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Early Sunday morning, Keegan Bradley woke up from a nightmare.
two Nightmares really.
He sleepered a 54-hole one-shot lead to reach the final round of the Travelers’ Championship. But that sleep, he later admitted, was rudely interrupted.
Bradley got up first with a starter after being hit by several shots while sleeping out of bounds. Ugh. Then, he woke up to the unsettling vision that Justin Thomas — who today started at 14-under, seven shots off Bradley — had just shot a 10-under par 60. In other words, Bradley experienced golf’s version of the world’s most common nightmare: falling (down a plate). lead) and stalk (ferociously, from seven shots back).
But wow, how the day turned out to be a dream. By Sunday evening, as Bradley began his walk to the 18th green, he was in possession of three shots. He raised his arms in front of the crowd, immersed in cheers and cheers, and pumped his fists, making full use of the security that comes with some insurance strikes. The only thing left is two parties and a party.
He was raised in Vermont (with stints in New Hampshire and Massachusetts), Bradley dreamed of becoming a New England sports legend. The Travelers—held in Cromwell, Connecticut, just outside Hartford—was the first pro golf event he personally attended. Now he’s smiling wide in the crowd. Sometimes athletes talk about the moment of winning as if it was a blur. I felt the opposite. Bradley seemed fully aware of how special this moment was. He looked at the crowd and pushed his hands in the air like a sponge, desperately trying to absorb the ecstasy in the air, absorbing the staggering reality in real time, hoping that he could shake it off later and experience the feeling again.
In the minutes after his win, the New England golf champ spotted, among hundreds of texts, one from Michael Jordan. Another came from Red Sox legend Tim Wakefield. The third was from Aaron Rodgers, which means a lot, Bradley said, “even though he’s playing for the Jets now.”
And then there was his family. Bradley Bear hugged his children and wife, Jillian. He did a post-tour interview with CBS’s Amanda Renner with his son by his side and then the two made a multi-step handshake, one of the most poignant moments of the moment.
Bradley won his first major championship in 2011 as a single man. win with his family? He said it does not compare.
“For them to be able to feel the excitement of this and be here and feel it, I can’t put a price on that,” he said. “It just feels great.”
to understand the dream You have to understand a little bit about Woodstock. As luck would have it, I started Sunday in a small town in East Central Vermont, where I spent the weekend at a friend’s wedding. Bradley grew up in Woodstock, just two towns away from where I stayed and only 90 minutes down the winding roads from my small town upbringing. He’s well known on the golf course in Woodstock and he’s well known on the courses I grew up playing on and he’s well known on every small town course in between as well.
We drove on and on our way out, catching a glimpse of New England’s lush and idyllic perfection. Woodstock has a population of 3,000—part of the crowd that rings the 18th green—which has been called “America’s Most Beautiful Small Town.” It serves as a country wedding destination in the summer, a snowy ski getaway in the winter and a trip back in time in every season. It’s pretty far out there, too—a two-and-a-half-hour straight shot of I-91 from TPC River Highlands.
“Where I grew up, it’s like the South, down here,” Bradley said of Connecticut.
He describes his childhood fondly. Bradley was a competitive skier and golfer who grew up in a family of skiers and golfers. It’s hard to be a successful golfer who grew up in a rural area, where space is plentiful, golf is cheap, and kids are really young. Can He hung out on the course, from morning to night, honing his game all the while. But Vermont? This is not a hotbed for aspiring professionals.
A decade ago, when Bradley made his debut on the PGA Tour and quickly became an unlikely major champion, a story emerged about how he spent his childhood living in a trailer park with his father, Mark. But Bradley believes the story could be misconstrued as an illustration of the family’s poverty. Instead, it showed what he and his father—an assistant touring golf professional at the time—had in abundance: adventure, determination, and relentless pursuit of Bradley’s future in golf. Squeezing his 6-foot-3 frame onto a designer over-the-counter bed inside the RV, his 6-foot-5 dad crammed into his own bed nearby? This is a different origin story than most Tour professionals. But Bradley enjoyed this difference. It’s still different.
It was in those years that Bradley began to shape the wafer that still stands above his broad shoulders. Need proof? The first words in his first post-win interview were the following, to Renner:
“This is for all the kids growing up in New England who would sit around during the winter and watch other people play golf,” he said. In his press conference later, he expanded on this message. “This is for all the kids like me who grew up in the winter and couldn’t play and were going to see the kids from Florida and down south improve and compete and get invited to the biggest tournaments in the country that I was never invited to,” he said.
think about it. In the wake of one of the most emotional wins of his life, Bradley’s mind has returned to junior golf and the invitations he never received. Whether it’s a lesson he learned in Vermont, on that trailer park, mini golf or sharing the fairways of South Florida with Jordan, one thing is clear about that chip on Bradley’s shoulder: He loves it out there.
