of knows exists. It’d be too flippant to say everything comes easy to this Bradley, but things sure have a way of working out.

This Bradley isn’t an outsider; he’s been a winner from the start. His dad’s golf-pro position in rural New England, the greatest place on earth, meant he was gifted all-day access to courses for cheap or for free. This kid was the nephew of legendary LPGA pro and Solheim Cup captain Pat Bradley, whose every move he studied and admired.

“I think there are so many advantages I had,” Bradley says now. “Back then I did not see one advantage of living [in New England] and trying to do what I did. But as I’ve gotten older, I realize I wasn’t as burned out as a lot of the other kids playing a national schedule. And as we got older, I started to beat them.”

Growing up a Bradley, you learn two things quickly: how to ski fast and how to make birdies. Keegan was a quick and eager study at both. He became an all-state alpine skier, following in the footsteps of his uncle John, who’d been a pro racer. The seasonal balance was a blessing.

“It gave me this real sense of urgency,” he says. “When the winter came, I physically couldn’t play outside and had to put my clubs away. But, then, in the springtime, I was just so excited to pick up a club, I loved the game so much.”

It was after one of his best results — a third-place finish in the giant slalom at the 2003 Vermont State Championships — that 16-year-old Bradley made the call. He’d proven he was fast, but grass, not snow, was his future. And then everything began to fall into place. He’d already won junior golf championships in Vermont; in his last year of high school he added a Massachusetts state championship to his résumé, as an individual and with his team. His dad moved to Wyoming during his son’s St. John’s run. While on summer break, Keegan won the Wyoming Amateur too.

This Bradley was confident — so confident that he remembers it being physically painful to sit with his college career counselor and pretend he had a backup plan to the only job he’d ever wanted. He hasn’t needed one yet.

This Bradley also quickly lit up the PGA Tour. He won the 2011 Byron Nelson in just his 16th career start. Barely three months later he won the PGA Championship, becoming just the second golfer in 98 years to triumph in his major debut and making him a shoo-in for PGA Tour Rookie of the Year.

This Bradley made fast and famous friends. Phil Mickelson took him under his wing early on; they played Tuesday practice-round matches, paired up for Ryder Cups and gladly took on all comers. This Bradley was among the trendsetting Tour pros to touch down in the Jupiter, Fla., area before it was pro golf’s capital; that’s where he befriended top-tier talent like Dustin Johnson and Rickie Fowler and, more notably, Michael Jordan. Bradley became the first pro golfer to land a Jordan shoe deal.

And this Bradley has endured. He’s not young but he’s not yet old. He’s able to bridge gaps. He’s played on Cup teams with Steve Stricker and Sahith Theegala. He has outlasted the contemporaries who comprise his Ryder Cup staff, pros like Webb Simpson and Kevin Kisner. Following his win at this year’s Travelers — the eighth Tour win of his career — he cracked the top 10 in the world, proved he was playing some of the best golf of his life and made an inspired charge to the brink of making his own team. Despite his lone-wolf tendencies, he has become a beloved figure on the American golf scene. That’s how you get chosen as the youngest Ryder Cup captain in 60 years.

Leave it to Bradley, then, to take an all-time honor and find some motivation, some small slight buried within it. For a half-century now, the implication of being named captain is that you aren’t good enough to make the team. Game on.

Bradley felt it all year, with U-S-A chants following him around every tournament. He felt it staring down his biggest decision: whether to name himself player-captain. And he’ll feel it when he finally arrives at Bethpage, the weight of the role and the weight of the effort he’s put in to getting himself there.

“It’s really strange,” he says. “Sometimes I feel like I’m living a dream. Like, I can’t figure out how all this has happened. It’s ridiculous. I feel a real sense of obligation to represent Bethpage the proper way, the way it deserves to be, but also the way the locals represent Bethpage and the people that grew up there. Winged Foot’s great, Shinnecock’s amazing, but if you talk to a real New Yorker, Bethpage is their home course. It’s a special place for a lot of people. It’s where they grew up. It was where they learned to play golf, where their dad took them. And when you’re out there, you really feel it. When we get to Bethpage, I’ll be standing there and I’ll just have this vision of all us St. John’s guys walking down the fairway. And it really is powerful.”

This time though, Bradley will be welcome on every square inch of the place. If Darby had had his way, his former player would have hit the first tee shot on Friday and been the first to cross the road. Instead he’ll do so at the helm of the U.S. team, the chosen man to lead a dozen of the world’s best golfers in its biggest team competition. And when he does cross that road as captain he’ll have to give up some piece of that “outsider” status for good, trading it for something between “fan favorite” and “national hero” instead.

As long as the home team wins.