Tuesday Trifles - Captain America Edition

As I told you yesterday, it will be Tiger because it simply has to be Tiger.  Unless, yanno, it isn't....

I did go back to review yesterday's Tour Confidential discussion, in which Steve Stricker was the only other candidate submitted.  Oh Yeah, we've heard Couples and Love mentioned as well, but of course Tiger will do it... After all, the new mature Tiger has accepted the mantle of leadership, and will take one for the team.  Unless, yanno, he was planning on washing his hair that weekend.

Just as we all predicted, the U.S. Ryder Cup team will be captained at Bethpage Black by a beloved character who promises to inject some serious energy into the Long Island faithful.

And just as precisely none of us predicted, that captain will not be Tiger Woods.

After months of speculation surrounding Woods’ candidacy for the Ryder Cup slot, Keegan Bradley will instead captain the U.S. side at Bethpage, the U.S. Ryder Cup committee said on Monday, ending a multi-month flirtation with the lead gig from golf’s preeminent superstar. The news is expected to be finalized with an announcement at the NASDAQ in New York at noon on Tuesday.

 

Beloved?   Keegs?  The irony here is that Employee No. 2 and I had just begun watching Season Two of Full Swing, although we haven't yet gotten to the scene where Keegs is informed by Zach Johnson that he won't need his famous suitcase just yet....

Bradley is the quintessential cheap date, of far greater interest is Tiger's hard pass.  Conventional wisdom is that this is a matured Tiger Woods, one that wants to give back and is all about growing the game.  It would be hard to find a stage bigger than a Ryder Cup at Bethpage, so wassup with the Greta Garbo act?

Woods, a 15-time major champ and eight-time Ryder Cup competitor, marks a surprise “no” for Bethpage. Woods had been the open favorite for the lead position for months after the American beatdown in Rome, even going as far as to comment about “discussions” with then-PGA of America commissioner Seth Waugh.

“We’re still talking about it,” he said with a smile at the Masters in April, a point that Waugh reiterated at the PGA Championship in May.

But Woods’ schedule posed an existential issue for the captaincy: After accepting an elevated role as a Player Director on the PGA Tour’s policy board last August, Woods had obligations surrounding a complicated merger agreement with the Tour and Saudi PIF that would preempt his Ryder Cup captaincy work, which is typically a two-year position beginning in the months following the previous cup. The PGA of America held out naming a captain for months in the hopes that an agreement between the two parties would be reached, clearing the runway for Woods to serve as captain, even naming former caddie and NBC Sports analyst John Wood as “team manager” in the hopes of supplementing some of the captain’s workload. But as the calendar flipped to July, no such progress had been made, and Woods was forced to turn down the captaincy, though he could still theoretically compete on the team via captain’s selection or vice-captaincy.

Wood took that ill-defined gig presumably assuming he'd be working for God, whereas he'll be taking orders from Mr. 13.  Hope he's getting well paid.

But, as Geoff notes, there is a meaningful change that's occurred since the above comments:

A-list option Tiger Woods slow-played a decision awaiting PGA of America politics to play out. When his Seminole Pro-Member pal Seth Waugh stepped down June 30th, Tiger lost an ally in the building who would excuse Woods for passing up marketing and partner appearances required of the Captain all while juggling his PGA Tour board duties.

No doubt those promotional obligations are over-the-top, typically involving players well past their competitive primes.  But, with the Wood appointment and all, it's simply impossible to believe that the parties would let that derail such an obvious choice.

In one sense, though, Woods himself is an odd choice for captain, as he doesn't strike me as especially knowledgeable about the players he'd be considering for captain's picks.  Typically, captains are also playing, frequently paired with those grinding for picks.  Obviously Tiger doesn't play golf any longer, and doesn't hang around or even watch Tour events.

But what do we make of this excuse from Tiger?

Conversely, Woods had asserted he was unsure if he had the time capacity to take on the responsibility.

