Justin Thomas' comments on the Bethpage greens only highlight Keegan Bradley's failure

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For me, there is almost nothing more fun in professional golf than obsessing over small details of Ryder Cup strategy (and performance, and drama, and conspiracy, and whatever else the event provides). I wrote a whole book about it, I got sued for my troubles, I've done entire podcasts about it (both independent and here at Digest) and I get in the same stupid arguments every two years, like clockwork.

I love it. I will do it until the last wisp of oxygen leaves my body. On my death bed, with my loved ones looking on, my last words will be, "Jose Maria Olazabal was the worst winning captain in Ryder Cup history."

So it was with some delight that I read Justin Thomas' comments about the greens at Bethpage. More Ryder Cup content? In December??? Christmas came early!

I like Justin Thomas, more than I like most professional golfers, even though we've spoken only a handful of times and I doubt he could pick me out of a lineup. But for me, his remarks about the greens and the fallout afterward is just further evidence that Keegan Bradley blew it at Bethpage. Which is not what Thomas intended, obviously—he's gone out of his way to defend Bradley post-Ryder Cup, and while that's a longstanding tradition on both sides when it comes to the losing captain (unless your name is Tom Watson), Thomas went above and beyond with some of his comments at the Skins Game and elsewhere.

RELATED: Keegan Bradley's avoidable disaster at Bethpage Black signals a bigger problem

I also feel a little bad piling on Bradley, because he's said that the last two months have been miserable and dark and that his year is an F because he lost the home Ryder Cup. He also, admirably, keeps putting the blame squarely on his own shoulders, right up until yesterday in his press conference at the Hero World Challenge. The Ryder Cup means a lot to him—maybe more than any other current American, even before he was named captain—and he has suffered in the aftermath. I think the decision to name him captain was ridiculous and doomed to failure, and I think his decision to accept the role was somewhere between arrogant and shortsighted, but on a human level it's hard not to feel bad for the guy after it all went wrong.

But I guess I don't feel bad enough, because this late addition to the Bethpage story is too instructive to pass up. If you missed it, Thomas went on No Laying Up—always a really good combination of guest and host—and talked about how the greens were faster on the Sunday singles session than they had been all week, and how the early slowness was a source of frustration to the whole team.

"I don't know why they weren't at all what Keegan had asked for," Thomas said, speaking of the speeds on Friday and Saturday. "I mean, he had been pretty clear of asking for a certain speed and wanting it fast enough. I watched them argue with us that they were 13s [on the Stimpmeter]....It’s like, 'guys, we play golf every week, like, look on TV at how many guys are leaving putts short...these greens are slow, speed them up...it was just so frustrating that we were being fought with and argued with on the speed of the greens that we asked for."

On one hand, this is kind of funny because the captain's agreement stipulates that you're not supposed to be able to influence this stuff after the Sunday preceding the Ryder Cup. Here's the exact text:

It is recognised that the home side has the opportunity to influence and direct the set-up and preparation of the course for the Ryder Cup. It is hereby agreed that any such influence, direction and/or preparation will be limited to course architecture/course design, fairway widths, rough heights, green speed and firmness, and will conclude the Sunday prior to the matches (Sunday, September 21st 2025)

(Quick side note: Is anyone else deeply troubled by the spelling of the word 'recognised,' indicating that Europe authored the agreement??? I'm only 90% joking here.)

In reality, this is not a very big deal, and I'm not even sure there was any violation, unless they did indeed get the grounds crew to speed things up for Sunday singles. The human element is always going to trump the letter of the law in these situations—at the 2019 Presidents Cup in Melbourne, I watched international team assistant K.J. Choi try to work the grounds crew for certain changes, and that's supposed to be totally independent—so I consider the rules angle a nothingburger.

