A PGA Championship media event in San Francisco included a Brooks Koepka Sirius/XM radio interview in which he talked Tiger Woods and more.
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Brooks Koepka’s 2020 debut on the PGA Tour at last week’s Genesis Invitational ended with a different kind of victory lap. Koepka finished T-43 at Riviera Country Club, but his status as the two-time defending PGA Championship winner resulted in a Monday media tour around the San Francisco Bay Area. TPC Harding Park will host this year’s championship May 14-17.
Koepka’s day included, among other things, a public transit ride with the Wanamaker Trophy in tow. He also addressed media in a press conference. His take on tournament venue Harding Park?
“It’s a big boy golf course,” Koepka said. “You have to be able to hit it long. It’s very difficult. It’s a major championship golf course. You know that. You look at – this finish will be interesting. I think it will be a great finish. You look at the back nine there, starting on about 13, 14, it gets really interesting. You’re going to see a lot of – it will be exciting, especially if it’s close on Sunday. I think those holes let up for quite a few disasters and some good golf.
He also sat down for a town hall broadcast at the SiriusXM/Pandora studios in Oakland, California. Koepka, who has not been shy to offer his opinion as his career has taken off, discussed everything from his prospects of playing in the Olympics to his conversation with Tiger Woods after Woods’ Masters win last year to his thoughts on Patrick Reed’s rule infraction at the Hero World Challenge.
Here are the highlights.
Keeping score with Tiger Woods
Koepka acknowledged what an interesting feeling it is to go head-to-head with Woods down the stretch at a major championship. He has done it twice, holding off Woods at the 2018 PGA Championship but losing to him at the 2019 Masters.
Interestingly, Koepka revealed that Woods took the opportunity to rib him in the immediate aftermath of his Masters victory.
“It was crazy walking off the green and being there to congratulate him,” he said. “The first thing he said was, ‘One-and-one now.’”
Patrick Reed’s infamous sand shot
Host Sway Calloway asked Koepka a pointed question when it came to Patrick Reed’s movement in a waste bunker at the Hero World Challenge that ultimately resulted in two penalty strokes for improving his line of play.
“What are your thoughts on that? Was he cheating?” Calloway asked.
“Uh, yeah. I think, yeah, yeah,” Koepka said. “I mean, I don’t know what he was doing, building sand castles in the sand but, you know, you know where your club is. I mean, I took three months off and I can promise you I know if I touched sand. It’s one of those things where you know, if you look at the video obviously he grazes the sand twice and then he still chops down on it. I guess the Astros are going through that right now. Jim Crane said it, when he got asked, ‘Is it cheating?’ And he said, ‘No, we just broke the rules.’ … If you play the game you understand the rules. You understand the integrity that goes on. I mean, there’s no room for it…”
An Olympic future?
When golf made its return at the 2016 Olympics, Koepka was not among the men representing the United States. Where does he fall on wanting to add “Olympian” to his resume? As it turns out, he doesn’t feel particularly strongly one way or another – in fact, he’s 50-50, as he said. As the 29-year-old Koepka pointed out, professional golf aspirations and Olympic aspirations only recently began to overlap.
“I think it would be cool to be an Olympian but at the same time it’s not something I’ve grown up wanting to be. … Golf is so new [to the Olympics] it’s one of those things where I never had aspirations of playing in the Olympics. So now all of a sudden it is in there and it throws kind of a wrench in the schedule.”
There are majors to consider plus the playoffs and the Tour Championship (plus the load of cash that goes to the FedEx Cup winner). On that subject, Koepka acknowledged, “I’d like $15 mil. I think that’d be nice. I’d like to be fresh for that.”
All that said, Koepka called it an honor to play for your country. If anything, he said, he’s leaning toward going.
Honoring Kobe Bryant
Koepka never met Kobe Bryant before his Jan. 26 death. As it turns out, Koepka was already working on a Kobe-themed sneaker design last fall with his partners at Nike.
“I’ve always said, I kind of missed the Jordan era. LeBron (James) was kind of coming up when I was 15. My big thing was I was a Shaq and Kobe guy, I was a big Lakers fan,” he said.
When Koepka knew he was going to be in Los Angeles for the Genesis Invitational, he and his Nike team decided it would be the right time to debut the shoes. Koepka considered Bryant one of the men who made him who he is as a player, and wanted to honor that.
“I never met the guy but I was crying in my hotel room,” he said of the night he found out about Bryant’s death. “The impact he had on me – I look at it through the injuries, idolized him when I was a kid, all these different things.”
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