The year 2020 will go down in the record books as a lost year for Brooks Koepka. Injuries to his hip and knee didn’t heal properly and prevented him from being the cold-blooded closer who won four majors between the 2017 U.S. Open at Erin Hills and the 2019 PGA Championship at Bethpage Black.
Koepka made a valiant effort at the WGC FedEx St. Jude Championship and the PGA Championship to claim a victory, but he enters this week’s Mayakoba Golf Classic in Mexico with one last chance to avoid being winless in 2020. Asked to sum up out how he would describe his golf year, Koepka took the high road.
“I don’t know if I could say that without getting fined,” he said. “Pretty bad.”
Koepka isn’t one to live in the past and he expressed confidence that his two-month layoff, during which he missed the FedEx Cup playoffs and U.S. Open, allowed his injuries to heal properly.
“It couldn’t have got much worse than it did over the summer,” he said. “My body wouldn’t let me do things that I wanted to do.”
That was then and this is now, and that is why Koepka isn’t putting too much weight into his failure to win since the PGA in May 2019 and only notch four top-10 finishes this calendar year. The former world No. 1 has dropped to No. 12 in the rankings, but has played a little bit more like his old self, recording back-to-back top-10 finishes at the Vivint Houston Open and Masters.
“When I started back in Vegas, I was pretty pleased,” he said.
Koepka said he won’t do anything differently this off season – “just keep focusing on my fitness, I think that’s probably the big thing,” he said – but he does plan to shake up his 2021 portion of the FedEx Cup schedule.
“Definitely going to start on the West Coast and play a little bit more. I think one thing this pandemic kind of taught me is you see a lot of guys don’t start their season until March and it kind of bit me and maybe a couple other players this year because you can only jam so many tournaments in,” he explained. “Stretch them out a little bit more and make sure it’s a little bit more of a consistent flow throughout the year.”
Koepka is making his second appearance at El Camaleón Golf Club, having missed the cut in 2013. A victory this week won’t redeem the year, but it would make for a merrier Christmas at the Koepka household and make a subpar year by his standards a bit more palatable.
“I mean, I’m disappointed, it’s not been the year I wanted, but just got to move on and keep pushing through,” he said.
