Not so babbling Brooks
U.S. Open champ’s emotions reserved
ERIN, Wis. — If Brooks Koepka could hit a baseball the way he launches a golf ball, he might never have won the U.S. Open. In fact, golf might never have even heard of him, something the soft-spoken 27-year-old nearly achieved while chasing the best golfers around the world the past five years.
For the latest winner of the U.S. Open, a single fist pump is considered a declarative sentence ending with an exclamation point. That solitary act after holing his putt on 18 Sunday that made him the seventh straight first-time winner of a major championship spoke volumes to him. To everyone else, however, one wondered if he had a pulse.
“Did you see that fist pump there on 18?” Koepka asked an inquisitor who had the same doubts.
If that was an emotional outburst, his idea of a fireworks display is striking a match. Here was a young man who finally had broken through after four years of frustration and false promise. He had just tied the Open record by shooting 16-under par at Erin Hills to win his first major, his name forever etched into the fabric of a sport whose lifeblood is tradition.
And his reaction is a single, solitary fist pump?
“It hasn’t even sunk in, but I think it will be special,” Koepka said. You think so? Tying Rory McIlroy’s Open record for low score against par? Dropping three straight birdies on the head of Hideki Matsuyama, who made five birdies on the back nine to close to within 1 stroke while Koepka stood on the 14th tee?
You might think those things are special, but for someone who only last December was telling Golf Digest’s Jaime Diaz he wished he’d stuck with baseball, this was, on the surface at least, just another day on tour. A big day to be sure, but nothing like his great uncle must have felt back in Pittsburgh in 1960.
That’s the year Dick Groat won baseball’s MVP and the World Series as the shortstop for the Pirates. A fivetime All-Star, Groat not only was a baseball hero in Pittsburgh but also an All-America basketball player at Duke and a college Hall of Famer in both sports. He was the leading edge of what Koepka said Sunday is “a baseball family.” Golf? Not so much.
“If I could do it over again, I’d play baseball, 100 percent, no doubt,” Koepka told Diaz. “To be honest, I’m not a big golf nerd. Golf is kind of boring.”
So why didn’t he continue the family tradition? If you saw him wallop a 3-wood 379 yards off the 18th tee Sunday, you’ll find his explanation as difficult to understand as viewing his single fist pump as a celebratory tour de force. He claims he couldn’t hit for power. Really?
“Could never hit a home run as a kid,” he said. “Maybe I was too small, but it drove me nuts. I kind of wish I’d stuck with it.”
So do the 155 other golfers who tried to win the U.S. Open at Erin Hills. They would have done way more than a fist pump if Koepka had been anywhere but in Wisconsin loping down the fairways like a young man out for a stroll with not a care in the world, hitting solid shot after solid shot and seldom finding the fescue. With nearly daily rain showers having softened the greens, conditions favored the good ball-strikers who could keep it in the fairway and score. That’s why it was a frustrating finish for Matsuyama and Brian Harman, who tied for second at 12-under.
That score would have won 115-of-117 U.S. Opens and would have forced an 18-hole playoff with Tiger Woods in one of the remaining two. It seems fair to assume those two guys showed more emotion in the privacy of the locker room in defeat than Koepka did walking up 18 with victory in his grasp.
“We were talking about vacations we’ve been on coming up 18,” Koepka said of he and caddie Ricky Elliott. “We went to Bali last year. We were talking about that. You know, you’re out there for 51⁄ hours. You can’t be focused in for that long.”
Perhaps not, but not being focused on golf, in a way, is how this all began for Koepka. At 10, he was riding in the front seat of a car driven by a babysitter when it was hit in an intersection. His face hit the dashboard, fracturing his nose and sinus cavity, which is difficult to believe given his Hollywood features.
Contact sports including baseball were out for that summer, so he wandered over to Okeeheelee Golf Course, a public track in West Palm Beach, Fla., and began pounding some golf balls. He learned he could hit them farther than baseballs. Thus was born a future U.S. Open champion.
The road to seeing his name on the same trophy as Ben Hogan, Arnold Palmer, Jack Nicklaus and Tiger Woods was a winding one. He was not highly recruited out of high school, and even though he became a three-time All-American at Florida State, he didn’t win a college tournament until he was a senior.
That led to being bypassed when the Walker Cup team was selected, which convinced him to join friend Peter Uihlein (a Mattapoisett native) on the Challenge Tour in Europe, where there’s more to deal with than bunkers and fescue.
There are language barriers, second-tier courses, bus and train travel, problems most American kids want no part of because golf is a pestering enough endeavor.
But Koepka flourished, winning in his first start and several more times before earning his European Tour card and becoming Rookie of the Year.
No one outside of European golf made much of a fuss about any of that, though, which seems to be the way Koepka likes it. Same was true after he joined the PGA Tour in 2014. He often was in contention but won only once, a fact that begun to grind on him to the point where baseball looked more inviting than the first tee.
And then there he was, winning his first major and pumping his fist one time at the boring game he’d dominated for four days on one of golf’s biggest stages. Might Brooks Koepka still choose baseball today, after being handed a check for $2.16 million, the largest winner’s purse in Open history?
“I think I’ll be all right,” Koepka said.
He didn’t pump his fist after answering.
He just smiled.