Brooks Koepka’s going to win another major championship — and someone’s going to call him aloof or boring on a weekday talk show again this week. That’s dumb.
1. Today I drove four hours through the high Mojave Desert, the desolate, yet beautiful stretch from Las Vegas to Los Angeles. If memory stands to reason, it was roughly around Barstow, California where Hunter S. Thompson said the hallucinogens began to take hold. Perhaps that was from the LSD, but it might as well be from the sensory overload of the expanse. You are out there, alone, searching for some barometer for which to calibrate your being and the concept of time — maybe a rest stop, a building, whatever. There is none of that. Just you and your thoughts, contemplating your existence, biding the time until the end of the drive.
2. Perhaps this is what playing golf against Brooks Koepka is like on a major championship week. It might be any given PGA Championship or US Open or whatever three or five or eighteen more of these that are still on the horizon. Brooks Koepka will take you, throw you into some timeless black box that deprives you of any sort of calibration and beat you so badly that you have no idea what is up, down, left, right.
3. That thing? Yeah, it’s happening again. At the moment you woke up Sunday morning, Brooks Koepka is seven shots clear of the entire field at 12-under-par. No other player is better than five-under par. He will win Sunday. If you’re here for a dramatic finish, there’s no point in watching. He literally acknowledged there’s zero chance of loss on the press center dais Saturday night. His competitors have done the same. There is a late-stage Instagram automaton who’s evolved into his final form as a major championship cyborg. Go enjoy a walk, or your family, or a $7.99 Golden Corral steak. Whatever your normal non-major Sunday entails.
4. At the end of all the formalities, Brooks Koepka will have four major championship wins, all coming in the last nine majors. Golf is not supposed to work like this, not almost-even odds against a field of over 100 other players. Golf generally celebrates this kind of dominance, but Brooks Koepka is Brooks Koepka and capital-G Golf isn’t quite sure what to do with Brooks Koepka being Brooks Koepka.
5. He’s boring. Doesn’t care about golf. Thinks it’s for nerds. Isn’t concerned with your press conference questions, isn’t concerned with walking you through a shot-by-shot, thought-by-thought type of break down of a round others will give you. He works out too much. Allegedly lost too much weight so he could be diminishing-returns levels of hotter for a magazine shoot. He doesn’t fit the desired points. He isn’t Jordan Spieth. We can’t calibrate him. Boring.
6. But, perhaps, perhaps – that’s all wrong. What if Brooks Koepka is actually the most interesting man in the sport today? What if your press conference questions suck? What if the types that answer in overblown detail are the neurotic weirdos? At some point in the last couple of days, Fox Sports ran a segment asking if Brooks Kopeka is the Kawhi Leonard of golf.
7. Brooks Koepka is fun because he makes The Golf People mad. He talks shit in places where he’s supposed to be gracious, doesn’t care for being a golf nerd – but also cares deeply about what you’re saying about him. He reads your tweets and stories, and shares Brandel Chamblee photoshopped as a clown on his Twitter feed. Brooks Koepka wants to be exactly good enough at golf to be able to slide into Instagram DMs if he wanted to, and Brooks Koepka wants to be just hot enough to pull it off, if he wanted to.
8. Hell, let’s go further than mad, existentially uneasy. He’s just another proof-point that the Very Important Values of a professional golfer are changing – just as they are for recreational players throughout the country. Golf needs to be less stuffy, shorter, more open, and more like the other major sports in this country where character development can follow more than 2-3 templatized career arcs.
9. If you do watch Sunday, appreciate this, because Brooks Koepka is a star – and the kind of star golf needs. Golf doesn’t need a face and a voice cut from the same elitist, self-important cloth of the other Golf People. It needs a svelte, cocky destroyer of worlds who just so happens to really enjoy passing out likes to pictures of butts on Instagram. Leave Brooks Kopeka alone, let him be your version of boring, let him win roughly 25 majors.
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