Mark Bradley lifted his 11-year-old son Keegan from atop his shoulders and sent him scurrying on his knees through the throng surrounding the 18th green at The Country Club in Brookline, Mass., on a late summer’s day in August of 1999.
Keegan Bradley tracks a fairway shot at his annual Charity Golf Classic at the Woodstock Country Club in 2016. The event, which benefited a range of children’s charities, was hosted by Bradley for several years beginning in 2012. Photo Provided
The final singles matches of the Ryder Cup, the biannual team match play competition between the top golfers from the United States and Europe had just wrapped up, with an ecstatic father and son watching on a Jumbotron as Justin Leonard infamously nailed a 40-foot putt on the 17th hole to best Spanish golfer Jose Maria Olazabal and help seal a remarkable comeback victory for the U.S. team. A moment later, the Bradleys watched in ecstasy as America’s Payne Stewart and Scotland’s Colin Montgomerie walked up the fairway to the 18th green at the legendary golf course in Brookline.
“Keegan tapped me on the shoulder and asked, ‘Dad, can I go see if I can get down on the green?’ Mark Bradley recollected fondly in a phone conversation with the Standard last week. “Well, there’s thousands of people around and we have no cell phones, but what are you going to do? So I let him down and said, ‘Meet me at the crooked tree.’ There’s a crooked tree behind the 18th at The Country Club, and we were standing next to it. And Keegan snuck through people’s feet, crawling here and there. He was standing on the green when Stewart famously conceded a 10-foot putt to win to Montgomerie.” The match was halved and the final score in perhaps the most dramatic of all the Ryder Cup competitions in history was 14-1/2 to 13-1/2. “Keegan’s right there — he’s on the green with Payne and Colin,” Mark Bradley related reverently. (Sadly for American golf and for sports fans the world over, it was one of Payne Stewart’s last public appearances. He died in a plane crash less than a month later.)
Following his greenside encounter with the American and Scottish golfers, Keegan Bradley found his way back to the crooked tree, and together father and son watched as the U.S. team members celebrated their epic comeback victory. “They’re up on this balcony and we were so close, we got sprayed with the champagne,” Mark Bradley recalled rapturously. “It was a defining moment in Keegan’s career as a golfer. He told me, ‘Dad, I want to play in the Ryder Cup.’”
Thirteen years later in 2012 and again in 2014, Keegan Bradley did just that. He played in two Ryder Cups — the first at the Medinah Country Club in Illinois and the second at Gleneagles in Kinross, Scotland. Bradley was one of 12 golfers representing the United States on each of those teams. To date, his record in Ryder Cup solo and pairs matches is 4-3. Now there dwells in the near future an even greater honor: Keegan Bradley will captain the 2025 United States Ryder Cup team, leading a dozen contemporary American golf standouts — possibly including himself — against a celebrated team of European professionals. This year’s Ryder Cup is slated for Friday through Sunday, September 26-28, at the fearsome Bethpage Black Course in Farmingdale, N.Y.
For our full story on this, please see our July 24 edition of the Vermont Standard.
