No longer a captain’s worry
Double major puts Koepka on Ryder Cup team
ST. LOUIS — It was 15 months ago when Tiger Woods told a police officer he couldn’t bend over and touch his toes. A year ago when he admitted that riding in a golf cart was too darn painful — “the bouncing hurt too much,” he said. As recently as last winter when he didn’t even have anything close to a golf swing.
Forget winning. Forget competing. The man couldn’t even swing a club.
“I didn’t know if I was ever going to play golf again,” Woods said.
It was all of that, all the demons and the doubt, the scandals and the silence, all of the last 10 years, really, that made a heart-stopping afternoon like Sunday all the more improbable. This is the reason so many people play golf, the reason so many people watch golf. A shootout on a major championship Sunday, the man in red making them roar, sticking irons and burying putts and pumping his fists and sending shock waves across the golf course as he authors a comeback story even he has admitted feels like fiction at times.
Maybe this 100th edition of the PGA Championship at Bellerive Country Club goes down as Brooks Koepka’s greatest triumph, a clinic from the game’s newest and most unflappable star, his third major in his last six tries.
Or maybe it’s remembered for the moments delivered by the aging icon, months removed from a fourth back operation, playing with house money as he trades haymakers with the very generation of golfing beasts the historic dominance of his youth inspired. That 15th major championship for Tiger Woods? A dream that felt dead and buried for so long suddenly seems possible. Perhaps even inevitable. “When he started making that run,” Koepka said Sunday evening, “it brought me back to when I was a kid and I was watching him and you heard those roars.”
Brought everyone else back, too. It was like a home game for Woods all week at Bellerive, the utterly massive galleries begging Tiger to turn back the clock, to replicate Jack Nicklaus’ 1986 Masters, to pull off the improbable. He fed off it. He dazzled with his short irons. He twirled his clubs. He pumped his fists. He made this tournament what he made so many in the 2000s: mustsee TV, some of the greatest drama in sports.
It was vintage Tiger, impossible to ignore, impossible to turn away from, impossible not to feel.
“I think other than me and my team, everybody was rooting for Tiger,” Koepka said. “As they should ... he’s the greatest player to ever play the game.
“As a kid growing up, that’s the whole reason that all of us, or people in my generation, are even playing golf, because of him.”
Koepka, by the way, celebrated his seventh birthday a month after Woods won his first major title.
Ever since Woods returned, he has readily admitted he wasn’t sure he’d ever climb out of the hole he sat in. He didn’t play for the better part of two years. If this was it, if his back said enough and he’d have to stop at 79 PGA Tour wins and 14 majors, fine. It was a good run. He could live with that.
He started slow, expectations tempered, years of physical setbacks wearing hard on his humility. Anything from here on out would be gravy.
How’s this for gravy: five top-10 fin- ishes this year, a tie for sixth in last month’s British Open after bolting to the lead midway through the final round, a solo second in the PGA Championship, a lock for next month’s U.S. Ryder Cup team, 1,093 spots climbed in the world golf rankings. His sizzling 64 was the best of his 66 career rounds at this major and the lowest he’s ever gone on a Sunday at any major.
And that’s saying something for a man who made winning so routine for so long.
Woods was asked Sunday, if during the darkest of moments last winter, he could’ve ever foreseen this, making a very real run at the last two major championships of 2018, at age 42, after four back surgeries, after not being able to touch his toes and or ride in a golf cart or know for sure if he’d ever play the game competitively again.
“With what swing?” Woods replied. “I didn’t have a swing at the time. I had no speed. ... I didn’t know what my schedule would be. I didn’t know how many tournaments I would play this year or if I would even play.”
From no swing and no schedule and no idea to second in a major in eight months. Feels a little bit like fiction. Then you remember this is Tiger Woods.
“I’m in uncharted territory,” he said. “Because no one’s ever had a fused spine hitting it like I’m hitting it. So I had to kind of figure this out on my own, and it’s been really hard. It’s a lot harder than people think.”
He bested 99 players this past week but couldn’t catch Koepka on Sunday. When the two finally met outside the scoring room after trading haymakers in the sweltering Midwest heat for four hours, the newly minted three-time major champ looked in the eyes of the 14time major winner and smiled. “Earned it,” Koepka said. Woods smiled back. He knew.