Keegan Bradley: 'Starting to feel better' about Bethpage Ryder Cup debacle
NEWTOWN SQUARE, Pa. — This may or may not make heartbroken American golf fans feel any better, but Keegan Bradley is still wrestling with the United States’ catastrophic Ryder Cup loss at Bethpage nearly eight months later. He’ll be driving down the road, and all of a sudden he’ll remember an element of that chaotic, wrenching weekend — a pairing, maybe, or a course setup tip, or the one thing he did (or didn’t) say to his players — and everything will come roaring back.
That’s about as diabolical a punishment as anyone could possibly conceive for a losing Ryder Cup captain. Still, though, the demons are starting to recede. “I’m starting to feel better,” he said Monday at Aronimink before the PGA Championship.
“The last couple months, I’ve started to feel more like myself. ” He conceded that “sometimes I’m a little too honest [in public] with how I’m feeling, and it gets me in some weird spots. ” The way that the favored, home-team United States lost — getting blown out on Friday and Saturday before rallying Sunday for a semi-respectable 15-13 loss — combined with the terrible behavior of a loud Bethpage contingent all landed on Bradley’s head.
He spent months afterward trying to atone for every mistake that led to the loss, some of which were his, most of which weren’t. Keegan Bradley stands on the 18th green after Team Europe won the 2025 Ryder Cup at Bethpage State Park Golf Course on Sept. 28, 2025, in Farmingdale, New York.
Carl Recine via Getty Images At this point, the Ryder Cup is something of a Greek tragedy for Bradley, with pain and buried trauma at every turn. From his losses as a player in the 2012 Medinah collapse and the 2014 Gleneagles blowout, to being left off the 2023 team in Netflix-televised agony, to Bethpage … it’s safe to say that Bradley and the Ryder Cup may never reconcile. For that reason, he said Monday, he doesn’t even entertain thoughts of playing his way onto the 2027 team.