Full Swing's Season 4 Premiere Gets Right Into Keegan Bradley's Inner Turmoil

In my life, there is no sport better to rewatch than golf.

Maybe it’s because every tournament is four days with so many twists and turns over that stretch of time. Golfers spend hours upon hours sleeping on leads and opportunities. We forgot most of the stuff that happened before the final nine holes on a Sunday, so getting a chance to watch it back is a reminder of all the maybes and could be's that go down at golf’s biggest events.

The opening episode of Full Swing Season Four was a great reminder of how fun it is to get a look back at something as special as the 2025 Masters. It was the biggest event of last year and most believe it’s a top-3 Masters moment of all time.

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Image: Full Swing Season 4, Episode 1 on Netflix

With the episode starting on Keegan Bradley and his tumultuous relationship with the Ryder Cup - the main focus of season four - and someone linking that with Rory McIlroy and his complicated relationship with the Masters made sense of two of golf’s biggest events.

Keegan becoming Ryder Cup captain at an age where he was still a top-20 golfer in the world meant that navigating life was going to be complicated, and we only got to see 1 percent of what that life looked like. Seeing the family and the mustache decision—shoutout Jillian Bradley and her call to toss that caterpillar on Keegan’s face to break the awkwardness of a coach competing against his pupils all season long—and the flashback to all the rough moments for Bradley and the Ryder Cup was a perfect setup to what will eventually unfold during this season.

Image: Keegan Bradley with his family via Full Swing Season 4, Episode 1 on Netflix

Much like the first season of Full Swing, this past year with all the Ryder Cup drama was setting up to be perfect television. Much like watching a Bond movie, you know the dapper protagonist is going to end up alive with a martini in his hand and some supermodel on his arm by the end of the movie, but the fun lies in the journey.

Image: Luke Donald at home with his family via Full Swing Season 4, Episode 1 on Netflix

This first episode gave fans that didn’t follow golf as closely as those ingrained in the game an idea of the two faces of their respective Ryder Cup teams. Luke Donald, the stoic, past-his-prime as a player but definitely not as a peer, European captain understanding the process while his counterpart tries to figure it all out.

The moment of the first episode that stood out to me was Keegan explaining that even during a week where he misses the cut at the biggest tournament in golf, there were duties he had to deal with that meant immediately switching over from player to captain. Most guys that miss cuts are going to sulk and punish themselves as they fly home on their private jets, but Keegan understood early into the season that there was more to the job than just picking a few names in the fall.

Image via Getty Images

The opening episode sets the stage perfectly for the rest of the season and how all of 2025 in professional golf focused around three days in New York.

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Editor's Note: Now available on Netflix, Full Swing is produced by Pro Shop’s own Chad Mumm and Mark W. Olsen, alongside PGA TOUR Studios, Vox Media Studios, and Box to Box Films.