Mark Bradley still remembers when he was the Head PGA Professional at Jackson Hole Golf & Tennis Club in Wyoming and his son, Keegan, would come out for the summer during college. The first year, he put him to work in the pro shop to help 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 fly-fishing for Cutthroat Trout.”
Mark only had to open his wallet for his son once more. When Keegan rolled out of Wyoming to try his hand at professional golf in 2008, Mark paid $3,000 for an electric-blue Ford Focus with 190,000 miles on it that Keegan nicknamed “Be Bop.” Plus, he slipped his son a couple of 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. “If you went too fast,” Keegan recalls, “the mirror on the side would fly off so I had to tape it to my door. Sooner or later, I think one of the maintenance guys at the golf course just deadbolted it on the side of my car.”
It took a few years, but Keegan made it to the PGA TOUR in 2011, winning twice as a rookie, including the PGA Championship at Atlanta Athletic Club. His victory at the 2025 Travelers Championship marked his eighth career TOUR title and fourth-straight year in the winner’s circle.
JOHNS CREEK, GA – AUGUST 14: Keegan Bradley celebrates a birdie putt on the 17th green during the final round of the 93rd PGA Championship at the Atlanta Athletic Club on August 14, 2011 in Johns Creek, Georgia. (Photo by Kevin C. Cox/Getty Images)
And now, at age 39, Bradley is the youngest American Ryder Cup Team Captain since 34-year-old Arnold Palmer in 1963. That was also the last time a captain also played in the matches, which was a topic of conversation about Bradley in the run-up to this year’s contest.
“I didn’t have a single conversation about [being named captain] 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 by 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.”
Bradley—whose Aunt Pat is a member of the World Golf Hall of Fame—is a New Englander to the core. He grew up in Vermont, attended high school in Massachusetts, and lived in New Hampshire, too. 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, secured the commitment by bringing in St. John’s Hall of Fame men’s basketball coach Lou Carnesecca. “I always made sure his office was the last stop,” Darby said. “The way Keegan loved basketball, that was the move.”
Bradley shipped off to the Empire State and developed quite the affinity for nearby Bethpage Black while winning nine tournaments, second most 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 of holes 3 through 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.”
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There was one hard and fast rule for the Red Storm team on Mondays at Bethpage: Stay on the Short Course and don’t cross Round Swamp Road. The remaining holes were off limits because they were visible to clubhouse security. (When, years later, Bethpage Black hosted a PGA TOUR playoff event, 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 until on one Monday during his senior year, temptation got the better of him 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.”
Other than that, Darby said Bradley and his teammates were an easy bunch to coach; he often joked 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 their pies to be delivered to the U.S. team room during this week’s Ryder Cup, a competition that first got in Bradley’s blood in 1999, when he was 13 years old, and his father took him to the final day of what became known as “The Battle at Brookline.” 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.”
NEW YORK, NEW YORK – OCTOBER 08: Keegan Bradley of The United States speaks at a press conference during the Ryder Cup 2024 Year to Go Media Event at The Times Center on October 08, 2024 in New York, New York. (Photo by Mike Stobe/Getty Images)
He earned his way on to the U.S. squad for the first time in 2012 and as a rookie paired with Phil Mickelson. Every time they won a hole, which was often, they tried to celebrate but kept botching their attempted high-fives and hugs. So Bradley spent the day pumping his fist and waving to the crowd. He compared the roar after one of his birdies to Patriots fans cheering a Tom Brady touchdown pass. “I wish I could go 36 more,” Bradley said afterward. “This might have been the best day of my life.”
Coincidentally, it was the first time Mickelson won two points in one day at a Ryder Cup. 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 the ill-fated “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, Bradley made just one more appearance on the Ryder Cup team —winning just one point in a disappointing defeat at Gleneagles in Scotland in 2014—but provided a fiery temperament in amassing a 4-3 lifetime match record. Still, 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 sealed shut, a permanent reminder that he has unfinished business with the biennial competition.
“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 the bag until he’s on the winning side. “That’s the way he is,” Bradley’s father said.
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 on Tour, but his game suffered 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.”
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“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 U.S Ryder Cup point standings but 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 in the Netflix documentary “Full Swing.” Bradley could tell immediately upon answering 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 also assumed that might have been his last chance to make a Ryder Cup team.
Jordan Spieth participated in the meetings to pick the 2025 U.S. captain following another road defeat, in Rome. The job belonged to Tiger Woods if he wanted it, but he declined 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.
And it was Johnson who had the honor of relaying the news in a phone call on June 23, 2024.
Bradley was back at his Newburyport, Mass., summer home after the Travelers Championship when he received the call. Three days later, he stood on the deck with his parents, sister, brother-in-law and wife Jillian and broke the news. “I gasped,” Mark said. “None of us were even thinking about it.”
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.
This week, the diehard Boston sports fan will be in New York Yankees and Giants country enjoying a full-circle moment, returning to a course that he snuck on as a college student. But this time, he’s the captain of the U.S. Ryder Cup Team. If things break the right way, Bradley finally will exorcise his 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.
