Back in 2019, ahead of the PGA Championship at Bethpage Black, Brooks Koepka was asked why winning majors seemed to come easier than regular PGA Tour events.
His response, which I’ll paraphrase, was a wonderful insight into the inner workings of the mind of a stone-cold killer on major championship weeks.
“There’s what, 156 guys here? Well 80 of them I’m just going to beat. Of those that are left, 35 won’t play well from there, and of the 35 or so that that leaves, the pressure is going to get to some of them.
“That only leaves you with a few guys, and you’ve just got to beat those.”
It was a risky move, especially since just over a month earlier at the Masters you could argue that Koepka himself hadn’t handled the pressure on Sunday’s back nine and finding the water on the 12th when just two shots back was proof enough.
But the rebuttal is that he eagled the next, and only Tiger Woods finished above him. He beat everybody else.
Just four days after making that declaration in New York, he woke up with a seven-stroke 54-hole lead and clinched his fourth major championship in as many years.
If you talk the talk, you’ve got to walk the walk, and right then, he was pro golf’s equivalent of a man on the catwalk with a loudhailer.
But if you live by the sword, you must also die by the sword.
Ok, I’m being a little melodramatic here. Missing out on the FedEx Cup Playoffs – events that Koepka in full major-mode would’ve treated like excrement on his shoe – is a long way from being visited by the golfing Grim Reaper, but his PGA Tour return wasn’t supposed to be like this. Not scratching around at 94th in the rankings with Doug Ghim, Kevin Yu and Chandler Philips – all good players in their own right but not remotely in the class we expect Koepka to be in – in the three places ahead.
It would’ve been easy for a player returning from LIV Golf, under additional pressure as a result, and reacquainting himself with the PGA Tour to hang it on that. To say that this season was about finding his feet again and, with that taken care of, that 2027 is when the Brooks Koepka that was golf’s premier ‘big game hunter’ would return.
But to his credit, he did none of that. He didn’t dodge the blade; he gripped it and turned it inwards.
“I think it’s pretty pathetic that I can’t get through,” he admitted. “Zero top-10s basically in two years. To be in the prime of your career and be as good as I think I am, I think that’s very pathetic, disappointing. Just need to go home and completely reevaluate everything.”
Of course, there are dozens of players below Koepka in the rankings who would gladly swap places and would view 94th as a perfectly respectable achievement. That’s precisely the point: Koepka clearly doesn’t measure himself against them.
But that’s also an elite mindset at work. If you accept mid-table mediocrity, then that becomes your level.
But the mentality that turned Brooks Koepka into a major-winning machine may now make it impossible for him to accept the Brooks Koepka that he has become.
Golf is a fickle sport, and even players with major-winning pedigree can suffer struggles that last months, years, even decades.
For most players, 94th on the strongest tour in the world would be something to celebrate. For Koepka, it appears to be something to eradicate. Acceptance simply isn’t a choice. He’ll perform career seppuku before it gets to that.
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