Ryder Cup captain Keegan Bradley gave fans a taste of Bethpage excitement
The driving range was bustling, with every hitting bay occupied by players displaying all fashions — from fancy, name-brand golf attire and gaudy belts to those in cargo shorts, untucked shirts and tattoos covering their arms and legs.
By around 1 p.m. around the Red Course, though, the energy changed.
Keegan Bradley, the U.S. Ryder Cup captain and an adopted New Yorker as a former player on the St. John's golf team, which played college matches on the Red, was cruising around the course with his wife, Jillian, sitting alongside him in his red captain's golf cart, both sipping transfusion cocktails.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
USA Today
2 hours ago
- USA Today
Today in Boston Celtics history: Jerryd Bayless, Si Green, Quinn Buckner born
Today in Boston Celtics history, guard alum Jerryd Bayless was born in Phoenix, Arizona in 1988. Bayless played his NCAA basketball with the Arizona Wildcats for a single season before he entered the 2008 NBA Draft, where he was picked up with the 11th overall pick by the Indiana Pacers. The Phoenix native never suited up for the Pacers, dealt to the Portland Trail Blazers soon after the draft was over. He also played for the (then) New Orleans Hornets (now, Pelicans), Toronto Raptors, and Memphis Grizzlies before the latter ball club sent Bayless to Boston in a trade that netted the Celtics 3-and-D wing Courtney Lee. Bayless would play just one season for the Celtics, playing 41 games and starting 14 of them. He averaged 10.1 points, 2.1 rebounds, and 3.1 assists while with the Celtics, leaving in free agency next summer to sign with the Milwaukee Bucks. Other birthdays It is also the birthday of former Celtic guard Sihugo Green, born in New York City in 1933. An alum of Duquesne, Green was the No. 1 overall pick of the 1956 NBA Draft, taken by the (then) Rochester Royals (now, Sacramento Kings). The New Yorker played for the Royals after their move to Cincinnati, the St. Louis Hawks before they relocated to Atlanta, and the defunct Chicago Packers, Zephyrs, and the also-defunct Baltimore Bullets before joining the Celtics via trade in 1965. The last stop of his career, Green averaged 3.2 points and 1.1 rebounds per game as a Celtic, retiring afterward. Finally, it is also the birthday of ex-Celtic guard Quinn Buckner, born today in 1954 in Phoenix, Illinois. Buckner played college ball with the Indiana Hoosiers, where he won an NCAA championship, and was drafted seventh overall in the 1976 NBA Draft by the Bucks. He was dealt to the Celtics in 1982, and won a title in his second of three seasons with Boston. The Indiana alum would average 4.8 points, 1.8 rebounds, and 2.8 assists, traded to the Indiana Pacers in 1983.
USA Today
4 hours ago
- USA Today
Lynch: New CEO Brian Rolapp just ended the PGA Tour as we know it, even if he didn't say it out loud
As the owner of more than 180 patents, inventor and businessman Charles Kettering knew of what he spoke when he said the best way to kill an idea is to get a committee working on it. Yet collective panels often serve a purpose for those who convene them, as evidenced by the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, which exists to provide air cover for what a powerful chief executive has already decided will happen. The CCP has 205 members, and 204 of those votes don't outweigh the one of Xi Jinping. On Wednesday, the PGA Tour's new CEO, Brian Rolapp, announced the creation of the Future Competition Committee, which is charged with aggressively re-examining the Tour's entire business model. It could be airily dismissed as a talking shop, an exercise in keeping minutes while losing months, but Rolapp's star chamber has the potential to author — or at least sign off on — the most seismic shake-up in the organization's history. Not a bad tease for 24 days in the job. In some respects, Rolapp will have less executive authority at the Tour than existed in his past gig. The veteran NFL executive spent over 20 years in a sport with one authority, with players who are contracted, where fans and broadcasters know who's playing each week, and where his outfit owned the biggest event. Now he's in a sport with multiple bodies running things, with talent that isn't contracted, in which fans and broadcasters have no guarantee who will play, and where — despite being arguably the most influential entity in golf — he controls none of the game's five biggest events. Tackling that inequity head-on is a fool's errand. Players will not consent to being contracted, and even armed with a billion-five from Strategic Sports Group, he'd struggle to acquire the PGA Championship or Ryder Cup, given how many PGA of America snouts would need to be dislodged from the trough. So other than creaming off a percentage of the revenue generated by the majors — and make no mistake, the Tour is coming for its share of that — the best he can do is streamline and elevate his own product. What does that look like? In both public comments and meetings with staff, Rolapp has said that every successful sports league requires three things, and that the PGA Tour currently only has one of them. That's competitive parity, notwithstanding Scottie Scheffler performing on a different plane than his contemporaries. The two