Brooks Koepka, dropped out of Augusta last year, grabs Masters Lead

AUGUSTA, Ga. — After the Friday round of last year’s Masters tournament, Brooks Koepka stormed up to a Mercedes-Benz parked at Augusta National Golf Club. He was furious, a four-time champion of a major tournament with a battered body, a war chest of pent-up ambition and another missed blow.

Twice he tried to smash the back window with his fist, which didn’t even crack, a pair of lows in a year so engulfed that one of the best golfers of his generation wondered if he should continue playing.

“If I couldn’t move the way I wanted to, I wouldn’t want to play the game anymore — it’s as simple as that,” Koepka said Friday, talking about how it sometimes took 20 minutes to get out of bed, or how he had sometimes been scared to demand too much from his knee.

But while Koepka gave the world another look into his haunted mind and lingering pain, it was as leader of the Masters where his five-under-par 67 in Friday’s second round gave him a three-stroke lead as the game was interrupted for the day due to bad weather.

A win on Sunday — or when the tournament ends, given a Saturday forecast of two inches of rain and winds of up to 30 miles per hour — would be something of an exorcism for Koepka, who went from champion to almost-but-not-quite. to cut material over just a few years. It would also be a unique achievement for LIV Golf, the circuit Koepka joined last year after Saudi Arabia’s state fund funded it with billions of dollars, and Koepka assures that even if much of the golf establishment denigrates his new league, he can play the Masters for life and, probably, other majors for at least another five years.

“If you win one here,” Koepka said on Friday, “you tick quite a few boxes, don’t you?”

Indeed. It would also bring him a victory at the British Open close to a career Grand Slam.

Approaching the first tee on Friday, Koepka shared a third of the lead with Viktor Hovland and Jon Rahm, who had also hit 65s on Thursday. With bad weather on the way he thought an early start would be an advantage. By the time Augusta National briefly interrupted play for the first time on Friday, he was well past his scorecard and Rahm and Hovland hadn’t even made the turn. Rahm had not won a stroke after six holes and Hovland had won one after seven.

Meanwhile, Sam Bennett, a 23-year-old amateur from Texas A&M University, had picked up four shots to go down to eight. His 68 on Friday tied Marvin Ward’s 1940 Masters record for lowest second-round run by an amateur. No amateur has ever won the tournament, which was first played in 1934.

But Bennett, who trailed Rahm by a stroke after the world’s third-ranked golfer made a birdie on the eighth and ninth holes, certainly outsmarted many professionals. Rory McIlroy, No. 2 in the Official World Golf Ranking, had a miserable Friday and was on the verge of missing the cut at the end of the second round, which Augusta National officials hope to resume on Saturday.

Although the cut line could shift and some were still playing, previous major champions Bryson DeChambeau, Sergio García, Louis Oosthuizen and Bubba Watson were all in serious danger of exiting the tournament. That would tarnish the show of the LIV circuit that turned golf’s outward politeness on its head and turned players, in the minds of the league’s critics, into symbols of greed and a covert Saudi quest to protect the kingdom’s tarnished reputation. to recover.

For Koepka, who earned about $38 million in prize money on the PGA Tour, LIV has been his most prominent proving ground of late. He has won two events on the track, including a tournament in Florida last weekend.

On Friday at the Masters, he barely waited to break the tie he faced at daybreak. He moved to the top of the standings with a number 2 birdie, one of those eminently achievable holes where a potential champion should progress.

He made par on the next five holes, then reached No. 8, the 570-yard par-5 that Rahm reached on Thursday.

After his ride Koepka thought he still had about 256 meters to the pin. Part of the ball was full of mud, which made Koepka wonder what it would do. Wanting to leave the ball close to the pin, he grabbed his 3-iron and made a swing he said he couldn’t have made not long ago, not with that uphill position and lack of power.

The ball landed just short of the green, then bounced off it and rolled to the right. A putt later, he also had an eagle at No. 8. Birdies at No. 13, playing 35 yards longer this year, and No. 15 sealed his 67, a bogey free round on a day when McIlroy had four just on the front nine.

“He drove well, hit his irons well, chipped well and putt well,” said Gary Woodland, the winner of the 2019 US Open who was grouped with Koepka on Thursday and Friday. “It was a 36-hole clinic.”

Such a show of force seemed unlikely until recently, and it was still so unexpected that it was striking that Koepka was able to hang crouched at number 13, where he made a birdie on Friday.

For some time, he said afterwards, he had been angry when he did something so simple and standard for a professional golfer, angry about how he had slipped at home and dislocated a knee — and torn a kneecap and torn a ligament trying to to move the knee yourself.

Had he been healthy, he acknowledged Friday, the decision to join LIV, with its guaranteed money and 54-hole, no-cut tournaments, probably would have been a better decision. Around the time LIV’s first season ended in the fall, he said, he started to believe he was on the verge of a revival. At the end of January, he was almost certain.

“I have a completely different knee, so the normal one is a little different, but swing-wise it still feels the same,” he said. “I can do everything I need to do and the confidence is there. The confidence was only lost because of my knee and that was it.”

Hovland, who was through 10 holes when play was interrupted, and Collin Morikawa, who had finished his round, were tied for fourth at six under, just behind Rahm and Bennett.

The closest LIV player to Koepka’s score was Phil Mickelson, who was eight strokes behind the leader. For the contested league, that gap is almost beside the point. Koepka’s rise at Augusta may be the circuit’s most welcome reprieve after months of setbacks, including legal defeats, a stingy United States television contract and, according to a lawsuit from LIV, earnings of “virtually zero.” (A California federal judge ruled Friday that a trial in the bitter trial between the PGA Tour and LIV would not begin in January 2024 as scheduled. The judge did not immediately set a new trial date.)

LIV’s detractors and rivals, especially the PGA Tour, relished the trouble and pined for its downfall. At the same time, many in the golf world were concerned about the possibility that a LIV player could triumph soon enough in one of the sport’s biggest competitions.

At last summer’s British Open, a reporter asked the director of the R&A whether a LIV player lifting the burgundy jug would amount to the governing body’s “worst nightmare”.

After all, the executive, Martin Slumbers, had just flogged LIV’s model as “not in the best long-term interest of the sport” and “entirely driven by money”.

“Whoever wins on Sunday will be inscribed in history,” Slumbers then replied, “and I will welcome them to the 18th green.”

The sport’s leaders only came so close to such a scene last summer. Such a person may now be only two rounds away – once the second round is over, of course.