How one phone call changed Ben Griffin’s golf career — and his life — forever
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- Ben Griffin earned a U.S. Ryder Cup captain’s pick after a breakout PGA season
- Griffin won twice and posted top-10 finishes, ranking just behind Scottie Scheffler
- Despite strong form, Griffin missed automatic qualification and relied on selection
The cameras were rolling when Ben Griffin took the call. He’d been followed all summer by crews from Netflix’s Full Swing, and they were there when Keegan Bradley was on the other end of the phone. The U.S. Ryder Cup captain had news that was going to change Griffin’s career, one way or the other, and there was nowhere to hide.
“It’s all live,” Griffin said Thursday, eight days after getting the call. “It’s not like anything’s recorded, I got a call from Keegan prior. So everything’s raw emotion, which is pretty cool, but, yeah, it was nerve-wracking. And then I could tell in the tone of his voice when he called me that it was probably going to go my way. Once he said it, it was just surreal. And then after the phone call is over, (fiancee) Dana and I are just looking at each other, like, ‘Man, this is actually happening.’”
One of six captain’s picks for the U.S. team at Bethpage Black in three weeks, Griffin parlayed a breakthrough season on the PGA Tour into not only a pair of wins that earned him a spot in next April’s Masters for the first time, but a spot among the Americans the 29-year-old Chapel Hill native and UNC product never could even have imagined at this time a year ago.
As months of anxiousness over wondering whether he’d make the team were replaced by the sudden stunning realization that he was actually going to play in the Ryder Cup, Griffin also had to engage in some introspection about how his relentless consistency — only Scottie Scheffler was more reliable on tour this summer — will adapt to match play, where birdies are often rewarded more than big scores are punished.
“I’ve got to keep the pedal down and make birdies fast,” Griffin said. “Because I think there’s pros and cons to being a consistent player over the course of the season. It obviously works out pretty well, had a lot of top finishes, but when it comes to match play, you’ve got to make a lot of birdies, and that’s not necessarily how my game tends to be.”
If the way he played this summer was all that mattered, Griffin’s position would never have been in doubt. Only Scheffler had more top-10 finishes. Griffin won twice, finished second twice, third once, contended on a regular basis and even with Bradley and his assistant captains watching every shot down the stretch, maintained that level right through the FedEx Cup playoffs — the new apex of an unusual career path that saw him put down his clubs entirely for 10 months in 2021.
Even finishing no worse than 12th in the final four events of the summer wasn’t quite enough to get one of the six automatic qualifying spots — a process that stretches out over two summers — which meant Bradley would have to choose Griffin as a captain’s pick from among every available player, many with higher profiles or Ryder Cup experience.
Veteran stars like Patrick Cantlay, Collin Morikawa and Justin Thomas were no-brainers. If Bradley chose to play himself, and he would have been perfectly entitled to do so the way he played this summer, the options would have narrowed. When news leaked early that Sam Burns was on the team, it became possible there was only one spot open for a big group of contenders: Griffin, Wyndham Championship winner Cameron Young, Brian Harman, Maverick McNealy and Andrew Novak.
When Bradley decided not to play, Griffin and Young both made it, and in an instant Griffin’s career changed forever. He’s already started spending time with other U.S. teammates who live in Jupiter, and the entire team save lone LIV qualifier Bryson DeChambeau will play the Procore Championship in California next week as a team-building exercise. All of that is designed to prepare the Ryder Cup rookie to represent the United States in golf’s most chaotic, most pressurized, most insane team event in front of New York crowds that figure to set a new standard for jingoistic rowdiness.
“It’s weird because, as a golfer, it’s hard to be a planner by any means,” Griffin said. “If that phone call goes bad, it’s like, ‘All right, I think I’m going to take most of September off. I might play a PGA Tour event at the end of September, maybe play a couple in October.’ Or I get the call, and now I’m playing the event in Napa and I’ll play the Ryder Cup, and then I’ll take October off. So I had no idea what my fall schedule was going to look like. It was totally up in the air based on that just one three-minute phone call dictating how I’m going to treat the rest of the year.”
His schedule wasn’t the only thing that changed. The year was already a whirlwind for Griffin, who is renovating his house in Florida, getting married in December and being followed by the Full Swing cameras, all while playing the best golf of his life. Meanwhile, he went from winning a team event with Novak to winning the Charles Schwab in Fort Worth in May to finding himself not only somewhat unexpectedly in contention for the Ryder Cup team, but a captain’s pick to make his debut for the United States.
It’s a long way from where Griffin started the summer.
“Starting this year, I had never made a cut in a major. I hadn’t even played in two of the majors,” Griffin said. “And so it’s just been a huge breakthrough year. But it’s just nuts. Putting myself in the same category as some of these other players that a year ago just felt like they were so much more elite than I was, and I just hadn’t broken down the door or any of those things. Now I have, and it’s just a bizarre feeling to know that I’m one of those guys.”
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