NAPA, Calif. — Keegan Bradley stood in the middle of the eighth fairway at the Silverado Resort North Course wearing head-to-toe United States Ryder Cup gear and sporting a wide smile on his face as he waited to see the best player in the world do what he does best.
“This has a better shot of going in the hole than in that back right bunker,” Bradley joked as Scottie Scheffler struck his wedge shot. The ball, of course, finished pin high.
As Bradley rode around in a cart and bounced back and forth between two foursomes that included seven Ryder Cup team members and one assistant captain during a nine-hole practice round Tuesday at the Procore Championship, the pressure of hitting his own golf shots, preparing for a tournament and sweating out putts was nowhere to be found.
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With the PGA Tour season now over and the team set in stone, all eyes are now on Bethpage, which means all eyes are on Bradley and the 12 players he is hoping to captain to victory. This week, that also meant that a typically quiet PGA Tour fall event in Napa Valley became a Ryder Cup rendezvous.
“I think the players knew it was important,” Bradley said. “This Ryder Cup means everything to them. We talk a lot behind the scenes of how much this means to us, and they are willing to do whatever it takes to be prepared.”
Keegan Bradley and Scottie Scheffler talk to Scheffler’s caddie, Ted Scott, during a practice round at the Procore Championship. Mike Mulholland/Getty Images
Unlike 2023, when most of the American team did not play at this or any other golf event leading up to the 16.5-11.5 Ryder Cup loss in Rome, 10 of 12 team members are in the field this week and playing with each other during the first and second rounds of the tournament.
LIV’s Bryson DeChambeau is not in the field, but he made the trip to Napa for the main event: a dinner Tuesday night at a team house where Bradley and the vice captains are staying this week. The only other member of the U.S. team not in attendance is Xander Schauffele, who just welcomed the birth of his first child.
According to Bradley, though this was part of his plan when he was given the captaincy as a way to keep players sharp and build chemistry, it was players who led the charge on making it happen. Scheffler said that he and Schauffele talked about wanting to play in this event all the way back to the beginning of the year.
“It would be unusual for me to have four or five weeks off before the Masters or the U.S. Open or something like that, so there’s no reason that I should be doing that going into the Ryder Cup,” said Scheffler, who didn’t win a full point in Rome. “In order to stay sharp, you can practice and do all you can at home, but there’s something different about playing competition.”
Players certainly appeared to adopt that approach this week. On Tuesday morning, the bustling putting green at Silverado featured Justin Thomas using a protractor to measure the grade of the slope while Russell Henley did his own putting drills next to him. On the other end, Scheffler’s caddie, Ted Scott, prepped a few golf balls for Scheffler’s own putting practice.
Nearby on the range, Harris English worked on his wedge game, while right next to him, Collin Morikawa was hitting with his driver in the overcast morning while a Trackman measured his numbers and two cameras filmed his swing.
Soon enough, the two of them walked to the first tee and went off alongside assistant captain Webb Simpson. Bradley walked with them for a few holes. Though there was no official word from Bradley, it was inevitable that how the practice round and the tournament tee times were structured shed some light into potential pairings.
English and Morikawa played their practice round together and were also paired together for the first two rounds of the event. Patrick Cantlay, Sam Burns, Cam Young and Justin Thomas completed another foursome while Scheffler’s practice round included a familiar face in Henley — who he paired up with during last year’s Presidents’ Cup — as well as a new one in Spaun.
“It’s been cool to just kind of see other sides of the players that I only see their on-course behavior, get to know them off the course,” said Spaun, the U.S. Open winner and Ryder Cup rookie. “We’re just trying to build comradery. We’re hanging out a lot together. I think it’s just trying to get those team atmosphere juices flowing early so that way when we get to Bethpage we’ve kind of got a head start.”
Even though they maintained their typical practice round routine of hitting various putts and chips around the greens, Spaun said the pairings also were playing best-ball-style matches within the group to try to simulate a match-play scenario as much as they could.
