Keegan Bradley first mentioned Bethpage Black wasn’t playing the way Team USA wanted it to on Saturday night during the 2025 Ryder Cup. On Sunday, after the American rallied to make the European winning margin seem like a close affair, he doubled down that he had made a mistake when it came to course setup.
“We tried to set the course up to help our team,” Bradley said Sunday after his team fell 15-13. “Obviously, it wasn’t the right decision. I think anytime you’re the leader of a team or the captain or the coach, or whatever, we talked about this last night, you’re going to get the accolades and you need to take the blame for when things don’t go well.
“I’ve never seen Bethpage greens play this soft ever. Even when we’ve played here and it’s rained, this is something that I’ve never seen. Chip shots are spinning backwards.”
Bradley harped that the course setup was not in favor of the Americans, and one could say he may have a point. When Team USA made its run in Sunday Singles, the greens were as fast and firm as they had been all week. Even subdued, perhaps it was just the thought they were sped up that helped the Americans make putt after putt on Sunday when they watched the Europeans do the same in the first four sessions.
During a recent appearance on the No Laying Up podcast, Justin Thomas mentioned how the greens were faster on Sunday, but then he opened up about a disagreement between Team USA and the grounds crew at Bethpage Black.
“I don’t know why (the greens) weren’t at all what Keegan had asked for,” Thomas said on the podcast. “I mean, he had been pretty clear of asking for a certain speed and wanting it fast enough. I watched them argue with us that they were 13s (on the Stimpmeter). It’s like, ‘guys, we play golf every week, like, look on TV at how many guys are leaving putts short. Nobody is getting … You can’t have a putt, roll, three feet, four feet past the hole. Like these greens are slow, speed them up.’”
“It was just bizarre because that’s not something you would expect at a home Ryder Cup. A fun advantage you generally have is being able to do that a little bit, and it was just so frustrating that we were being fought with and argued with on the speed of the greens that we asked for. So that was bizarre.”
Bizarre indeed. It may sound like another excuse for an embarrassing performance the first two days from the Americans, but the red, white and blue have long believed it has an advantage on faster greens in the Ryder Cup. The PGA Tour notoriously plays faster greens than those on the DP World Tour, and with the Americans playing a more PGA Tour-heavy schedule than the European team (though that gap isn’t as big as it was 20 years ago), green speeds is often a big part of the Ryder Cup.
But for the second straight biennial bout, the Europeans just made more putts. The New York crowds were one of the big stories of the 2025 Ryder Cup, but the grounds crew arguing with the hosts is a close second.
