Tom Brady whipped Keegan Bradley on the golf course
Tom Brady, Michael Jordan, Keegan Bradley, and Luke Donald walk on to a golf course …
Tom Brady, his NFL opponents won’t be surprised to learn, is something of a competitor even off the football field, a fun fact Keegan Bradley found out last weekend when his idol bested him at his place of work, the golf course.
Some background for non-Bostonians: Bradley, as the Vermont native will be the first to admit (and did, on ESPN Radio’s SVP & Russillo on Monday), grew up deifying the New England Patriots all-world QB. Ever since he received a text from TB12 congratulating him for winning the 2011 PGA Championship, Bradley has been drooling over the possibility of teeing it up with Touchdown Tom. That pretty much catches you up.
@stoolpresidente Brady is god.
— Keegan Bradley (@Keegan_Bradley) March 29, 2015 Fast forward to a couple days ago and Bradley -- vacationing in the Bahamas at the same time as PGA Tour player Luke Donald, Brady, and fellow Bear’s Club member Michael Jordan -- found himself in the midst of realizing his dream. It seems that he and Donald were picking the pockets of TB and MJ at Baker’s Bay Golf & Ocean Club on Saturday when the foursome reached the 18th green. MJ’s looking at a 20-foot putt to determine bragging rights and, true to his Hall of Fame nothin’-but-net form, buries it, pushing the match to a Sunday conclusion.
Some hoops intervened, but Sunday rolls around and Bradley’s licking his chops in anticipation of fattening his wallet at Brady’s expense.
“So the next day, I say, ‘Tom Brady, I’m going to give him 12 shots and this is easy money,’” Bradley said. “So I’m getting all cocky on the first tee and I get a match with him and I win the first hole.
“I go, ‘TB I’ll give you a buyout if you want.’ I start to chirp,” Bradley, who called his superstar BFFs “two of the great trash-talkers ever,” recounted. “And then he runs off — he plays the next 14 holes 4-under par, beat me 6&5. So he’s really good like I couldn’t believe.
“As soon as we get the match,” Bradley said, “his competitive juices kicked in, he’s smoking.”
Which is not exactly the word picture Bradley originally painted of how things went down.
@stoolpresidente don't ask em how golf went early that day.
— Keegan Bradley (@Keegan_Bradley) March 29, 2015 Bradley will, no doubt, regale listeners with additional tales of Tom and Keegan’s Excellent Adventure at this week’s Shell Houston Open. The three-time tour winner will try to put his humiliating loss in the rearview and tune up one last time for next week’s Masters.
MJ and TB, by the way, kicked the golfers’ butt on the court, where the owners of a combined 10 world championships proved to be an unbeatable duo.
“They got this ‘greatest of all time’ partnership going,” Bradley said about Jordan’s six NBA championship trophies and Brady’s four Super Bowl rings.
As for how it was to have the chance to spend time with his boyhood favorite, Bradley’s reaction was pretty cool.
“It was almost one of these things where I almost didn’t want to meet Brady just because he’s so high on my list of people. I’ve tried to model my career after him, I grew up watching him,” said Bradley, who had met Brady once before at Augusta during a practice round for the Masters and counts Jordan as a friend and mentor.
“I played 36 holes with him, played basketball with him, and I got to really kind of be with the guy and hang out,” he said. “It was one of those moments where you look around and you realize, ‘I don’t know how I’ve gotten here in my life’ … It was just a really, really fun time.”
★★★
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