Rory McIlroy has laid down the Ryder Cup gauntlet by insisting the idea of a playing captain cannot work.
Team USA’s qualifying race ends this week at the BMW Championship in Baltimore, the hours ticking down to Keegan Bradley’s eagerly awaited decision on whether to name himself as one of his team picks.
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Scottie Scheffler, Xander Schauffele and JJ Spaun are already guaranteed their spots at next month’s biennial tussle in New York and, on Sunday evening, they will be joined by the three other Americans who will earn their automatic selections.
Bradley will then have 10 more days to figure out if he should select himself as one of the six wild cards – and so become the Ryder Cup’s first playing captain in 63 years.
Bradley is playing in the PGA Tour’s penultimate FedEx Cup play-off event – starting at the Caves Valley Golf Club on Thursday – and, at 10th in the US standings, could leap into the top six if he defended the title he won 12 months ago.
Otherwise, as quite clearly one of the best dozen Americans competing at the moment, he is being urged by his US peers to take the unprecedented act of announcing his own name at the team unveiling on August 27. These include the likes of Patrick Cantlay and Rickie Fowler, who are also in the mix for a pick. “If I was the captain, I’d pick Keegan,” Cantlay said.
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Like the overwhelming majority in the opposing ranks, McIlroy does not believe the situation to be anywhere near that simple. In his pre-tournament press conference on Wednesday, the world No 2 underlined his feelings on the issue by once again revealing that he was sounded out about the possibility of being a playing captain at the 2027 match in Ireland.
“The idea of me being a playing captain sometime soon came up, and I shot it down straight away,” McIlroy said. When asked why, he replied: “Because I don’t think you can do it.”
McIlroy (right) says Keegan Bradley (left) would have too many commitments as captain to be effective as a player – AP/Jessica Hill
McIlroy went on to expand on his opinion that the dual role is effectively the impossible job.
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“It’s just the commitments that a captain has that week,” he said. “You think about the extra media a captain has to do, you think about the extra meetings the captains have to do with the vice-captains, with the PGA of America, preparing your speech for the opening ceremony… there’s a lot of things that people don’t see that the captain does, especially now that the Ryder Cup has become so big.
“If you’d have said it 20 years ago, I’d say, yeah, it was probably possible. But now with how big of a spectacle it is and everything that’s on the line, I think it would be a very difficult position to be in.
“Then [on the playing side] the captain isn’t going to be on the course all day, so really the captain’s only going to be able to play one session on Friday and one session on Saturday. Would you rather not have a player that has the flexibility to go twice [in a day] if he’s playing well?”
There can be no question that Europe would secretly relish watching Bradley trying to emulate Arnold Palmer in 1963, as the blue-and-gold brigade attempt to win away for the first time in 13 years. Last month, Telegraph Sport exclusively revealed that Luke Donald had agreed with Bradley’s request to redraw the Captains’ Agreement – signed by both camps before each match – to smooth the path for Bradley to make history. And the Europeans will already be enjoying the tension building around the issue.
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Next to Bradley’s deliberations, Donald’s dilemma looks blessedly straightforward. Europe qualifying finishes a week on Sunday at the British Masters, with Donald naming his six wild cards on September 1.
In Chicago, Justin Thomas – seventh in the standings – will be aiming to rise above Harris English, although even Brian Harman, down in 13th, could make himself an automatic pick with victory in this $20m event. McIlroy, who is in second place in the FedEX standings behind Scheffler – with whom he plays in the first round – declared that he “is as interested as anyone else to see how this [the US team selection] plays out”.
But he cryptically warned Bradley that personality should also come into the equation when it comes to finalising the picks. “You want that adaptability and that flexibility, and having someone that can go five if they’re playing really well that week,” he said. “And [you want] someone who the rest of the guys are really comfortable with. You don’t want to have a fox in the henhouse.”
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