It’s Brooks Koepka against world

Brooks Koepka, inarguably the dominant golfer of 2018, seems to have set his face against the world. Becoming the fifth player in history to win the US Open and the PGA in the same year has been enough for Brooks to give it a final, conclusive “get it right up ye” to all those who seem to be offended by him.

His crimes, such as they are, are to have won three majors while only so far winning one PGA Tour event, not being sufficiently emotional or demonstrative to have a permanent chip on his shoulder about perceived, imagined or actual slights, and of course to have ruined a fairytale at the PGA at the weekend by not folding in the presence of the people’s champion, Tiger Woods.

A good example can be found from one prominent US writer who on Sunday night devoted a large section of his lengthy article on Koepka’s win to their personal relationship (or lack of it, Koepka tried to get the writer ejected from a recent press conference).

Koepka gets it full barrels on his lack of emotion and refusal to play the golfing superstar is best buddies with the reporters game. Oddly, Dustin Johnson, Koepka’s close friend, gets absolutely none of this criticism for arguably being just as emotionless and frankly the worst interview in golf for the past 40 years.

While we all should be against golfers ejecting writers from press conferences, (even writers deluded enough to think they’re part of the story), Koepka doesn’t owe anyone anything other than his effort and performance, which he gives plenty of.

The slights? He does seem to be one to nurse a grudge, but hello, we’ve had that in supercharged fashion by the most prominent player in the game for 20 years. And even if the slights are imagined, if he uses them as fuel against the world to be successful, it’s not exactly a unique strategy in golfing history.

The final straw for many seems to be that he didn’t flinch under pressure from Tiger on Sunday. We’ll address that phenomenon later, but he’s already shown this year that he’s not as flaky as his pal DJ or as Jordan Spieth.

What he did in the final round at Shinnecock Hills in June, already proved that. Those were immeasurably more challenging conditions to anything he faced at Bellerive.

Tiger’s best chance was Carnoustie

Strip away the considerable noise, the hype, the downright hysteria of a thousand crushingly unfunny Twitter GIFs, Tiger Woods’ best chance to win a major this year was at Carnoustie.

He led the Open outright with eight holes to play, on a far more challenging course. He was in the driver’s seat until he made an almighty mess of one of the more straightforward holes at Carnoustie, the 11th.

At no time on Sunday was he in anything like a position of strength as he was last month. Unless you still subscribe to the view that his striding on to the premises in a red shirt reduces all of professional golf to a quivering wreck – and the evidence of this comeback year should be enough to disabuse that notion – he was always chasing.

Two bad holes, the 14th and 17th, were enough to quell any hope of a last day charge to victory, something that he still hasn’t done in a major. Koepka actually missed three reasonably straightforward birdie putts on the back nine and still won with plenty to spare.

Tiger smashing his own scoring

“He does seem one to nurse a grudge but we’ve had that from the most prominent player in the game for 20 years

aggregate and a 64 to finish being his lowest in a major are gaudy looking stats, but such comparisons are misleading. Bellerive was not remotely in the class of the other major venues this year, nor indeed most of the venues this century so far.

But we do have what we’d hoped for latter-day Tiger; he’s no longer the longest, the most powerful, the deftest, the best in all dimensions, and he was never going to be.

But he has plenty of stuff swimming around in that head that makes him competitive – intelligence, experience and, above all, desire.

So he can clearly win again, maybe even a major. But for that all the cards have to fall in his favour, and the field is nowhere near as compliant. The odds are still against, I think.

Form should be the wildcard test

So we know the automatic qualifiers for the USA for Paris, and we apparently know two of the wildcards already.

There’s no way, apparently, that Jim Furyk won’t pick Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson. Woods, of course, probably justifies a pick, but Phil? On the evidence since May?

Sentiment, or simply assuming that someone is indispensable for previous heroics, are very bad selection options in the modern Ryder Cup.

Furyk should know this because he’s been such a wildcard selection himself in the past, at Medinah.

Europe discovered this last time out at Hazeltine, when nobody thought it odd that Lee Westwood got a wildcard despite a record breathtakingly modest during the qualification process.

Westwood had performed on wildcards before, but time ran out on him. It happens eventually even to the best.

Phil? You want to use a wildcard on him the way he’s playing, be our guest.

Picture: AP. Brooks Koepka won his second major of 2018 at the PGA Championship, but apparently not many more friends.