The Major Specialist

As of the 2019 summer solstice, Koepka has won four majors and only two ordinary PGA Tour events. (And one of those two regular tour wins came in Korea.) He set scoring records in the US Open at Erin Hills and the PGA Championship at Bellerive, and he won a very difficult US Open with an over-par score last year at Shinnecock Hills. This year he won on a brutally big and strong course at Bethpage, and he nearly won again on a short course with tiny greens at Pebble. And this was after he finished only one shot behind Tiger at Augusta National. With little exaggeration, Koepka easily could be gunning for a calendar grand slam in the Open Championship at Portrush had a few balls bounced his way.

Not counting Koepka, 14 men have played the majority of their professional golf on the PGA Tour in America and won four or more major championships: Nicklaus, Woods, Hagen, Hogan, Player, Watson, Snead, Palmer, Trevino, Nelson, Mickelson, Floyd, Els and McIlroy. Between them, these 14 golfers won a total of 652 PGA Tour-sanctioned events, of which 112 – 17.2% – were majors. Only one of them, Gary Player, can say that more than 25% of his wins were majors (9 out of 24, or 37.5%). Koepka’s ratio is currently 66.7%. This simply isn’t how modern professional golf works: the occasional fluke notwithstanding, tour pros are supposed to learn how to win majors first and foremost by learning how to win regular tour events.

What is Koepka’s secret? His talent is prodigious, of course – amazing length and power, sparkling iron play, wonderful touch, brilliant putting – but I think his temperament is what unlocks his potential. It’s easy to forget that Koepka started his professional career in Europe, rising through the Challenge Tour ranks and then winning his first European Tour title in Turkey in 2014, and the many different conditions and types of courses here in Europe seem to produce more well-rounded golfers. Koepka also seems detached from golf at times: he once told Golf Digest magazine he thinks “golf is kind of boring”, and the game doesn’t define him the way it defines his peers. Koepka’s great-uncle, Dick Groat, was the National League MVP in 1960 and won two World Series titles with the Pittsburgh Pirates, and Koepka himself lists the following special interests and hobbies on his PGA Tour website profile: “Baseball, basketball, table tennis, ‘proper’ football (soccer), football, jet skiing, fishing, paddleboarding and hanging out with friends on off weeks.” Perhaps treating golf as a job and not an obsession frees your mind from some of the game’s most pernicious demons?

Koepka faced his first real major championship adversity in the final round of this year’s PGA Championship at Bethpage, bogeying four consecutive holes and letting a massive lead over Dustin Johnson dwindle to a single shot before steadying himself. Some pundits wondered if emotional scar tissue may have formed, even in victory. As if: at Pebble Beach, rounds of 69, 69 and 68 tied him for third place after 54 holes, and in the first five holes of his final round he made four birdies and an unbelievable par save from the barranca well short of the 2nd green. He had great chances to birdie the 6th and 7th holes as well, but after failing to do so he settled into a rhythm of efficient, unspectacular golf, parring the last six holes when even a single birdie might have supplied the scoreboard pressure he needed to become the first man since 1905 to win three straight US Opens. And that still might have been enough, had Gary Woodland not played the tournament of his life. Woodland joins Graeme McDowell as very solid, capable players to have surpassed expectations and won US Opens at Pebble Beach; Koepka became the first golfer in US Open history to shoot four rounds in the 60s and not win.

Does Koepka need to win more regular PGA Tour titles to be taken seriously as one of the game’s greatest players? It’s a fascinating question, and one without an obviously correct answer. But Koepka is still only 29 years old, and he has plenty of time to make the question moot – if he wants to. Maybe he doesn’t. Perhaps Koepka will self-consciously use the normal PGA Tour grind as little more than a (lucrative) laboratory and warm-up track, fully fueling his precision-crafted golfing engine only four times a year as he openly mocks the FedEx Cup. I’m already a little bit smitten with Koepka as it is; how much more awesome would that approach make him?

Meanwhile, following his April win in Augusta, Tiger missed the cut at Bethpage and backdoored his way into a tie for 21st at Pebble by birdieing six of his final 12 holes. Has the Big Cat Revival already climaxed? I’m not at all prepared to say that, but I will say this: for the first time this decade, everyone knows for certain who the best golfer in the world is when it really, really matters. It’s Brooks Koepka, and it’s not even close.