- I’m After Keegan Bradley closed out the winning point in the Presidents Cup with his sigh-of-relief 1-up victory over Si Woo Kim at Royal Montreal, he hopped in a cart with captain Jim Furyk for what one might describe as an exit interview. The two men talked for 10 minutes. It was the only time during the week that Bradley, selected to be a captain’s assistant before Furyk recruited him as a competitor, gained insight into a job he will now undertake as the U.S. Ryder Cup captain.
“I sort of walked him through the process of how we got from point A to point B and just some of what we were thinking throughout the week,” Furyk told Golf Digest by phone. “He had some great questions. But he had his year-out press conference today? Yeah, he hasn’t had much time for things to slow down. It gets real now.”
Indeed, Bradley and European captain Luke Donald conducted a press conference Tuesday in New York to officially kick off the one-year (or so) countdown to the 45th Ryder Cup slated for September 26-28, 2025, at Bethpage Black in Farmingdale, N.Y. After Bradley helped the American team to its 10th straight win over the International team in the Presidents Cup, he is now on the hot seat as the leader of a U.S. team that was beaten handily by the Donald-led European squad in Rome.
Bradley, 38, is likely to seek guidance from Furyk and other U.S. captains—and also, he said Tuesday, from Tiger Woods—after getting the call in July to lead the American team despite having no previous experience in the role.
In the aftermath of the U.S. win in Montreal, Bradley was asked about what, if anything, he might have gleaned from the week that might be useful to him at Bethpage. He talked in broad strokes, citing how Furyk, who was on the losing end as Ryder Cup captain in 2018, handled the team room, going so far as to say it was the greatest team room he’d experienced in two appearances each in the Ryder Cup and Presidents Cup. “We’re going to copy a lot of what Jim Furyk did this week,” he said. “He set a culture here for us, and we’re going to carry that over into Bethpage.”
It’s a culture that has been promoted since the 2014 Ryder Cup Task Force and implemented in 2016 at Hazeltine, which, as Furyk explains it, is simply, “to put the players in the best possible position to play their best.”
On Tuesday, Bradley spoke of another aspect of the Furyk formula that impressed him.
