The five-time major winner has a casual vibe that hides an inner fire which has powered him through golf's peaks and valleys—and now has him in a prime spot to defend at the PGA Championship.
Brooks Koepka emits such a casual, aloof vibe that the notion he cares little about the game he excels at certainly carries some weight. Killer Koepka, the major championship stalker, has come to be his signature. So, too, the idea that he doesn’t sweat the small stuff.
“Brooks has been pretty good at timing things up,’’ says his dad, Bob Koepka. “But I talked to Pete after that and he said, 'if the Masters was three weeks ago, it would be a totally different story.’ He was flushing everything and I think he peaked early. A little flaw came in and he wasn’t covering the ball like he used to.”
“I’ve never let him them down like I did at Augusta,” he told his dad. “So I put myself in penalty workouts every day to show that I’m going to work my butt off to get back to where I need to be.”It carried over into his time in Australia at LIV’s Adelaide event. And again a week later in Singapore, where he won his fourth LIV event, the most of any player in the three-year existence of the league.
But while Koepka amassed this amazing major record, he was ordinary in regular PGA Tour events—and has been at times in LIV Golf events. One of the amazing things about Woods is he didn’t discriminate. He wanted to win the majors more than anything but he picked off the regular events at a huge rate, too. But before he joined LIV, Koepka had those four majors—and just four other PGA Tour titles.
During a hectic LIV media and photo session earlier this year, Koepka was taking a break between responsibilities and getting a bite of lunch while talking with a reporter about his major run of a few years ago, the subsequent injuries that derailed him, the uneasy time when he signed with LIV Golf that had him wondering about his future, and then his resurgence last year with his major championship victory.
“But it was fun as a little kid. You grow up and want to play golf. It’s a dream. Then you see the business side. There’s this deal, there’s this shoot, there’s this meeting. It becomes a job. And it transitions from a fun game at the club with your buddies and having a few beers. That’s not the golf we play out here. My Challenge Tour days were the most fun because it wasn’t a job to me then.”
“We only have four events a year that are like our Super Bowl. Whatever team wins the Super Bowl, they are having a great time. Same with the World Series. Any of those guys who won a major last year are in the conversation as among the best players. You look at Rahm, myself, Scottie Scheffler ... and they’ve been there for a while too.”“But a big thing has been health, too,” Koepka says. “Things got off. I think I’m doing something but I’m not. Then we try to correct it.
Amazingly, Koepka contended at the PGA Championship that spring, finishing second to Mickelson and was tied for fourth at the U.S. Open and tied for sixth at the British Open. “I felt like I couldn’t play golf the way I wanted to play golf,” he says. “That was the only reason why I wasn’t sure if I was going to keep going. I don’t think many people knew. It took me a year and a half to get my knee to be healthy. I was like, “If I walked Augusta three weeks after, O.K. , I can walk the golf course. I can play.” That was my mindset. But are you actually healthy and I wasn’t.”Koepka spent a relatively miserable first few months with LIV Golf.
After opening at Augusta with a 65 to tie Rahm, Koepka got a lot of queries about finding his game, about being back, even about his future in major championships due to his association with LIV and the inability to earn Official World Golf Ranking points. “I got close and I tasted it,” he says. “Obviously I was super disappointed and not happy about it. Felt like I played good enough to win. Didn’t. Bad Sunday. I figured out why. ‘Alright I’m never going to let that happen again.’ It was a mental thing, a mistake that’s easily corrected. Mental mistakes are so preventable. If you think this way and it’s been successful, and switch one time and it fails and it flops.
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