“We're still working on what that might look like, also whether or not I have the time to do it,” Woods said in May at the PGA Championship. “I'm dedicating so much time to what we're doing with the PGA Tour, I don't want to not fulfill the role of the captaincy if I can't do it.”

Woods was referring to his roles on the boards of the PGA Tour and PGA Tour Enterprises, along with his position on the tour's transaction team, all of which have been focused on the tour’s potential deal with Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund.

“What that all entails and representing Team USA and the commitments to the PGA of America, the players, and the fans and as I said, all of Team USA,” Woods continued. “I need to feel that I can give the amount of time that it deserves.”

Right!  One assumes that a deal will happen, and likely sooner than later.  The match itself is 14 months off, so I'm left to conclude that the man is simply a D88k.

Geoff does note one other possibility:

The intrigue surrounding Woods’ lack of desire to lead the team at Bethpage will continue to center around Waugh’s departure and may linger over Bradley’s captaincy. But Woods is likely interested in the 2027 job thanks to his love of Ireland and close friendship with Adare Manor owner J.P. McManus.

Really?  He prefers a road game?  This is my favorite piece on the shocking news:

Keegan Bradley is an ingenious pick for U.S. Ryder Cup captain ... or a rash act of desperation

Isn't this why we have ampersands?   Here's what I mean about home vs. road games:

The truth is, the Ryder Cup is arguably more of an exhibition than a sporting event, because in sporting events the issue is always in doubt. But golf’s biennial clash between the U.S. and Europe has become woefully predictable: the home side has won eight of the last nine matches and 11 of the last 13 Ryder Cups, with an average winning scoring margin of five points. There’s a decent chance a cardboard cutout of Rich Lerner could captain the U.S. to a win in Long Island next fall.

Isn't Bethpage as close to a sure thing as possible?  Dealing with the desperation angle first, here's the case for Keegan:

This appears to be an act of desperation. In a quote from the press release, PGA of America president John Lindert cited three qualities he valued in Bradley: "Past Ryder Cup experience, strong relationships and unwavering passion for this event." Bradley's past Ryder Cup experience includes two Ryder Cups as a player, the lowest total of any U.S. Ryder Cup captain since Dave Stockton in 1991. "Strong relationships" with his fellow players has been refuted by Bradley himself in a Netflix documentary. And "unwavering passion" is nice, but also meaningless … or at least useless.

So, he played on two losing teams with quite mixed results.  Just a reminder that when Rory almost missed his singles tee time at Medinah, he dusted Keegan pretty easily without the benefit of a warm-up.

And another odd aspect:

One of the great innovations of the modern captaincy was choosing someone just slightly older than the current players—someone in his late 40s or 50s who commanded some authority but who wasn't yet out of touch with the younger generation. Bradley, at 38, pushes a good strategy to its absurd breaking point. He's still playing. He is, by his own reckoning, an outsider. It would be wrong to say that other players didn't respect him, or that he's unpopular, but it is true that he's fully out of the loop. As far as I can tell, he's not an especially great communicator. How on earth is he going to summon the gravitas to lead his peers? (One thought, unbidden, keeps popping into my head: I wonder what Patrick Cantlay thinks of this guy?)

Also, I may have missed the announcement, but last I heard, he's not retiring from competitive golf. Again, he's 38. What if he makes the team? What if, like last time, he has a solid argument for making the team as a captain's pick, and finds himself having to make a tough call … on himself? Worse, how is he going to have the time to take on the duties of the modern captaincy, which is essentially like being a two-year CEO of a major corporation, when he's playing a full schedule?

Will you stop it already?  Just because they whine about how much work is involved doesn't mean we have to actually believe it....  They pick shirts.  Apparently that's too labor intensive for Tiger....

