Who would have thought that little Brooks, instead of dedicating himself to the sport he was passionate about as a child and still is today – baseball – would become a shining world golf star. Fate had assigned a starring role to the boy who, at the age of 28, has become a two-time consecutive US Open champion.
At the age of 10, Brooks suffered a badly broken nose when the car his babysitter was driving crashed and was unable to play contact sports that summer, so he spent his time playing golf at Okeeheelee Golf Course in West Palm Beach.
He would have liked to dedicate himself body and soul to his beloved baseball, a love instilled in him by both his father, a pitcher at West Virginia Wesleyan, and his great-uncle Dick Groat, a legend of the sport and also of basketball (he played in the NBA), but circumstances led him in other directions.
“If I had another chance to do it, I would play baseball, 100 percent for sure,” Koepka said in an interview.
In case there was any doubt about his sports preferences, the American player said a year ago after winning his first U.S. Open at Erin Hills that “golf is boring: it doesn’t have much action”. Despite this boredom, Brooks certainly can’t complain, both in sporting and financial terms, because winning a major again is a feat that has hardly been achieved by a handful of stars. Koepka, for example, is the seventh player to win the US Open in succession. Previously Willie Anderson (1903-1904), John McDermott (1911-1912), Bobby Jones (1929-1930), Ralph Guldahl (1937-1938), Ben Hogan (1950-1951) and Curtis Strange (1988-1989).
What he has been a pioneer in is pocketing the biggest prize in a golf tournament, $2,160,000, the same amount he won for his triumph last year, when the USGA decided to increase the US Open’s prize money by a million more than in 2016, making the tournament $12 million, two more than the Augusta Masters, $3,550,000 more than the British Open and $1.5 million more than the PGA Championship.
Koepka’s feat would seem astonishing in view of the number of victories on his resume, since before his first triumph at the US Open last year, he had only achieved one win on the American Tour and another on the European Tour, where he was enrolled at the beginning of his professional career after failing to qualify for the PGA Tour. However, the scarcity of victories does not tarnish a record of great performances, reflected in the numerous top-10 of his career and his outstanding performance in the last Ryder Cup, where he recorded three wins and a tie.
Leap to fame
Brooks’ first big leap into the international media spotlight came in June 2012, when, at 22 years old, he played the US Open (he missed the cut) still as an amateur after qualifying brilliantly through the preliminaries. Just a year later, he made his professional debut in the the Credit Suisse Challenge, his first contact with the European Challenge Tour. He played about twenty tournaments in the Challenge between 2012 and 2013 and added four victories, which earned him the passport to the European Tour. And five years after those first steps in the professional world, he equaled at Erin Hills the best winning record in the history of the US Open, with -16, the same result of Rory McIlroy in 2011.
In this year’s US Open, his winning score, +1, is a far cry from the previous one, but the victory has once again tasted like glory to Brooks. Even if he is still passionate about baseball.
Although he has yet to reach the status of one of his famous neighbors, Tiger Woods, once nicknamed The Extraterrestrial, Koepka resides in Jupiter (no accent), Florida, and is a partner at Medalist GC in Hobe Sound, Florida.
So far this season up to and including the U.S. Open, Koepka had three top 10 finishes, with runner-up finishes at the Forth Worth Invitational and the HSBC World Golf Championship, and totaled earnings of $3,955.41.
Throughout his career on the American Tour, the young man born in West Palm Beach, Florida, has played 95 tournaments, of which he made the cut in 78, and in 27 he finished in the top ten, with six second places and three third places. His earnings since he joined the PGA Tour until his second triumph in the US Open amounted to 17,520,172 dollars.
Of the 17 majors he has played so far, one of them as an amateur, Koepka has recorded seven top-10s: his two US Open wins, two fourth-place finishes (US Open 2014 and PGA Championship 2016), a fifth (PGA Championship 2015), a sixth (British Open 2017) and a tenth (British Open 2015). He missed the cut at the 2012 US Open (as an amateur) and the 2013 British Open.
Curiosities
– Brooks has a younger brother named Chase who also plays golf. Chase Koepka currently competes on the European Challenge Tour and last June was 38th in the Road to Oman rankings.
– Brooks enjoys other sports such as baseball, basketball, table tennis, proper fotball (that is, soccer as we know it) and American soccer, of course. The two-time US Open champion is also a fishing enthusiast.
– Koepka recorded a 3-1-0 (wins-ties-losses) record in his Ryder Cup debut two years ago in the U.S. victory at Hazeltine National. Brooks was instrumental in his team’s triumph.
– Koepika’s girlfriend is actress Jena Sims, 19. He previously dated American national soccer team player Becky Edwards (20). Sims has played supporting roles alongside Morgan Freeman, Michael Douglas and Robert DeNiro.
– Watching his mother beat breast cancer while he was in college gave him another perspective: “It made me realize that life can end very abruptly, so you have to enjoy it. Make people laugh, be optimistic. Try not to take everything seriously.”
– During his time as a student at Florida State University, he won the ACC Golfer of the Year award twice and holds the school record for best stroke average (71.85) and best single-season average (71.09).
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