However, it's worth mentioning that text just to make the point that Keegan Bradley really shouldn't have been taken by surprise. For a literal year and a half, he had a chance to oversee conditions at Bethpage, and it sounds like all he did was stipulate a certain speed and then throw up his hands in shock when it seemed slower. It's also very much a case of he-said-he-said, with the players saying, "these are not 13s on the stimpmeter" and the grounds crew or their PGA intermediaries saying "yes, they are," so we don't even know if it's accurate. And on that note, it's worth highlighting the response of an anonymous Bethpage grounds crew staffer on the Twitter account of Rick Golfs, in which they say the following:

"They can argue with numbers all they want, but these are concrete, collected numbers that cannot be argued with. Data is data, not an opinion. Player perception is an opinion."

RELATED: Bethpage Black's flat greens, explained

Which sounds very much like they were rolling at 13, but the U.S. didn't believe it. You can see that kind of dispute happening, especially with the larger frustrations boiling—the Europeans humiliated the U.S. 11.5-4.5 over the first two days. From a purely psychological perspective, they had to be looking for any explanation as to why it went so wrong. After the event, Bradley blamed himself for setting up the course with short, forgiving rough, but not without hinting at the problems with the greens. Here's his full quote from that Sunday:

"I definitely made a mistake on the course setup. I should have listened a little bit more to my intuition. For whatever reason, that wasn't the right way to set the course up. The greens were as soft as I've ever seen greens without it raining. Especially here, it can get pretty firm, and they never firmed up."

Take this in combination with Thomas' quote, and you can easily read him as saying that there's no way the greens were as fast as advertised, and it bailed out the Europeans, who could still flag-hunt after wayward tee shots.

The second quote from the anonymous grounds crew member is, in my mind, even more pertinent:

"There was ZERO conversation between captains and the grounds crew during tournament week, and that is at the fault of Keegan. We would have welcomed him with open arms any day or time (we were there 24/7) and only spoke with him directly ONCE- weeks before the event. If there was a problem, it should have come from him in practice rounds (that they failed to play) when they would have realized they didn't like the speed."

Again, that kind of intervention during the practice rounds would have been technically against the rules, but the broader point here is spot on: why was this taking Bradley by surprise on Friday? In a somewhat confusing follow-up on PGA Tour Radio, Thomas clarified that he wasn't throwing the grounds crew under the bus, but just pointing out a failure in communication. But again, I ask: whose fault is that? Whose job is it to be in constant communication about course conditions? Do you think a captain like Luke Donald or Paul McGinley or Davis Love or Steve Stricker would have left that to chance? Was Keegan maybe a little busy being a full-time player, or maybe a little under-informed becasuse he'd never even been a vice captain?

Another critical detail is that while Europe played the full 18 holes at least eight times in the two weeks before the event—it's hilarious now to go back to old Reddit threads asking, hey, why are the Europeans already at the course and we're not?—the American practice regimen reportedly consisted of two nine-hole rounds. If the red flags were already up about the speed of the greens, we certainly didn't hear it mentioned at the time, and it only became an issue after the drubbing on Friday and Saturday. Nobody on the American team said the greens were the only reason for the poor play, so I'm not trying to paint them as excuse-makers, but it's also a fact that the slow green narrative only took root (at least publicly) in the aftermath.

I don't know about you, but of the two possible explanations here—either Europe schooled the Americans in putting because they knew the course inside and out, or the difference came down to a few disputed measurements on the stimpmeter in a contest between players who mostly play on the same tour anyway—there's one I find a lot more convincing.

It all comes back to the same question: Where was the preparation? Why didn't Bradley know this grounds crew by name? Why wasn't he obsessively going over green speeds with them weeks and months before the event, and why wasn't he hovering like a helicopter parent in the lead-up (rules be damned) if he thought they were too slow? Why did the visiting team get more reps, by far, on the home team's course?

To me, this story that on the surface could provide an excuse for the American failure—they didn't get the greens to where we wanted them—is just further evidence of a captain who found himself way out of his depth. Bradley was woefully unprepared for the job, and GreensGate, far from implicating the grounds crew at Bethpage, just sheds more unflattering light on the worst American Ryder Cup since Gleneagles.

Previously on Golfpocalypse:

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