AUGUSTA, Ga. – The reconstruction of Brooks Koepka was nearly complete.
His body healed, his swing honed, only one area was lacking. So Pete Cowen jotted down a list of critiques and prepared to rip into his prized pupil.
This wouldn’t be the coach’s first time, of course. Prior to the 2017 U.S. Open, Cowen had famously laid into the mopey masher after growing tired of Koepka’s grousing that he hadn’t won more on the big stage. “You need the attitude of a champion,” scolded Cowen, and Koepka responded by matching the lowest 72-hole score in tournament history en route to his breakthrough major. Of Koepka’s four Grand Slam titles, the only keepsake Cowen owns is a signed flag from Erin Hills. Koepka’s message: Thank you for the bollocking. I couldn’t have done it without you.
The pep talk two weeks ago in Orlando, before the final LIV tuneup event, would have had a similar theme … had Cowen actually delivered it. All he did was warn Koepka of the imminent tongue-lashing, a clever bit of reverse psychology from one of the masters.
“Look, I’ve prepared a talk for you, and I don’t want to give it to you,” Cowen told Koepka. “So give me the attitude that I won’t give you this pep talk. If you don’t want it, then make sure your attitude is right.”
Locked in from the jump, Koepka stormed through the field at Orange County National, becoming the first player to claim two individual titles on the LIV circuit. His confidence restored, he was already looking ahead to Augusta and the opportunity to pick off the third leg of the career Grand Slam. “I’ve got no doubt in my mind that I can do it again,” he said, “and I think this just solidifies it.”
By Masters Sunday, Koepka appeared in complete command of his game, and in that familiar frontrunning position. He had raced four shots ahead of Jon Rahm, the LIV rebel just 30 holes away from breaking the internet and joining the likes of Seve Ballesteros and Byron Nelson as five-time major winners.
It felt like 2019 all over again.
“I want to stand there and him to basically ignore me like I’m not there because he’s so in the zone,” Cowen said. “That’s where he is. He’s in a great place at the moment.”
The last message Cowen gave Koepka came just after 8 a.m. Sunday, before the restart of the third round. Cowen wasn’t sticking around for the final day – his work done, he was driving six hours south to Orlando, then catching a direct flight to Manchester – but before sending Koepka on his way, Cowen patted him on the back and, this time, offered not a rebuke, but reassurance.
“If you keep that focus, if you keep that attitude, they’re gonna struggle to beat you,” Cowen said. “They’re gonna really struggle to beat you.”
Eleven hours later, Koepka wasn’t just caught from behind. He was boxed out, then eventually lapped.
That it was Rahm – indomitable, irrepressible, inevitable – should have been little surprise. Now a four-time winner this year and the world No. 1, he methodically chipped away at the deficit, then dissected the second nine on his way to clinical 69 and a comfortable four-shot victory. A non-factor for the final few hours, Koepka slumped to a Sunday 75, ceding the stage so that his playing competitor could soak in the adoring cheers of the patrons on the 72nd hole.
While Rahm got fitted for his green jacket, Koepka struggled in the moment to see the larger context.
“Not today. Probably not for the next few days,” he said. “But give it a week, and I’ll start to see some positives out of it and carry this over.”
For the rest of his team, it wouldn’t take nearly that long.
* * *
After twice trying to punch through the window of his SUV at Augusta, after suffering through the worst major season of his career, after twisting himself into a web of bad habits, Koepka landed in the same pro-am group as his former swing coach in July 2022.
There was much to untangle. After playing through issues with his left knee and hip the previous two years, Koepka suffered a catastrophic injury to his right knee in March 2021 that included a shattered kneecap and accompanying ligament damage. Rather than sit out for six months, as his doctors recommended, Koepka continued to push forward. Perhaps fearful that his major window was closing, he never allowed his body to heal, leading to additional strain on his ailing hip, swing compensations and an unpredictable two-way miss. Help wasn’t immediately available either; he’d previously dumped the swing coach, Claude Harmon III, who over the previous decade had helped unlock his greatness. Throw in a full-bag equipment change, and by last summer – with Netflix cameras rolling – Koepka was an almighty mess.
“I’d just never seen him hit it that bad,” Harmon said.
And so midway through another miserable event at LIV Bedminster, Koepka swallowed his pride and once again asked for Harmon’s help. That afternoon, they toiled on the range, alone.
“I still feel like I have a lot of great golf left,” Koepka told him. “I still feel like I can win major championships.”
The next morning, they reconnected for good, eager to reincorporate the same swing elements – sturdy base, wide backswing, proper weight transfer – that had made Koepka a bulletproof world No. 1 just three years earlier. Within a few months, he was hitting his usual missiles. His body finally healthy, he effectively used the ground and worked through the ball at the right pace, rather than jumping at it to create speed.
