Should Keegan Bradley end up playing on the US Ryder Cup team in 2025, it will mark a triumphant return to the event for the 39-year-old after more than a decade away.
Following his victory at the Travelers Championship last month, Keegan Bradley looks to be on course to play on the US side at Bethpage. He is currently inside the top 12 in the qualification standings, but he has work to do.
If he does play in the Ryder Cup in September, it will complete the redemption arc for Bradley who has had a fascinating career. Of course, he won the 2011 PGA Championship in his first ever major start.
Some felt Bradley should have been picked for the 2023 Ryder Cup in Rome. But that came after a number of years in the PGA Tour wilderness for Bradley, who did not register a single top 10 in the majors between 2015 and 2021.
The meeting hosted by Tiger Woods in 2022 which infuriated Keegan Bradley
By the time he reached the BMW Championship in 2022, Bradley had gone four years without a win. So perhaps it was not entirely surprising that he was not invited to a meeting that week held by Tiger Woods in which he spoke to around 20 PGA Tour players to discuss the threat of LIV Golf – as reported by ESPN.
However, that does not mean that Bradley took the news well. Speaking to the Fore Play Podcast in 2023, he explained how that week in Delaware inspired him to make big changes to his diet.
“I’ll tell you exactly what it was, I was playing BMW last year, so the second playoff event, and I went into the playoffs 33rd in the FedEx Cup, pretty good year, I was looking to make the Tour Championship and I played horrible at Memphis and BMW. I was walking up to the clubhouse on Thursday and Friday and I got to the locker room and I was fired, I hadn’t even played yet,” he said.
“Then I found out, this is when they had the secret PGA Tour meeting, and I was p—-d. I was bummed out, it was sort of a wake-up call for me. I was top 50 in the world at that time, I thought I should have been in the conversation, and not being invited to that, I was like alright bro, you’ve got to make some changes here, you’re not where you want to be if the best players in the world don’t view you as a top player. I used it as motivation and I told myself once it became clear I wasn’t going to make the Tour Championship, I was on the course thinking all day, the whole round, ‘this has got to be a wake-up call’.”
The remarkable rise of 2025 Ryder Cup captain Keegan Bradley
Bradley’s wait for a win on tour would not last much longer. He won the ZOZO Championship in October, starting a run of winning in each of the last four years.
Two of those victories have come at Travelers Championship, while he won a second BMW Championship title back in 2024 in the months after being named the US Ryder Cup captain.
He is also now eighth in the FedEx Cup and seventh in the world rankings. So you would imagine that he will indeed get the call if a similar meeting is held anytime soon.
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