elements he believes are lacking are simplicity and scarcity. The Tour doesn't have simplicity in any realm. Not in the structure of its season-long points race, not in the format of its playoffs, not in the eligibility criteria for issuing cards and filling fields. Until a change was announced in May, there wasn't even simplicity in the scoring system for the Tour Championship finale. This muddied administrative system is the product of decades of compromises and sops to the membership and other constituents. Flicking away that scab will be painful for many. The most crucial of Rolapp's philosophical pillars is scarcity. The Tour's 2026 regular season schedule has 38 stops, not including the Fall tournaments, and features four weeks when two events are staged concurrently. That's closer to saturation than scarcity. Rolapp's committee is a mechanism to right-size a product that has long been based (and its executives bonused) on one criteria — creating playing opportunities for members. In short, the Tour incentivized its leaders to dilute the product for parochial interests. 'I don't think we have a particular number in mind,' the CEO replied when asked about reducing the number of events. 'That's an important part of the work that we'll work with the committee on. I think the focus will be, as I mentioned, to create events that really matter.' 'Events that really matter' is the type of outwardly anodyne phrasing that will chill the blood of tournament directors and sponsors who already fear their tournament doesn't really matter. Even if Rolapp isn't saying it aloud, his goal is obvious: to dispense with operating principles more befitting a trade association than an elite league. Midwifing that process won't be easy as various stakeholders see their privileges and fiefdoms endangered. Like top players, who will be asked to give more to their business than signing a scorecard and posing for selfies. Like rank-and-file members, who will have to fight harder for less. Or tournaments and sponsors deemed surplus to requirements. And employees at the Tour's GloHo, who will no longer be aligned to business priorities. That's a lot of potentially aggrieved constituents, but Rolapp knows he'll never be more powerful than he is now, that those who hired him are forced to back him or risk looking like a bush league backwater ill-equipped for the modern sports economy. He's clearly intent on being a radical change agent, and the vehicle for that change is the Future Competition Committee. It's an exercise in consensus building, sure, and a potential incubator of ideas to improve the product, but really a means to ensure no one can complain about not being heard. But even powerful factions will find out that being heard no longer means being indulged. The players who wrestled control of the PGA Tour in recent years are about to learn that they sunsetted a commissioner who was of the golf ecosystem and was historically answerable to them, for a modern, aggressive CEO who isn't and, well, isn't.
Yahoo
5 hours ago
- Yahoo
From addiction to a porn-star marriage: What happened to the original Wednesday Addams
History does not record the day of the week when Charles Addams attended a party in New York thrown by a close friend of the poet and actress Joan Blake. We do know it was early in 1964 and that the New Yorker cartoonist was agonising over an upcoming live-action television adaptation of his popular Addams Family cartoons – about a ghoulish family of misfits who lived in morbid seclusion in a spooky mansion. The big headache was the family's little girl – pale of face and menacing of pigtail, but, until that point, nameless. What, Addams fretted to Blake over dinner at PJ Clarke's (a Manhattan restaurant popular with the mid-20th century literati), should he call her? 'I said, 'Wednesday – Wednesday's child is full of woe.' And Wednesday became her name,' Blake told The New Yorker in 2018. Full of woe Wednesday might have been, but the character has quietly become one of the most enduring in Hollywood – as celebrated, in her unsettling, unblinking way, as any superhero or horror movie villain. First brought to life by the troubled child star Lisa Loring in the 1960s TV series, Wednesday remains one of the hottest brands in popular culture: largely thanks to her reinvention as a Gen Z pin-up in Netflix's titular mega-hit, starring Jenna Ortega. Wednesday's reinvention Like a school-going, goth-leaning James Bond, each generation of Addams Family fan has got the Wednesday they deserve: Loring's mischievous youngster, Christina Ricci's grungy Nineties icon, Ortega's darkly sardonic yet shy introvert. But Loring's portrayal remains the most memorable. Born in 1958, she was just five at the time of her audition. 