It’s entirely apropos that a beloved quote from the late, great New York Yankees catcher and Baseball Hall of Fame member Yogi Berra came so close to neatly summing up the experience of the 12-member United States Ryder Cup team and its non-playing captain, Woodstock native Keegan Bradley, at the fearsome Bethpage Black golf course on Long Island this past week.
“It’s déjà vu all over again,” Berra once said in one of his most famous and oft-quoted “Yogisms.”
In the case of the narrow, 15-to-13-point loss to a dozen of Europe’s finest linksmen in golf’s most revered international competition, one has to tag on a heart-rending — and heartbreaking — addendum to Yogi’s fractured quote: “Almost.”
When dawn broke on Sunday morning at Bethpage Black, U.S. captain Bradley and his beleaguered U.S. charges — 12 of the greatest golfers in the game, led by world number one Scottie Scheffler — were coming off two days of disastrous play in four sessions of doubles competition on Friday and Saturday. At day’s end on Saturday, the U.S. was down 11-1/2 to 4-1/2 — a deficit the golf punditocracy agreed was all but insurmountable. The dejection on Bradley’s face that he carried into the post-match interviews following Saturday’s eight doubles matches against Europe’s finest was palpable evidence of the stress the Vermont native and U.S. team captain was enduring as he and his squad looked toward a full day of 12 singles matches on the concluding day of play on Sunday.
What transpired during the dramatic day of singles competition on Sunday was awe-inspiring, with the results unfolding before a many-thousands-strong throng of spectators, a sizable number of them from the New York area, calling Yogi Berra’s splintered aphorism readily to mind. The American side earned 8.5 points in singles on Sunday, matching the highest total during the era of 12 singles contests at the Ryder Cup, which dates back to 1979.
The irony for Bradley, who touted his Vermont and New England roots, with their “true grit” and “work ethic” in multiple media interviews throughout the week, is that the 2025 Ryder Cup result nearly mirrored the heretofore unprecedented U.S. comeback that occurred at the 1999 Ryder Cup at The Country Club in Brookline, Mass — a team competition that Bradley, then a 13-year-old Woodstock Union High School and Middle School student and a rising star on the regional and U.S. junior golf circuit — attended with his father, then a PGA club professional and golf instructor here in Vermont.
That fateful Sunday in October of 1999, the U.S. mounted a stirring comeback, notching 8-1/2 of a possible 12 points in singles — exactly the same number of points the American golfers of 2025 racked up this past Sunday. And Bradley was there to witness the tremendous turnaround by the U.S. golfers both times — first as a teenage, golf-obsessed fan and aspiring PGA Tour standout and again this past week as the captain of the 2025 American Ryder Cup squad. The 15-13 final points tally this year was the closest Ryder Cup scoring margin in 13 years. By contrast, in the past five of the landmark international competitions, the final point differential between the winning and losing teams has been at least five points.
Bradley, 39, now resides most of the year on Florida’s east coast, while also maintaining a second home and summertime getaway on Massachusetts’ North Shore. This past week, he waxed philosophic about the Ryder Cup experience in 18th-green-side interviews and at a press confab that followed the trophy presentation at the 2025 event on Sunday. Even in defeat, the U.S. players, who were significantly outgunned in doubles competition by their European counterparts on Friday and Saturday, drew copious praise and admiration from Bradley, especially for their fiery comeback in singles.
“They’re a tough group,” Bradley offered. “We didn’t play our best the first couple of days, but we did today. That was really fun today. We had all of our fun in one day here at the Ryder Cup at Bethpage,” he added. Asked if he would have done anything different about his captaincy if he had the Ryder Cup to do over again, Bradley was largely non-committal. “I think I would have set the course up a bit differently,” Bradley said, referencing the prerogative that is given to the home team captain and co-captains at each Ryder Cup. “But I don’t know,” he continued. “They played better than us. They deserved to win. They’re a great team,” he added. “In my eyes, Luke Donald is the best European Ryder Cup captain of all time.”
Both Bradley, the U.S. captain, and Donald, his European counterpart, were effusive in their praise for one another and for their respective teams. The positive back-and-forth between the pair of captains at media get-togethers throughout the week was in marked contrast to the extraordinarily disruptive, disrespectful, and unsportsmanlike behavior of many U.S. fans. The European duo of Rory McIlroy and Tommy Fleetwood — dubbed creatively as Fleetwood Mac by on-course media commentators — played together spectacularly on Friday and Saturday, despite the fact that they were the targets of particularly vicious bile and a torrent of F-bombs out on the course. At one point, McIlroy’s wife was even showered with the remnants of a fairway-side cocktail on the back nine during his Sunday singles match against Scheffler. In remarks throughout the week, by contrast, both Bradley and Donald took pains to put the most sportsmanlike of veneers on their relationship, spotlighting their obvious affection and respect for one another, especially in the face of the decidedly unsettling behavior by many American fans in the gallery and grandstands.
“[Luke] won home and away,” Bradley said, referencing the fact that Donald had just notched his second consecutive Ryder Cup championship victory as a captain, having also led the successful European effort at the Marco Simone Golf & Country Club in Rome, Italy, in 2023. “He’s an incredible leader. He’s really quiet and I think he was able to kind of come out of his shell a little [during] these Ryder Cup years.” On several occasions during the week, Bradley also acknowledged the fact that Donald is one of his closest friends on the world golf circuit, with the British golfing great having taken Bradley under his wing when the Vermonter first stepped onto the PGA Tour stage in 2012. At the time, Bradley noted, Donald was the number-one-ranked player in the world, and the 2025 U.S. captain said he’d never forget how much Donald’s mentorship and camaraderie meant to him in those early years.
For more on this, please see our October 2 edition of the Vermont Standard.
