SUTTON, Mass. – From Jupiter, Fla., to Worcester Regional Airport via jet service, Keegan Bradley walked into a time tunnel Monday afternoon courtesy of Pleasant Valley Country Club.
Oh, the New England native was in attendance as defending champion of last summer’s Travelers Championship, an unpretentious PGA Tour stop that still has that mom and pop feel only it is brilliantly wrapped in a blanket of community philanthropy and has been elevated to the top tier of tournaments. Coming four months since the day Bradley birdied the 72nd hole to stun Tommy Fleetwood for his second win at TPC River Highlands in three years, this media day was put on so that Andy Bessette, chief administrator of Travelers, and Nathan Grube, championship director, could thank media members who annually spread the word and cover this event.
Bradley was the guest of honor, understandably for his wins in ’23 and ’25, but also for his unfiltered love of the Travelers. Bradley understands that the tournament's rich history poured its foundation as PGA Tour in 1952.
When he earned his way onto the PGA Tour in the fall of 2010, Bradley said his first thought was “I’ll get to play in the Travelers,” and he’s done so in all 15 of his PGA Tour seasons.
As dialogues bounced back and forth between Bradley’s memory of watching his aunt Pat play in a 1999 LPGA Tournament at Pleasant Valley (the areaWEB. com Challenge where she finished T-38) to the winning birdie last summer on what Keegan calls “the best finishing hole in the world,” the 18th at TPC River Highlands, my mind considered that we are talking of two locales entries that offer special golf memories in New England.
Born the Insurance City Open and forever beloved as the Greater Hartford Open, the Travelers Championship has an impressive list of those who won multiple times (Billy Casper, Arnold Palmer, Phil Mickelson) and Bradley becomes the eighth name to do so.
So clearly, Bradley appreciates his connection to that championship. Still, he was sitting 80 miles north, at Pleasant Valley CC, a parkland course that has an equally precious place in golf history. Tony Lema won the 1965 Carling World Open here in ’65, three years later Palmer triumphed at PV in the Kemper Open, and from 1969 to 1998 the list of winners of the annual PGA Tour stop in this small bucolic town included Casper, Lanny Wadkins, Raymond Floyd, Mark Calcavecchia, and Brad Faxon.
Pleasant Valley is where 50 years ago Roger Maltbie – long before he became the greatest on-course reporter in television golf history – won the second of his five PGA Tour tournaments and subsequently left the $40,000 check in a local watering hole called T.O. Flynn’s.
(The original check was quickly canceled and Maltbie got paid by PV owner Cuz Mingolla. Subsequently found at the bar, for years the original check was framed there until being returned to PV where it now sits among so many other wonderful mementos of a storied club.)
Waiting for the program to commence, Gary Young, the PGA Tour’s Senior Vice-President of rules and competition, talked of his 20-year run at PV (1988-2008) where he started as an assistant and advanced to become head pro. He still lives nearby so it was a chance stop by and reminisce and told of getting a last-minute call to fill the field in 1988.
To stroll through the clubhouse at Pleasant Valley is to discover mementos of a time gone by -- like scorecards belonging to luminaries such as Ben Crenshaw and Gary Player.
Nervous? Oh, yeah, and the reality packed even more pressure when he was told that one of his playing competitors would be Curtis Strange. “And he had just won the U.S. Open (three months earlier),” laughed Young, who would go on to play in three other PGA Tour stops at Pleasant Valley.
Arguably the grandest LPGA legend of them all, Mickey Wright, won a tournament a PV in 1964 and Kathy Whitworth captured two others, in 1966 and 1971. Before he became a renowned orthopedic surgeon and leading authority/safekeeper of Olympic history and statistics, Dr. Bill Mallon won back-to-back Massachusetts Amateurs, the second of which came at PV in 1974, and the toughest of all those NHLers who mastered the golf game, Bill Ezinicki, won the State Open here in 1964.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, we know. At a time when so many think that the greatest game and the greatest player and the greatest shot and the greatest putt and the greatest comeback and the greatest tournament moment all happened in the last year or two, or since you got that new phone on which you watched (big sigh), history still enthralls moi.
What was it that Churchill said? “Study history, study history. In history lies all the secrets of golf.”
Or something like that.
So it was that when questions took Bradley away from the nuances of PV and the heritage of the Travelers and into the matter of his captainship ending in a disappointing Ryder Cup 22 days ago, my interest waned.
Not that the Ryder Cup doesn’t offer wonderful memories, because on 11 different occasions in five different countries my attendance has been marvelously rewarded by this international competition. But because where spending two hours chipping and putting brings extraordinary joy, less than a minute of beating a dead horse bores me to tears.
To his credit, Bradley accepted the questions and offered perspectives that were gut-wrenching to hear.
“You win, it’s glory for a lifetime,” he said. “You lose, it’s ‘I’m going to have to sit with this for the rest of my life.’ There’s no part of me that thinks I’ll ever get over this.”
Then this: “This event has been so brutal to me. (As a player he was on the losing side in ’12 and ’14). I don’t know if I want to play (again). No, I do. It’s such a weird thing to love something so much that just doesn’t give you anything.”
Having been pulled away from so many pleasant thoughts of Pleasant Valley and the Travelers Championship and the glorious histories in play with each of them, it was painful to hear such heartache from Bradley. So here’s hoping a clearer and bigger picture rightfully replaces the Bethpage angst; a picture of the last three seasons during which time Bradley across 67 PGA Tour tournaments has won four times and piled up 15 top-10s.
At 39, he’s been riding the best golf of his career and deserves to revel around that history and not have to beat a dead horse.
History does matter. Study it.
