Roundtable: Surprises, analysis from Wednesday at the PGA Championship

ORLANDO – Francesco Molinari rolled in a 44-foot birdie putt on the final hole at Bay Hill that capped off an 8-under 64, taking him from five shots behind to a two-shot victory Sunday in the Arnold Palmer Invitational presented by Mastercard. Molinari watched the putt kiss off the flagstick and into the cup, and the normally reserved Italian raised his fist and dropped it downward, knowing that would make him hard to beat. No one got closer than two shots the rest of the way. Matt Fitzpatrick managed only two birdies in his round of 71 to finish second. Defending champion Rory McIlroy started the final round one shot behind and never got anything going in his round of 72.

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Keegan Bradley isn’t freaking out about the U.S. Open’s return to The Country Club. He’s New England to the bone, but he wants to be chill. Zen. Think Tom Brady inside two minutes. OK, fine, this is the first time the U.S. Open has come to Bradley’s beloved Boston since 1988, when he was 2. And, yes, this is the most significant Beantown golf happening since the ’99 Ryder Cup, which Bradley watched from atop his father’s shoulders. And, sure, his dad Mark Bradley, a PGA professional, once met Boston golf legend Francis Ouimet. Oh, and in Keegan’s home office in Jupiter, Florida, he has a signed boxing glove from Lowell, Massachusetts brawler Micky Ward (played by Mark Wahlberg in “The Fighter”) and a shoe from Celtics legend Paul Pierce. He has the puck he dropped at a Bruins game, the coin he flipped at a Patriots game, the ball he threw at a Red Sox game. Who doesn’t? A U.S. Open in Boston is nothing, even if Bradley did graduate from Hopkinton High School, nearly 33 miles from The Country Club, which, hey, 33 was Larry Bird’s number, and beloved old Red Sox catcher Carton “Pudge” Fisk is the uncle of Bradley’s wife, Jillian, and – Oh, never mind. Bradley is sort of freaking out about this U.S. Open. But he’s trying not to. “It’s big,” he said in a lengthy interview at his house in Jupiter, Florida. “It’s the thing I’m most proud of; when you’re from New England, it becomes who you are. But I’ve sort of had to block this out in my brain and try to minimize it. I knew it was a big deal because no one in my family was talking about it, and then I qualified, and here come the texts. “It’s no secret,” he continued, “that this is going to be a tough week because of how much I want to play well, and when you try too hard to make it happen, it never works out.” The Country Club was, however, the site of the ultimate win for a hometown kid, when Francis Ouimet, a 20-year-old amateur who grew up across the street from the course, won the 1913 U.S. Open in a playoff with two of the greatest players of the day. They made a movie about that, too. Bradley knows all about it; he’s been told his dad, Mark, was 12 when he met the great man, who was by then around 65. Like Ouimet, Keegan Bradley has been overlooked. And like Ward, he has been knocked down only to pick himself up off the mat. Into the teeth of the storm Bradley wanted to play for a college golf powerhouse, but it didn’t happen, so he went to St. John’s University in Queens, New York. (He now says it was the best possible place for him.) “It’s tough to get many looks when you come from Massachusetts,” said Jon Curran, Bradley’s friend from Hopkinton High, who played the PGA TOUR and now works in insurance. “Golf in Massachusetts is just not cool, and if you were good at it, it felt like we were super nerds.” Or super rugged; Bradley might have picked a more golf-friendly climate than Woodstock, Vermont (before his dad took a club pro job in Hopkinton), but that, too, was formative. Golf in the snow and sleet? Bring it on. He has become America’s premier bad-weather golfer. At this year’s PLAYERS Championship, in brutal wind and cold, Bradley got the wrong end of the draw and finished fifth. At the rain-plagued Wells Fargo Championship, he tied for second. That finish clinched his spot in this year’s U.S. Open, earning him an exemption via the world ranking that allowed him to skip the uncertainty of Final Qualifying. At the 2011 Bryon Nelson, his first TOUR win, weekend rounds featured winds of 25 mph with gusts hitting 40. He’s made so much hay in bad weather he’s basically human Gore-Tex. “He’s so into his process and practices really, really well, and efficiently, so when things have a chance to go awry, his stuff’s really tight,” Curran said. “It takes a lot more than some rain or cold for stuff to go off kilter, and that’s because of all the work that he puts in.” The most challenging storm for him has been golf’s anchoring ban, which went into effect in 2016. Bradley, who had used a belly-putter, was suddenly adrift. “I think I underestimated the effect of it,” he said. Although he made the 2012 and 2014 U.S. Ryder Cup teams, and the 2013 U.S. Presidents Cup team, Bradley was knocked backward and took up a grim residency outside the top 150 in Strokes Gained: Putting. And the stress of it all crept into other facets of his game. Ah, but this is Bradley we’re talking about. Former ski racer. Overlooked amateur golfer. He likes it hard and rebuilt his game under the tutelage of coach Darren May, who teaches at Grove XXIII, the South Florida club built by the basketball legend Michael Jordan, who Bradley counts as a friend. (A framed scorecard in his office commemorates the Medalist member-guest in which Bradley and Jordan were teammates, signed by Tiger Woods, who played with Ahmad Rashad.) Bradley controlled what he could control, which meant making sure he was one of the TOUR’s best from tee to green. He would be ready when his putting came back to him. If it came back. “I’ve been on every putting machine ever made,” he said. “And the people running them would say, ‘Your stroke looks great!’ And that was even more infuriating.” Determined to find answers, Bradley finally sought help from renowned putting coach Phil Kenyon, and they began working together at THE CJ CUP @ SUMMIT last October. “Technically he was in a good place; whatever journey he’d been on, he wasn’t a basket case,” said Kenyon, who also works with Max Homa, Francesco Molinari and others. “It was about getting him to believe in his technical skills, because golf is so much about confidence, but it was also about improving his green-reading and alignment.” Their work has paid big dividends. Bradley led the field in putting at the Wells Fargo and was gaining strokes on the field on the greens as of last week (81st in Strokes Gained: Putting). “My green-reading is so much better,” he said. Curran said the stats were always somewhat deceiving. “He was never a bad putter,” he said. “It was never a thing like, ooh, boy, you gotta look away. Whenever we played him for money at the Grove or Bear’s Club, the guy was freakin’ good no matter what he used. You were thinking he was going to make everything he looked at.” Boston to his core That Bradley sticks in the fight goes to his Boston roots, and that Micky Ward boxing glove. “I love everything about his story,” Bradley said. “He’s the perfect Boston athlete, just a hard-nosed, blue-collar guy. Tough. Resilient. I love the movie, love everything about his career. And my dad’s side of the family is from near Lowell, so to them he’s an even bigger hero.” Bradley battled through the anchoring ban to win the BMW Championship in 2018, his first win in six years. But this latest resurgence is another example of his resilience. Last year, he dropped out of the top 150 in the world ranking for the first time since 2011, back when he was a winless TOUR rookie. Now he’s back inside the top 50 thanks to five top-10s already this season, four of which have come since March. At 33rd in the FedExCup entering last week, he’s on pace for his best FedExCup finish in four years. Brendan Steele, Bradley’s BFF on TOUR and partner at the Zurich Classic of New Orleans (they finished T4 in April), calls Bradley the quintessential grinder. “He says, ‘I always want to shoot the best score I can,’” Steele said. “He doesn’t subscribe to the theory of, if he’s 8 over, he may as well go for it and blast driver, like a lot of guys out here. He’s like, no, no, I still want to shoot the best score I can.” Bradley’s aunt is LPGA Hall of Famer Pat Bradley, and he recalls trying to catch her attention during tournaments only to have her look right through him. “She was so dialed in she wouldn’t even see me,” he said. “I remember thinking how cool that was.” Keegan, too, gets dialed in and stays there, come what may. In addition to his remarkable bad-weather rounds, he overcame a late triple bogey and won in a playoff over Jason Dufner at the 2011 PGA Championship, his first-ever major. (So much for rookie nerves.) There is something very Bostonian about that. It’s Ward refusing to stay down; the Red Sox besting the New York Yankees after going down 0-3 in the 2004 ALCS; Brady and New England’s history-making 2017 Super Bowl comeback against the Atlanta Falcons. It all seems to be in Bradley’s blood. “He lives and dies Patriots,” Steele said. “We’ve got a group text with Jon Curran and Jamie Lovemark, and Keegan sends us something about the Patriots almost daily. It’s like, come on, dude! We’re at that portion of the day where we’ve got to talk about the Patriots? In April?” Added Curran, “He’s very well informed. He listens to Felger and Mazz, which is like the local sports radio feed. I don’t know how he gets it, but he does. He’ll text like an op-ed piece from the bowels of the internet on what’s going on with the Patriots.” Bradley will throw out the first pitch before the Red Sox/A’s game Tuesday, and he’s determined to enjoy it more than he did in 2011, when the New York Yankees were in town and the stands were swollen with fans. Standing on the hallowed Fenway dirt for the biggest 60-foot-6-inch toss of his life, Bradley was a nervous wreck, and it didn’t help that Red Sox pitchers Tim Wakefield and Jon Lester gave him conflicting advice on whether he should throw from the windup. “They’re both golfers,” he said, “and I think they were messing with me.” Also, he was hoping to throw to big Red Sox catcher Jason Varitek; instead, out came 5-foot-8-inch second baseman Dustin Pedroia. (Yep, definitely messing with him.) In the end, Bradley didn’t throw from the windup, although it was all such a blur, he barely remembers anything. “I threw it a little high,” he said, “but I wasn’t going to bounce it up there. It was a 5 out of 10.” In his day job, he wants to contend five times a year. He wants to make the U.S. Presidents Cup Team that will defend its title at Quail Hollow in the fall. And he wants to look good. Bradley is a Jordan athlete who recently had to rent a storage unit for his sprawling shoe collection, much to Jill’s relief, and he’s had a special pair made up for this U.S. Open. “They’re going to be decked out with Boston stuff,” Curran said. “I think there’s something about Carlton Fisk on there, and other stuff, and this is a guy who doesn’t love attention.” Could Bradley win his second major and fifth TOUR title overall this week? He has not lifted a trophy since the 2018 BMW Championship, but odd things happen at The Country Club, where Ouimet beat favored Harry Vardon and Ted Ray in 1913. This, too, was where Ben Crenshaw’s U.S. Ryder Cup team trailed 10-6 when Crenshaw wagged his finger and said, “I’m a big believer in fate; I have a good feeling about tomorrow.” The Americans won, 14.5–13.5. “We went Friday and Sunday,” Bradley said of that historic week, when asked about it at the 2014 Ryder Cup. “I was on my dad’s shoulders when Justin made that putt. I was on 18 green, but I could see through the trees, and I remember seeing all the red shirts running by.” It was, at the time, the greatest comeback in the history of the event. And there it is again. Willpower. Fortitude. Bradley has seen players go through a dip, only to rally at the end their careers. He’s only 35. He hopes he can conjure something similar. “Almost every week, someone will say, ‘It’s so great to see you playing good again,’” he said. “And I’ll thank them, but it’s not really a compliment. I’ve made the second-to-last playoff event every year but twice, and one of those was during COVID, which was weird for everybody, playing different courses. I feel like I’ve been pretty consistent, even though it’s top-heavy early in my career. I have a lot of good years left, and I’ve got more to prove.”

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