Koepka had success in his sights early on U.S. Open
In summer 2012, an American father and mother did what American fathers and mothers often do in American summers: They tried to fall asleep while their 22-year-old offspring jetted above the Atlantic toward Europe.
Such voyages often brim with the promise of indiscriminate beer and exhilarated 5 a.m. exits from dance warehouses, but in this case, not so.
These parents knew their son was trying a path so unorthodox that it was gutsy, and they knew his When: Thursday-sunday Where: Pebble Beach Golf Links, Pebble Beach, Calif. TV: Thursday-friday (FS1, 12:30 p.m.; Fox, 7:30 p.m.), Saturday (Fox, noon), Sunday (Fox, 2 p.m.)
brain always seemed laced with something most humans struggle to attain: clarity.
“You’re always nervous sending your kid overseas,” Bob Koepka said, “but he just wanted a place to play.”
Off went Brooks Koepka, then 22 and unqualified for the PGA Tour, armed with a few tournament exemptions, organized in mind if not necessarily elsewhere.
“Probably none of his shirts were folded,” his father guessed. “Probably in a pile.”
Forgive yourself, busy sports fan, if you find yourself uninformed about one of the top one-man forces to rock American sports in recent years. Through some quirky hash of factors, the general knowledge of Brooks Koepka strains to catch up to the merit of Brooks Koepka.
Excuses do exist. As the U.S. Open begins Thursday at Pebble Beach, California, it’s rote by now that Koepka, 29, lacks the self-promotion chromosome. That’s true even though he’s that rare golfer they could market shirtless, and though he states his intentions boldly, if not excitedly.
Regardless, he has claimed four of golf’s past nine major championships, become the first man to hold back-toback PGA Championship and U.S. Open titles simultaneously and zoomed to the No. 1 ranking.
He belongs in polite general conversation even if polite general conversation hasn’t caught up.
“My thoughts are, he just makes it look easy,” said Trey Jones, who coached Koepka at Florida State from 200812. “He hits it as straight as Luke Donald and as far as Dustin Johnson. You’re not sitting on the edge of the seat wondering where the ball’s going. He doesn’t let you in. He just walks out and wins the golf tournament.”
Those seeking Koepka fluency need Koepka stories. As a 9-yearold growing up in Palm Beach County, Florida, he accompanied his father and brother to the Masters and, upon return, insisted upon wearing slacks to play golf that summer because that’s how pros dressed, even as tournament organizers fretted for him in Florida’s heat.
At 13, he told his childhood coach, Warren Bottke, “You know I’m going to play in the Masters,” and the utterance somehow sounded distinctive even to Bottke, by then a worldclass teacher who had heard many such vows.
To his father’s recommendation of a Plan B, young Brooks replied, “Dad, if I have a Plan B, it means I’m not going to work hard enough to make Plan A happen.”
Who is Brooks Koepka? He’s a guy who deemed his backpack and suitcase too tightly packed to include his first pro trophy (in Spain), so he left it in the room, prompting his father to call the hotel, then the tournament, then Fedex. Brooks Koepka, walking off the first green during a practice round for the U.S. Open on Wednesday in Pebble Beach, Calif., has won four of golf’s past nine major championships.
He’s also the guy who, upon his first PGA Tour victory in Phoenix in February 2015, said, “I want to be the best player in the world,” and, “I think I’m one of the most mentally strong people that I have ever met.”
“He’s always been very strong-willed,” Bob Koepka said. “He’s a Koepka. We’re stubborn. We all love a challenge. We grew up competing. My brother always says … there wasn’t anything we were doing where we weren’t keeping score.”
Koepka’s parents, who divorced in the mid-1990s, met in Pennsylvania, then moved to Florida for his mother’s job as a television news anchor.
Bob Koepka is the grandson of a Pittsburgh steelworker and the son of a man who, among 10 siblings, started work
early in life and toiled at Union Carbide and a gas company. He’s also the nephew of Dick Groat, the National League MVP in 1960 for the Pittsburgh Pirates.
Bob Koepka caught the golf bug largely because Groat owned a Pennsylvania course. In Florida, Bob’s swing teacher was his friend Bottke, who in turn became Brooks’ first coach and second father, beginning at 10.
“He was very shy,” Bottke said of Brooks. He was “a very good listener. You know, at 10 years old, kids are cutting up, doing different things, and he was just dialed in. I was like, ‘Wow, this kid doesn’t even clown around.’ ”
Koepka long ago solved the destructive flaw of his self-directed, club-banging, bagkicking temper, partly by running the Florida State stadium stairs at the direction of assistant coach Chris Malloy.
“He worked on it,” Malloy said. “Everything you see on the golf course is a learned behavior. This is not a natural thing.”
Somehow, Koepka channeled it into a stoicism he calmly declares an on-course asset, a poker face Malloy shows on video to his present-day players at Mississippi. “I can’t be Brooks; that’s not the way I’m wired,” some reply.
“That’s not the way he’s wired, either,” replies Malloy. “I just think he has an unbelievable knack … for simplifying things.”
Life on the course is pretty simple these days for Koepka, whose clarity has managed to even ward off the obsession that foils many a golfer: He can spot a needed break and take it.
“I’ve not touched a club” since the PGA Championship, he said last week.
“Would you want to be out there tinkering with your golf swing every day,” Jones asked, “or would you just want to realize you’ve got one?”