By Winning Major No. 5, Brooks Koepka Isn't Just Great, He's an All-Timer
If it makes Viktor Hovland feel better, he can go cry on the shoulder of some of the other great golfers that Brooks Koepka just beat. Like Ernie Els. Or Ray Floyd. Or Rory McIlroy. Koepka just won his fifth major, a gargantuan achievement that, like most gargantuan achievements in golf, is easier to appreciate if you forget Tiger Woods exists.
Tiger has won 15 majors. His career skews perspectives. But here is the list of golfers who began playing professionally in 1970 or later and won five majors:
Woods, Tom Watson, Nick Faldo, Phil Mickelson, Seve Ballesteros, Brooks Koepka.
Think of how many great male golfers have played in the last half-century. Those are the only six to win five majors—and Koepka is only 33 and has time to win more.
Five majors puts a player in a different category. Good players can win one. Really good ones can win two if they get a little lucky or certain majors tend to suit them well. Three is a sign of a player who does everything extremely well and (usually) of greatness over a long period of time. Four is historically elite.
But five? Five majors says something about a player that goes beyond how he hits the 14 clubs in his bag. Five is a window into his head and heart. A player who wins five majors has the rarest combination of mental toughness and emotional stability, and Koepka might be the best example in golf history of that.
Els was a better player, but not a better majors player. If you were building players in a lab, you would rather create Greg Norman or Fred Couples or Dustin Johnson, but you wouldn’t take any of them over Koepka with nine holes left in a major championship.
What Brooks Koepka has done better than anyone else of his generation is win majors. It sounds simple to the point of mindlessness. But it’s true. The man knows how to cash in. Hovland and Koepka both hit some lousy shots and got tough breaks Sunday. But Koepka is so good at recovering. He is a master at being exactly as aggressive as he should be, but no more. He is an incredibly confident and steady clutch putter; you rarely see him hit a truly poor putt under pressure.
The Koepka who won at Oak Hill seemed to have disappeared. Well, he did disappear. Just not forever.
There was a moment when everything seemed to change for Koepka, and whether this was correlation or causation is open for debate. It happened after the third round of the COVID-19 PGA in 2020. Dustin Johnson held the lead, Koepka was two strokes back, and Koepka told the media he was confident because he had won four majors and then he said, “I guess DJ has only won one.”
Johnson had “only” a U.S. Open on his majors resume; he has since won the Masters. Regret crept onto Koepka’s face almost before he finished saying it. Maybe the words slipped out. Maybe he realized he had accidentally confirmed that he and DJ were not as tight as they once were. Maybe, on some level, something more profound hit Koepka: he could no longer play the part he had played en route to two U.S. Open and PGA Championship wins.
After thousands of compliments, the no-respect act had become dishonest. Another part of his shtick—that he didn’t even really love golf, never watched it, and certainly didn’t care about non-majors—started to feel like a put-on, too. And when Koepka lost those two pillars of his competitive persona, he didn’t have anything to replace them.
It was a pivot point. Before then, Koepka had nervelessly beaten Woods at Bellerive, and DJ at Shinnecock Hills and Bethpage Black. Even when Koepka contended and didn’t win, like at the 2019 Masters and U.S. Open, he played well on Sunday.
But after calling out Johnson, Koepka shot a finishing 74 at that 2020 PGA, on a day when nearly everybody else in contention broke 70. In 2021 he shot a 74 in the last group of the 2021 PGA. At this year’s Masters, Koepka had a four-shot lead on Jon Rahm and shot a final-round 75.
Yes, during this time, Koepka was also injured, he wondered if he would ever be the same player again, and—probably because of that fear—left the PGA Tour to work for LIV Golf and the Saudi Arabian government. But his Sunday aura disappeared before all that.
Koepka is healthy now. He has dropped some of the public posturing, and he found whatever it was inside him that made him so good in majors in the first place. It was never about the haters, even as he pretended it was (and maybe even told himself it was). Koepka’s greatness was always about what is inside Koepka.
Koepka’s old feud with Bryson DeChambeau was fueled, mostly, by the enormous personality differences between the two, and there are many ways to capture those, but on the list is this: DeChambeau wanted attention but not scrutiny. Koepka didn’t seem to enjoy attention, but he loves the moments when everybody is watching him play.
He has now won three PGAs and two U.S. Opens. His excursion into LIV is part of his story, and for some golf fans, Koepka’s lack of a Masters or British Open affects his historical standing. But five majors is a monstrous haul and should be appreciated as such. Whatever the tour, whatever the era, Brooks Koepka is an all-time great golfer.