'I got it because of my pout,' she later said. In fact, she was cast – over a 13-year-old rival – because of her resemblance to Carolyn Jones, who portrayed her mother, Morticia Addams. Loring's Wednesday was the original pioneer of the creepy kid species. She played the character relatively straight as a giddy and enthusiastic child – but everything else was distinctly ghoulish. She had two pets: a black widow spider named Homer and a lizard, Lucifer. Her favourite doll was headless, and given the morbid moniker Marie Antoinette. She enjoyed her time on the show, once describing her co-stars as 'like a real family: you couldn't have picked a better cast and crew. Carolyn Jones, John Astin – Morticia and Gomez – they were like parents to me'. She also thought it significantly more sophisticated than its rival, The Munsters, saying The Addams Family was the Marx Brothers compared with The Munsters' Three Stooges. It was an astute observation, given that the show's producer and head writer, Nat Merrin, had worked with the Marxes and was a friend of Groucho. Away from the screen, however, Loring's life was filled with tragic ups and downs – including addiction, grief and a doomed marriage to a porn star. She was born Lisa Ann DeCinces in 1958 in the Marshall Islands, halfway between Hawaii and Australia in the Pacific Ocean, where her parents were both serving with the US Navy. Just like Ortega, who would don Wednesday's famous black-collared dress 60 years later, Loring's mother had Mexican roots. Loring's parents divorced soon after her birth and she was raised by her mother in Hawaii, and later Los Angeles. Show business came knocking early. By age three she was modelling, and claimed her first acting credit in Dr Kildare in 1964. After The Addams Family was cancelled, when she was just six, Loring had to start over. She picked up small parts in The Girl from U.N.C.L.E. (a spin-off from The Man from U.N.C.L.E.) and Fantasy Island. Her biggest post-Wednesday role was in the soap opera As the World Turns, in which she was cast as rebellious teenager Cricket Montgomery. As she reached adulthood, she found it hard to adjust to life post-stardom, with smaller parts in slasher films such as Blood Frenzy marking a big step down from The Addams Family. Struggling to pay the bills, she worked as a make-up artist and interior designer – but substance abuse cast a constant shadow. She turned to drugs and alcohol, before entering rehab in 1990. The following year she discovered the body of her friend Kelly Van Dyke (the niece of the actor Dick), who had died by suicide. Loring, too, tried to take her own life with an overdose. Loring was following a tragic family path. Her mother, Judith Ann Callies, had died from alcoholism in the early 1970s, when her daughter was just 14. The following year, the teenager married her childhood sweetheart, Farrell Foumberg. They had a daughter but broke up soon after. In 1981, there was a second marriage, to soap star Doug Stevenson, and another daughter. Her third marriage was to porn actor Jerry Butler, whom she met while working as a make-up artist on the adult film Traci's Big Trick. Before they were married, Butler had promised to quit the porn industry. But upon discovering that he continued to work in adult films, she divorced him. 'I would not be involved with someone who did that… he was going behind my back and lying to me – that was it,' she said. She went on to remarry, before she died from a stroke in 2023, aged 64. Family history Despite her long afterlife, Wednesday began as an afterthought. She did not feature at all in the first Addams Family cartoon – a single-panel New Yorker illustration from 1946 in which her parents, Gomez and Morticia, assisted by man-servant Lurch, stand on the roof of their haunted mansion, preparing to pour boiling oil on trick-or-treaters below. There was no Wednesday, no severed hand named Thing, no bald Uncle Fester. These would come later. Addams initially didn't even have a name for his macabre clan – and he certainly did not expect that they would become his life's work. If anything, the cartoonist – born in Westfield, New Jersey, in 1912 – bristled at how his characters had been made more palatable by Hollywood; he was especially aghast over the makeover given to Gomez, who had been piggishly ugly in the cartoons (in part inspired by unsuccessful presidential candidate Thomas Dewey) but smartened up for the screen. Still, he didn't object to the royalty cheques, which, along with his New Yorker salary, funded a lavish lifestyle including a two-storey apartment in midtown Manhattan, with a Civil War mortician's embalming table in the dining room. He was also fully occupied as a serial lothario, with love interests including Veronica Lake and Jacqueline Kennedy, whom he allegedly dated mere months after her husband's assassination. Over the decades, Addams's creation has refused to die. Original episodes were re-shown regularly on TV; it was revived on various occasions throughout the 1970s; and the 1991 film, starring Raul Julia, Anjelica Huston and Ricci, won over a whole new generation. It is perhaps Ricci's monstrously deadpan iteration of little Wednesday that Netflix's series owes the most obvious debt – but without Loring, the character may not have ever taken off. As Ortega herself told late-night host Jimmy Fallon in 2022, while discussing the show's viral dance sequence to the Cramps's Goo Goo Muck: 'I paid homage to Lisa Loring, the first Wednesday Addams. I did a little bit of her shuffle that she does. And of course, they cut out of camera when I did do it. But it's there – I know it is'. It was a fitting tribute to the original Wednesday, a strange little girl for whom adulthood proved nothing but one long horror show. Wednesday is streaming on Netflix now Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more. Solve the daily Crossword