When Koepka made the shock move to LIV last summer, it was viewed as a cash-out by an increasingly brittle basher who had made the hard realization that his athletic prime had already passed. Netflix cameras captured one particularly bleak scene, in the living room with his mother, when Koepka, then 31, seemed to accept his competitive mortality, sighing that he could no longer compete with the game’s best players.
Or so it appeared on screen.
“Everybody thought he was talking about his game,” Harmon said. “But he was talking about his body that just didn’t physically allow him to swing the golf club the way he wanted to.”
Koepka conceded last week that the LIV decision would have been made more difficult had the circumstances been different – had he been in form, had he been healthy. Still, he said, “I’m happy with the decision I made.” It was strictly about business. Much like free agents in other sports – Lamar Jackson, Kyrie Irving, Justin Verlander – Koepka chased what he thought he was worth.
“Athletes get the bag,” Harmon said. “That happens every single year, and every single season, but all of a sudden there was a narrative that he’s just not going to be who he was.”
But to Koepka, at least, there remained an open question about what he could still become. Drawing closer to full fitness, he’d never worked harder than last summer, and yet he still lacked the validation that can only come on the leaderboard. That’s why when he won in October in Saudi Arabia – in his fourth start after reuniting with Harmon – he showed a vulnerability that had been missing during his torrid run through the late 2010s.
“Obviously, it was doing his head in,” caddie Ricky Elliott said. “He’d been to the top, and he was trying to push it a little bit, trying to push it in the gym and work out a way to get there again. He was pushing all the time.”
Middling results this spring concerned everyone but Koepka. Whether he competed on the PGA Tour or LIV, he has always treated regular-season starts as prep work, as filler, until the legacy-defining majors. All along he’d targeted the second week of April, and he trusted nearly a decade of experience peaking at the right time.
At his final pre-Masters start, at LIV Orlando, Koepka said Cowen threatened to “rip me a new one.”
The moment had arrived.
A year earlier was no time for one of the coach’s famed talks. Koepka was injured and broken, questioning his direction, contemplating his future.
“That would have just pushed him down further,” Cowen said. “He’s got to come back at you: No, I can do this. I’ll show you. That’s what you want.
“Some people are afraid of the truth. It’s hard. It hurts to hear it. But Brooks isn’t afraid.”
The suggestion alone was enough for Koepka to narrow his concentration. He dialed back his aggressiveness. Missed on the proper side. Holed the momentum-saving putts. By the time he landed in Augusta, he had once again morphed into major mode: Quiet and focused, disciplined and driven.
An opening 65 announced Koepka’s intentions. A second-round 67, in ideal conditions, convinced even the most stubborn skeptic that his resurgence was for real. When play was suspended Saturday, Koepka stood four shots clear, poised to surge past Rory McIlroy in the race to become the best major performer of the post-Tiger era.
“Brooks is really comfortable in the ‘death zone,’” Harmon said. “That’s what this is. You start at the bottom, you get to Camp 4, and then you’re in the death zone. You either like that or you don’t, and he likes it. It’s tough; that’s why there’s so few people who have had the opportunity to win five majors. But he feels very comfortable in those situations.
“In less than a week, he has gone from being a nobody, a non-competitive loser, to now everybody is going, Oh, f–k, he is who we thought he was.”
Standing in the tournament practice area Sunday morning, with a marathon day ahead, Cowen practically felt invisible – just like he wanted. He compared their player-coach dynamic to a racehorse that no longer needed his trainer.
“I want to be obsolete,” Cowen said, “and that’s where he is at the moment.”
* * *
After one of the most humbling days of his career, Koepka was brought into the press building to diagnose what went wrong over the final 30 holes, what his performance meant in the broader Tour-LIV culture war, and what he proved to the golf world.
Are you back?, he was asked. Can you win more majors?
“I think I proved it this week, no?” he said. “I’ve known this for a while, but it was just a matter of going out and doing it. I led for three rounds, and just didn’t do it on the last day. That’s it. Plain and simple.”
No one in the past decade has thrived in the death zone like Koepka, but Sunday’s inexorable slide at the Masters was further proof that even the biggest, baddest dude on the mountain can still feel starved for air. In his last major triumph, at the 2019 PGA, he nearly coughed up a record seven-shot lead on the back nine. A month later, one stroke behind major-less Gary Woodland at Pebble Beach and eyeing a historic third consecutive U.S. Open, he wound up losing by three. Going head-to-head against 50-year-old Phil Mickelson at the 2021 PGA, he bombed out with a Sunday 74. With another chance the following month, at the Torrey Pines Open, he bogeyed two of the last three holes, opening the door for Rahm to bust through.
Seeing how this Masters unfolded, it’s easy to imagine Cowen back home in England, reassessing the week, scribbling notes and fine-tuning his message – you know, just in case.
A chance at major redemption is five weeks away. Koepka shouldn’t need any more motivation than that.
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