Sports fans may not realize just how astonishingly good is golfer Brooks Koepka.
With his victory Sunday in the PGA Championship, the quiet man with the linebacker’s physique put himself in the most rarified company in the history of the game.
The PGA was Koepka’s fourth major championship in less than 24 months, and his fourth before age 30. Only four other golfers have accomplished the former feat. Their names are Nicklaus, Woods, Palmer and Watson. And while a half dozen others have won four professional majors before age 30, only three men have won more than Koepka’s four. Their names are Nicklaus, Jones, and Woods.
And he is the only man ever to have successfully defended two different professional majors (the PGA and the U.S. Open).
Arguably, only an unfortunate gust of wind at Augusta National in April kept him from having won four of the past five majors. In his last 19 majors, Koepka 14 times has been in the top 15, ten of those in the top ten, eight of those in the top five. This is Woods-like, Nicklaus-like dominance.
Koepka crushes his ball off the tee, so much so that the once-famously-long Woods said Friday that “Brooks is hitting nine irons where we’re all hitting five irons.” He hit his irons with tremendous precision, leading the field in greens in regulation and in “strokes gained” in approaches to the green. When he missed the green, he had a deft surgeon’s touch, leading the whole field for the first three days in the “scrambling” category until a rougher day Sunday pushed him back to 10th.
In short, Koepka does it all. He wins majors on links-like courses (Erin Hills, Shinnecock Hills) and at parkland courses (Bellerive); he wins when scores are very low (Erin Hills, Bellerive) and when they are high (Shinnecock), and when they start low but rise in tough weather (Bethpage Black).
And, just when his brute efficiency and deadpan expression made him appear almost cyborg-like, and thus hard to cheer for, he stumbled with four straight bogeys on the last nine on Sunday and showed a little bit of human vulnerability before righting his ship to gut out the win. By the end of the tournament, the famously difficult New York crowds were raucously applauding him — a sign, perhaps, that fans might finally be appreciating both his skill and his grit.
As noted here before, professional golf is in a star-studded golden age of the sort not seen since the 1970s. With his PGA victory on Sunday, Koepka now has eclipsed Jordan Spieth, Rory McIlroy, and Dustin Johnson as the brightest light among the younger stars.