Focus on course, not USGA pays off

THE RIGHT player won.

It wasn’t the most popular player; that would’ve been Phil Mickelson, who bathed in another fourhour cascade of adulation as he shot a 1-under 69 hours before the leaders teed off and somehow managed to play all 18 holes without using a foot wedge.

It wasn’t the best player; that would’ve been Dustin Johnson, still a towering talent but still a golfer who seems destined to spend so many Sunday afternoons starcrossed and snakebit, gagging away too ma ny short putts, finishing the day two shots shy of one of his best friends.

And it wasn’t the players who would’ve turned Shinnecock Hills upside down and inside out; that would’ve either been Patrick Reed, the Masters champ who birdied five of his first seven holes and seemed on the verge of making an historic Sunday charge before petering out, or Tommy Fleetwood, who did make that epic charge, who tied the U.S. Open record at 63 and fell a stroke short but heard the galleries chant his name all day.

“Getting behind an English guy?” Fleetwood marveled, grinning. “That was great for me.”

All of those would have been nice stories. But the right story was Brooks Koepka, who was most responsible for so much of the angst that polluted so much of the weekend, so much of the bloody scorecard carnage, whose 16-under total at last year’s Open at Erin Hills so spooked the USGA that it was clearly bound and determined to torture the world’s best players as payback.

Koepka finished 17 shots worse than he did a year ago, but the result was exactly the same because he decided it would be better to keep his head down and play the golf course, rather than expend excess energy and complain about it, the way so many of his colleagues did. And so history was his. And ours.

“To have my name on there twice is pretty incredible,” Koepka said, pointing at the silver Open chalice, “and to go back-to-back is even more extraordinary.”

And look, we get it: the USGA looked small and stupid by setting the course up the way it did Saturday, by somehow forgetting that one of the beautiful things about Shinnecock is the Atlantic lies not far away and — hey, holy [cow], what do you know! —

sometimes the wind blows in off the ocean.

One player after another walked off the course Saturday afternoon, all of them hollow-eyed and telling a tale similar to “The sea was angry that day, my friend …” and one by one you could cross off those names. Shinnecock had already beaten them, and so had the USGA.

Koepka, he went another way. At one point Friday, after his first 25 holes at the Open he ballooned to 7-over, putting himself within a shot of the cut line. Then he rallied. By the close of business Saturday he had a quarter-share of the lead. And on Sunday, when everyone else atop the leaderboard rose and fell and crested and dipped, he grinded on. He got upand-down when he had to. He drained testy par putts when he had to.

And it wasn’t until it was over, and he had already kissed the Open trophy, and he had already been embraced by Curtis Strange — last man to win this tournament back-to-back, only 29 years ago — that he finally allowed himself an exhale and a smile and this observation: “It was testing this week, to be honest with you.”

And still he won, which means the right player won, because it was Koepka and his 16-under score of 264 a year ago that had lit a fire under the USGA, which hates it when players turn their marquee championship into the Waste Management Phoenix Open.

It was Johnny Miller’s final-round 63 at Oakmont in 1973 that led directly to the Massacre at Winged Foot a year later, in which Hale Irwin shot 7-over across four days in Westchester County and still finished two shots clear of a battered-and-bloodied field (and you suspect the USGA took extra pleasure in Miller’s four-day total of 22-over-par 302, too).

The USGA couldn’t get to Koepka, and neither could Shinnecock Hills, and as so he becomes only the seventh player to repeat as Open champ. Tiger Woods never did that. Jack Nicklaus never did that. Arnold Palmer, Mickelson, Tom Watson: no, no, no.

Brooks Koepka did. The rest of the field fought the law and the law won. Koepka just kept making one clutch shot after another, kept rolling in one critical putt after another, and his green 1-over this time around looked just as beautiful in the end as the red 16-under had a year ago. The right player won.