ATLANTA, Georgia — The coincidence factor is too strong to be ignored.
Here, in the stately East Lake Golf Club clubhouse, stands the 1963 Ryder Cup bag used by Arnold Palmer. It’s behind glass.
Here, on the 18th green early Saturday evening, Keegan Bradley finished off a 7-under-par 63 to get near the lead in the Tour Championship.
Palmer was the last American to serve as a Ryder Cup playing captain. And he did it here at East Lake in ’63. Bradley is on the cusp of being in the same position. He is already the Ryder Cup captain. But he said when he was picked for the job that if he didn’t make the team on points, he would not pick himself as a wild-card addition to the team.
Except Bradley keeps playing like one of the best remaining American players, maybe playing the best golf of any of them.
It’s a dilemma, all right. And what happens Sunday in the Tour Championship, whether he wins or doesn’t win, probably won’t change his decision.
“I wish Arnold was alive so I could call him,” Bradley said wistfully. “I wish I could call Arnold and talk to him becaue I think he’d hace some great advice for me.”
Palmer played in every round of the ’63 Ryder Cup matches—all six of them since there were two singles rounds.
“I know one thing,” Bradley said upon hearing that tidbit, “I’m not Arnold Palmer.”
Bradley noticed Palmer’s bag in the clubhouse early in the week when he registered to play this week. It made an impression on him.
“It was really weird looking at his bag,” Bradley said. “Like really strange because I’m nowhere in the world of Arnold Palmer and somehow I’m in this with him right now, which is definitely strange. They’ve got lot of his memorabilia in the clubhouse. It’s pretty surreal looking at it.”
Feel free to read into this coincidence anything you want. Is it a message from beyond? Is Arnie or someone trying to persuade Bradley to go ahead and go the player-captain route? Or is it a reminder of just the opposite? What Bradley himself said: “I’m not Arnold Palmer.”
After Sunday’s round, Bradley will get together with his vice captains and determine the last six spots on the American squad. “I can’t wait,” Bradley said. “I’m done with this whole process. I want it over with, either way.”
The chance to be a player-captain is a burden that maybe seemed unlikely when Bradley was first chosen for the job. And Bradley noted the irony during the summer when he won in Hartford. “Every year I’ve been out here, I wanted to play on the Ryder Cup team and then this would be the first year where maybe I didn’t want to,” he said in July. “I just wanted to be the captain and, of course, this is what happens.”
With four vice captains and the whole entourage that is the American team, how hard would it really be to do both jobs? Well, no one really knows in the modern era because no one has done it. When Palmer played, the Ryder Cup outcome was usually a foregone conclusion because the American team was much stronger. And Palmer most likely played all six matches as a way to increase interest in the event since he was golf’s biggest star.
That’s all different now. With 24-hour news and the Internet and a world full of online second-guessers, the worst that could happen now would be if Bradley tried to do both and the Americans lost. His decision to play, unless he went unbeaten or maybe even if he did, would be cited by critics as a distraction that hurt the team.
Bradley, who was born in Vermont and raised in New Hampshire and Massachusetts, keeps talking about putting the team first. If he was not the captain, he would be a lock for one of the remaining six picks. But given his comments, he sounds like he’s leaning the other way. That he takes the captain’s job so seriously that he cannot be distracted by having to play and that if he did, he might do a worse job of captaining.
The media have been batting this topic around like a fierce game of pickleball (you know, America’s most injury-prone and dangerous sport). There is no consensus. And Bradley has been fielding these questions all year.
“It’s just a heavy decision,” he said. “All the picks are tough. The captain is going to be judged on who he picks. It’s pretty strange to pick yourself. It doesn’t seem like reality sometimes. We’re going to do the best we can to make the right decision and it’s going to be controversial to certain people either way. I’m prepared for that.
“Ultimately, I have to protect the team. I have to do the right thing for the team. Whatever that best decision is, we’re going to make it.”
His devotion to the PGA of America, which went out on a limb to give him this job, is admirable. Bradley has always felt close to the PGA because his father, Mark, was a club professional. That’s what made Keegan’s victory in the PGA Championship, his only major title, so special.
Bradley is walking on ground that hasn’t been trod on in more than 60 years. And when it was, Arnold Palmer was walking on that ground. The playing-captain ground.
The drama has added an extra element of interest to this Tour Championship, which already featured a $10 million first prize and a handful of American players trying to impress enough to make Bradley’s team.
Patrick Cantlay and Tommy Fleetwood finished tied after 54 holes at 16 under par. Maybe one of them will win. Maybe Scottie Scheffler, who already has five wins, will rally from four shots back. He trails Bradley by one.
Sunday will be a big day, no matter what. When Bradley arrives at the East Lake clubhouse Sunday morning, one of the first things he’ll see—again—will be a red, white and blue golf bag with a familiar name on it.
Arnold Palmer.
It’s a name that makes anyone in golf aspire to be a better golfer, a better captain and a better man. Bradley feels every bit of it.