But it's a dark moment for the illustrious Task Force:

To understand why Bradley was picked, you first have to understand the chief failure of what has

been a generally successful and innovative U.S. Ryder Cup task force. Since the group's advent in the wake of the 2014 Gleneagles nightmare, it has struggled to prepare a younger generation for the captaincy. They tried with Zach Johnson, who (charitably) proved unable to meet the standard in Rome, but then the pipeline is dry after him. Look at his vice captains: Davis Love III, Jim Furyk, Steve Stricker, Fred Couples and Stewart Cink. That's three former captains (one of whom, Love took the job twice, and then captained the Presidents Cup in 2022), one guy in Couples who is your classic fun uncle but will never be a captain, and Cink, the man who told me in 2021 that he thought his chance was gone. He was the fifth and final vice captain, and he's the only name whose exclusion vis-a-vis Bethpage raises an eyebrow.

In short, the task force ultimately was run like a board of directors, shuffling leadership between them. They got unlucky, too; Phil Mickelson and Tiger Woods were supposed to pick up the baton, but then Phil went to LIV and Tiger clearly turned down the job. (Which may not be the biggest tragedy; he wasn't very good as Presidents Cup captain in Melbourne, nearly booting what looked like a sure thing before his players rescued him in Sunday singles.)

I couldn't disagree more.  You can only declare the Task Force a failure in the context of its objectives, and here the authors seem to naively assume its purpose was to win Ryder Cups, whereas the true purpose was the allow the cool kids to hang together.  It's first action in the aftermath of the 2014 debacle was to give Davis Love a mulligan for his 2012 debacle, so winning seems to be a secondary objective at best.

So we're left to hang our hat on, well, passion:

Sense to be made in the shock of Bradley's selection

The answer can be found in a suitcase that’s remained packed for some time. Keegan Bradley famously said he would never allow himself to open his return luggage from the 2012 Ryder Cup,

not until he was part of a winning team. It was a story Bradley resurfaced last year when he was desperately hoping to make his third U.S. Ryder Cup team (but first since 2014), only for his name not to be called when Zach Johnson announced his captain’s picks. The stigma that U.S. players don’t care about the Ryder Cup is overplayed and not entirely true. In the same breath, it’s clear that, as a group, they don’t carry the impalpable weight of hurt as their European comrades do. If the Americans win, great; if not, there’s a tournament to be played in the upcoming weeks. Bradley was the exception, unwilling to compromise his passion in spite of the pain it caused.

It’s exactly that passion that makes him the best choice to become the next U.S. Ryder Cup captain. Just not for the reasons you think.

Yet Bradley—or the idea of Bradley, or someone like him—was desperately needed. His attitude and love for the Ryder Cup runs perpendicular to the reported player unrest over money on the American side that surfaced at Marco Simone, to say nothing of the backdrop of greed that has been the undercurrent of golf’s civil war between the PGA Tour and LIV Golf. The Ryder Cup is arguably the one time the sport has true communal appeal, where fans come together to back their boys. In Bradley, the fans have an avatar for someone who cares about the Ryder Cup as much as they do.

What Joel Beall is foreshadowing here is a Keegan-Patrick Cantlay cage match, for which I will lay in a supply of popcorn.  As down on it as ai May seem, I like this pick a heck of a lot more than any of the retreads or Stewart Cinks of the world, because at least the captain will want to be there.  But Rory got himself taken to the cleaners by Cantlay, and I don't know that Keegan's passion will prove communicable.

It's not for nothing that many commentators are comparing it to Ted Bishop's statement pick of Tom Watson to captain that 2014 team.  While we understood the need for the statement, we never had any illusions that it would work, especially as weak as that 2014 roster was (Jeff Overton, for God's sake).

In this case it's a home game at a venue that will uniquely favor the locals, so one assumes they'll get away with it and win.  But Tiger has refused to step up when needed, and I do hope folks are paying attention.  When Tiger was put on the Tour's Board recently, my sense is that people were excited without actually knowing how Tiger would perform in such a role.  My own sense is that he's making the world better for Tiger, but pretty much ruining the game in all other respects.

Welcome to our new reality.  At the beginning of the LIV battles I made one prescient prediction, to wit, that we would end up hating them all.  Pretty good call, eh?  I suppose the saving grace is that I don't yet hate Keegan.  But there's still plenty of time.....

That will have to do for today.  I'll catch you later in the week for sure.