PITTSFORD, NY – Six weeks ago on Sunday, Brooks Koepka couldn’t sleep. He has thinking to do and demons to chase. After it all — the devastating knee injury, the pain of unfulfilled ambition, the taunts and the splenetic rift in professional golf he helped personify — he rallied to a Masters Tournament lead, and after he failed. Crushed, really.
He finally vowed, he recalled over the weekend at Oak Hill Country Club, not to “think the way I thought going into the final round.” On Sunday night, Koepka found his vindication: a two-stroke victory at the PGA Championship, earning him his first major tournament trophy since 2019. It was his fifth career major. Koepka’s victory, tying him with figures such as Seve Ballesteros and Byron Nelson.
“I think this one is probably the most meaningful of all of all the things that have happened, all the crazy things of the last few years,” said Koepka, who said he received about 600 text messages during the time he was holding a news. conference. “But it feels good to come back and get No. 5.”
The victory made him the first member of LIV Golf, the annual breakaway league bankrolled by Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, to win a major title since joining the circuit. And while Koepka’s victory at Oak Hill may have done little to quell some of the criticism of LIV — its ties to a repressive government, its contested goals, its cheerful encouragement of a financial arms race in an ancient game – the dispute is completely over when Men who play small 54-hole tournaments can dominate the biggest, 72-hole stage of golf.
“I think it will help LIV,” Koepka said, “but I’m more interested in myself right now, to be honest with you.”
Fair enough, as he silenced the notion, one that seemed a little off the mark after the Masters, that his fighting days were made by carding a three-under-par 67 on Sunday, which took him at nine under for the tournament. . But this is a 33-year-old player whose results in the 2022 major season look like this: uncut, tied for 55th, solo 55th, uncut. It’s easy to forget that in 2021, the order goes like this: unbroken, tie for second, tie for fourth, tie for sixth.
At the end of last year, he had a growing suspicion that his recovery was almost over and that he would, finally, be relevant again. About January, he said, he was sure of it.
“He’s back to health,” said Cameron Smith, who won the British Open last summer and then joined LIV later in the year. “I think that brings a little more internal confidence as well as going out there and just doing your thing.”
It wasn’t as recently as Thursday, when the prospect of Koepka lasting more than a host of stars seemed more unlikely than impossible. He opened this tournament with a two-over-par 72 and, by his own account, was not good and struggled to hit the ball the way he wanted. He can’t remember, he said, the last time he was hit so badly.
But he’s not far behind as the tournament, the first major played at Oak Hill since a major effort to restore some of the grueling tests that characterized the Donald J. Ross-designed courses , has emerged as one of the most exciting PGA Championships in recent memory. decades, often evoking the difficulty of the 2008 competition at Oakland Hills in Michigan. Of the 156 players who competed this past weekend, only 11 finished under par – a departure from 2013, when 21 players finished in the red at the PGA Championship at Oak Hill.
The stinginess has even reached the course, with dangerous rough and humble bunkers, which will be more accommodating on Sunday than ever before. Smith, Cam Davis, Kurt Kitayama and Sepp Straka all shot 65s on Sunday, moving them to the top of the leaderboard. Patrick Cantlay, who became one of the tournament’s rare eagles, signed for a 66. Michael Block, whose day job is head pro at Arroyo Trabuco Golf Club in southeast Los Angeles, had a hole in one of the No. 15, the first PGA Championship ace by a club professional since 1996.
But most of the focus Sunday was on Koepka; Viktor Hovland, the new Norwegian talent; and Scottie Scheffler, the No. 2 player in the Official World Golf Ranking. Koepka, his standing diminished by his lucrative relationship with LIV, whose tournaments are not accredited by the ranking system, entered Sunday at No. 44. (The PGA of America, which organizes this tournament, is different from the PGA Tour, the rival of LIV .)
Koepka entered the first tee box with a one-stroke lead and doubled his margin in short order when he birdied the second hole. He played the hole to par the first three days, often reaching the green in two shots but leaving himself with long putts. On Sunday, with the pin front-right of the green, he needed less than 5 feet.
His birdie putt on the third hole required a little more, after his longest tee shot of the tournament on the hole known as Vista, which moved his advantage to three strokes.
The sixth hole, a threat to many players throughout the tournament, was coming. Koepka saved the hole, a par-4 challenge that finished the field in an average of 4.52 strokes, enough for Thursday, Friday and Saturday: par in each of the first three rounds. On Sunday, however, his tee shot bounced right into a thick patch of grass on the so-called native area. He took a drop and then, about 191 yards from the hole, hit it on the green and finally escaped with a bogey. Although Koepka followed with another bogey, Hovland also stumbled on No.
At the turn, Koepka led Hovland by a single stroke. Scheffler, a consistent voice sensation since he won the Masters last year, and Bryson DeChambeau, the 2020 US Open winner, are three in the lead.
Koepka responded with an impressive streak: birdie, bogey, birdie. Hovland had a chance for birdie on the 12th hole, but his putt was from nearly 15 feet to the left of the cup. With six holes to play, Koepka’s advantage returned to two strokes. After two holes, it’s down to one.
But in almost every major, there comes a time when one person’s victory seems inevitable. It may not be mathematically buttoned-up yet, but almost everyone knows the tournament is over before it ends.
On Sunday, the scene of that moment was the 16th hole. It’s not the most hellish of Oak Hill, not by a long shot. Hovland will remember it, though.
His ball in the bunker after his tee shot, he used his 9-iron. With less than 175 yards on the hole, he swung and fired his ball — not on the green, but on the lip of the bunker. His fourth shot hit the green. A bogey putt was missed, leaving him with a double bogey. Koepka, in the twilight of his pursuit of his third PGA Championship win, made birdie to take a four-stroke lead.
“It’s not easy to fight a guy like that,” Hovland, who finished in the top seven for his third consecutive major, said of his duel with Koepka. “He wouldn’t give you anything, and I never felt like I gave him anything until 16.”
Scheffler made a birdie putt on the 18th green shortly after to find Koepka’s path. Koepka himself narrowly narrowed it down with a bogey on No. 17.
He came to the 18th hole, having played 497 yards on Sunday, with two shots to spare. His tee shot bounced and then hit the fairway, stopping 318 yards. The tall grandstands waited in the distance, filled with spectators, as the galleries lined the fairway, watching to see if, after all, Koepka had indeed returned.
His next putt lifted the ball onto the green. The applause grew louder, seemingly with every step as he marched up the steep slope, the kind of incline that felt like Everest to Koepka in the recent past. He knelt down — there were times, he said, when he couldn’t bend his knee — and then approached the ball. He braced himself and tapped the ball forward.
It stopped, according to tournament officials, about 3 inches short.
He flashed a tight smile, as if to say that, of course, there was one last hiccup.
He tried again. The ball falls into the cup. He pumped his fist and then hugged his caddy for nearly nine seconds.
Actually, after all that, Koepka is back.