To understand the nightmarethen you need to understand the part of Bradley that always struggles with golf.
Earlier this year, I got to watch the Players Championship with him, where he said something I’ve never heard another pro say in exactly the same way.
“I am a person who worries every day of my life and every second. So playing golf difficult For me,” he said. “It’s hard for me to go out and hit every shot. It’s hard knowing I have to play this course and shoot four putts on the 17th, four putts off the 18th tee. It doesn’t come easy for me.”
Golf is hard for everyone, of course, but I would consider it easier for professionals because they are better at playing it. But achieving greater game mastery does not guarantee a lighter mental load while playing it. It leads to Bradley’s pre-shoot routine, which is tense and ritualistic and calls to mind another New England sports hero, Red Sox shortstop Nomar Garciaparra, whose pre-bat adjustments were, well, you can watch them. here. Bradley’s approach is similarly unique. Not everyone likes it.
Bradley explained the amount of work required to manage his stress, particularly when he was playing in front of a home crowd. He knows it doesn’t make sense, because his family and friends love him too “whether I shoot 80 or 60”. But he wants it for them and he wants it for himself too, even though it’s hard. maybe because Difficult.
For Bradley, the joys of success in professional golf are close neighbors to its pure misery. One of the things he said after the win was that he dreamed as a kid playing at Fenway Park or Gillette Stadium in front of thousands of adoring fans. But he also told me that after throwing the first pitch at Fenway twice, he swore to do it again because of the anxiety it raised.
Golf successes are no different. Until Sunday, he explained that the best part about golf was the fact that he didn’t have to play any more.
“It was a really stressful day. I’m so glad it’s over,” he said. His next sentence? “Today was a day I will remember for the rest of my life.”
There are more nightmares to comeBecause competitive golf will continue to be difficult for Bradley, even as he continues to compete at the highest level. This is the result of caring as much as he does and handling the wire the way it is. The PGA Tour is filled with neurotic solo acts, of course, but most of them hide their insecurities behind stoic masks. When Patrick Cantlay plays well, he makes golf look simple. Bradley never does. Effort not found in the list.
Nightmares are scary because they are grounded in reality. Sometimes the pros hit balls out of bounds, as happened in his Saturday night dreams. Even an elite driver like Bradley. He did miss the cut at the US Open just one week ago, after all. He is hardly invincible. And the pros shoot 10 times below par sometimes, too. If Thomas had shot 60 on Sunday, he would have posted a four-innings score of 24-under-par—better than Bradley. His nightmares are well calculated.
But there are more dreams in the future, too. The first thing Keegan said to Gillian as he walked off the field was how much this advanced his chances of making the Ryder Cup team. He has reached 7th place in the US team standings. In terms of golf priorities, nothing currently ranks higher.
Bradley is back in the top 20 now, too, jumping to No. 18 with his win, his highest win in nearly a decade. It’s No. 5 in the FedEx Cup. His future on the PGA Tour is secure.
The key to this success is not only determination and desire, of course. she lays. Since the January 1, 2016 belly putter ban, here is what Bradley’s stats looked like:
Stroke acquisition: Beating (by year)
2016: -.631 (183)
2017:-216 (149)
2018:-358 (174)
2019:-516 (178)
2020:-683 (185)
2021:-.548 (186)
2022: .067 (88th)
2023: 0.458 (23rd)
Did you notice a sudden shift there? Bradley went most of his career on the tour as a first-order bowler and lower-order batsman. Suddenly he’s put together a season where he’s above average in every aspect of the game. At Travelers he was No. 1 in strokes gained on the approach And I gained strokes with his putter. When you consider that Bradley’s greatest strength is his drive, this is an unbeatable combination. He has put forward theories to change the situation, and reasons that involve a combination of AimPoint, experience, and hard work. But he also quite understands thanking the golf gods for the gift of a hot putter; He and his pack, Scott Vail, are caught on camera repeatedly bowing to their new and improved weapon.
“We just pay our respects. If the racket works, I will do everything I can to keep it going,” Bradley said. “We just bow and say thank you.”
There’s no telling what’s next for Bradley. He has now won twice this season. He’s scored a couple more top kids, too. But before Sunday, he had eight tournaments without a top 10. His Ryder Cup dreams were on a razor’s edge, with success on one side and failure on the other.
It’s the only place he knows.