“We’re [at] 90 percent,” Bradley said when asked how close he was to knowing what those pairings will be. “One of our goals was to have the guys prepared, ready to know who they’re playing with, especially in alternate shot.”
Though not talked about explicitly, there has been an undercurrent of comparison between what the U.S. may have done wrong in 2023 under captain Zach Johnson and what they’re trying to do differently under Bradley. Morikawa said Wednesday that a lot of the difference comes down to the way Bradley is handling everything.
“Keegan’s been very open to talking to a lot of us, a lot of players just asking what can he do for us to make the [Ryder Cup] week that much easier,” Morikawa said. “He’s been open to hearing every suggestion possible from all of us to say how do we make it as normal as can be and go out there and do what we need to do to put points on the board.”
In many ways, it also helped that Napa and this tournament was the ideal setting for this. Though the juxtaposition of players like Scheffler and Morikawa alongside journeymen who typically play this event hoping to keep their Tour card created its own unique dynamic, which resembled a clique of cool kids at summer camp, the relaxed nature of the setting, a “lighter scene” as Bradley put it, made it an effective place to relax before the hoopla in Long Island begins.
The vibes were high Tuesday as Bradley, assistant captain Jim Furyk (who captained last year’s President’s Cup team that Bradley was a part of), team manager John Wood and a few of the team’s data specialists walked the grounds, interacted with players and watched as players interacted with each other.
After the nine-hole practice rounds wrapped up, players mingled and got in a long line for burgerdogs, making small talk about various topics as they waited for the famous regional delicacy. It was the kind of small moment that this situation was engineered to create with Bethpage looming.
“This is probably the most different I’ve ever been at a golf event,” Woodland said. “Usually I’m focused, I’m by myself. [This week] we’re hanging out with the guys, we’re talking, we’re really preparing for two weeks, right? So it’s been fun.”
Woodland was a unique choice by Bradley. Like Brandt Snedeker, Webb Simpson and Kevin Kisner, the four selections are of a slightly younger generation than previous assistant captains and are still playing in Tour events from time to time and know the players on the team well. That, Woodland said, is by design.
“I talked to the guys that are like, ‘this is different,'” Woodland said. “They have no problem picking up the phone and calling me. I know them on a personal level where I think that brings us all closer together.”
On Wednesday, Bradley spoke of this approach, acknowledging even that the choice to make him the U.S. captain was a shocking one that no one expected. That decision, however, has been a catalyst for just how Bradley says he is approaching this entire process.
Keegan Bradley looks on while Justin Thomas plays a practice round at the Procore Championship. Mike Mulholland/Getty Images
“I think it’s important, I keep trying to remind myself as well that I was chosen to do this job, to do it maybe a little differently as well,” Bradley said. “Me being the captain isn’t really the status quo of what the U.S. side has done. I remind myself and the vice captains all the time that we were picked to do this job because we wanted a little shift in what we were doing.”
The slight shifts that Bradley has adopted have ranged from organizing this entire week, to crossing off any tasks that can be done ahead of arriving in New York, to maintaining a group chat with the team, as well as opening up more personally to the entire group.
“I’ve known Keegan for 15 years. We’ve been around each other a lot. I’ve never seen him like this,” Woodland said. “He’s opened up so much. You could tell how much it means to him.”
With the Ryder Cup still two weeks away, Napa has felt like a purposeful honeymoon stage for the American team. Everyone is saying the right things, complimenting Bradley’s directive and showing a united front ready for the task at hand. Yet even though the lead-up may be different, prior teams would be the first to say that a week in Napa does not make a winning Ryder Cup team. Team dinners don’t directly correlate to made putts and even extra preparation does not always determine who lifts the cup come Sunday.
If it’s Bradley’s team that does, however, players will look back on this week as a crucial part of not just the preparation for this Ryder Cup but perhaps for future cups to come.
“Who knows?” Bradley said. “Going forward this could be a part of something that we do every year.”
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