Golf is crazy, Brooks Koepka says. He has proof, too.
He looks at his year. He says he hasn’t played well. But at times, he has. Take the majors. Koepka missed the cut at the Masters, the PGA Championship and the Open Championship — and respectably tied for 12th at the U.S. Open.
“It’s felt good,” Koepka said, “and then it’s just completely disappeared.
“Ebbs and flows.”
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Then there’s his putter. He said he’s struggled with it. Especially the 8-footers. The “bread and butter” of his career, as he called them. But the misses have snowballed.
“That means you got to hit it close,” Koepka said. “It puts a little more pressure on your irons. Then you got to hit it in the fairway.
“And it just kind of goes through the whole game at that point.”
Koepka was talking with the Off the Ball group ahead of this week’s Amgen Irish Open, where the five-time major winner is playing this week. The hope is to regroup, he said. In three weeks, he won’t play in the Ryder Cup after making four straight appearances, but he’s hopeful to play in the biennial event again in two years, when it’ll be played at Adare Manor, about two hours west of this week’s event. And there’s some optimism. The slightest of adjustments after spotting the smallest of things did it.
Important to Koepka has been posture, alignment and grip. The basics. Or put another way, he said he tries not to overthink things. “When you’re playing your best, you’re not thinking about anything,” Koepka said to Off the Ball. “You just go up and go hit the ball. You don’t think about, ‘Oh, I got to start it down this line, do this, or my swing’s got to be shorter, come a little bit more inside or outside.’ You just get up and hit it.” The mantra, he said, led him to a grip change. It happened around the middle of the year.
After he spotted something on his golf glove.
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“We were just looking at the grip trying to figure out what was going on,” Koepka told Off the Ball, “just because the club never felt quite good in my hands and just noticing that it got a little too palm heavy. You could see it in the wear and tear on the gloves. My thumb was wearing a little bit more and the edge of the palm right in there was wearing. But that just means that the whole club isn’t stable, right? So it’s got to go on both ends of your hands.
“So just noticing things like that have kind of helped.”
So Koepka will work. In the video, he said he’ll play two more events this year, then his LIV Golf schedule starts again in 2026. He’ll also watch the Ryder Cup.
Was he disappointed not to be picked to the U.S. team? Koepka said he wasn’t. He blamed his play. He also didn’t blame being on LIV, where tournaments don’t count toward Ryder Cup standings.
“I did it myself, so it’s not anything I’m not aware of,” Koepka said. “Not shying away from it. It’s just bad timing. You have one down year, but if it’s the year after the Ryder Cup, it makes it a whole lot easier to play catch-up.
“But yeah, I think just the situation I’m in being on LIV and then not playing well is — I don’t think LIV had anything to do with me not being on the team, but it was more the timing of the year and just trying to get that ball rolling.”
Koepka did have advice though, for the visiting European Ryder Cup team, which is expected to play in front of an enthusiastic crowd at Bethpage Black. And you can hear that, along with watching the entire Off the Ball video, by clicking here.
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