Can Brooks Koepka overcome one of the worst meltdowns in Masters history?

AUGUSTA, Ga. — Jon Rahm, the last big LIV holdout, won the Masters last year. It rained like the world would end. Trees almost fell on patrons. Tiger quit. Phil surged. LIV both lost and won.

But amid all of the compelling storylines, none was quite as remarkable as the collapse of Brooks Koepka, the most dominant major champion of the past 20 years. While eclipsed by matters of greater moment, from a purely golf-centric perspective, Koepka’s failure was the biggest story of all.

He blew a 2-shot lead by shooting 3-over in the final round on a day built for scoring. It was one of the most astonishing stumbles in Masters history and, considering his unique profile, perhaps the most astonishing ever.

You see, Koepka is golf’s best big-game hunter. He’s big, strong, and smart, with the touch of a surgeon, the nerve of a spy, and the patience of a sniper. His appetite for competition in the spotlight recalls Jack Nicklaus, Tiger Woods, and Tom Watson, with similar results. Koepka has five wins in his last 23 majors, four runner-up finishes, and 14 top-10s. Only Woods and Phil Mickelson have more major wins since golf became more inclusive, international, and athletic in the 1990s. Which made it all the more shocking when, on a benign spring afternoon, Koepka gave away the 2023 Masters.

He won the PGA Championship the next month at Oak Hill with a 3-under 67 on Sunday. He said that evening that he’d spent the night before reviewing what happened on Sunday at the Masters.

“I knew what I did in Augusta,” he said. “I spent the whole night thinking about it. I knew what I did and I knew I was never going to come out and think that way again. Didn’t do that. I felt in control all day.”

He made a similar vow at this year’s Masters.

“If I get the chance this year, I won’t be thinking that way,” he said Tuesday.

While most pro golfers fit the profile of affable, entitled, slightly out-of-touch country club kids, Koepka once was refreshingly different: a pleasant, reflective presence whose joy with playing the game and gratefulness for his talents and opportunities carved a niche for him. But after years at or near golf’s peak replete with petty rivalries, inevitable injuries, and what seemed to be a desperate, self-loathing move to LIV, he has devolved into an ever more surly, antihero loner with little use for the fools among us.

Choking at the Masters surely didn’t help.

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He finished tied for second, but his Sunday score was the worst of anyone in the top 10. The other nine golfers beat him by an average of 6.3 strokes in the final round. Rahm beat him by six. Mickelson, who was 52, beat him by 10, and tied him for second. Jordan Spieth, who once authored the most painful implosion here ever, beat him by nine; Masters rookie Sahith Theegala by eight.

Why?

Head games.

“I just didn’t play great,” Koepka said, “but I think that had to do more with my attitude or with the way I was thinking.”

So, what was he thinking?

“I’m not going to share it,” Koepka said, echoing his comments after the PGA.

OK. Let’s speculate.

The most logical explanation is that Koepka, then a recent and relatively reluctant defector to the controversial, Saudi-backed LIV Golf tour, felt pressured to validate the PGA Tour’s bitter rival. At that point, Mickelson was still a pariah for leading a pack of big names — including Masters champions Dustin Johnson, Bubba Watson, and Patrick Reed — away from the PGA Tour, which immediately banned them. That sparked bitter recriminations and rampant litigation (since settled) and a toxic rift in the usually placid golfing world. If Koepka had won golf’s showcase event, the arguments regarding LIV’s credibility — 54-hole, no-cut, closed-field events conducted with shotgun starts — would have been injured, if not invalidated.

Within weeks, that happened anyway, when Koepka won the PGA. Afterward, as the LIV world rejoiced, the man with consecutive U.S. Open wins said, astonishingly, that the 2023 PGA title was his “most meaningful” major. Seriously?

Perhaps, but while he rehabbed his knee and and reset his career and ruminated in LIV exile, winning the PGA was not Koepka’s goal. Winning the Masters, golf’s annual garden-party reunion, was. It would give him a third leg of a career grand slam (he also lacks a British Open), joining 12 others. It would make him one of 15 golfers with at least six majors. It would happen on golf’s biggest stage in golf’s most precarious moment.

The green jacket has been his obsession for 18 months.

“I’ve worked my tail off over the last, maybe, year-and-a-half, just getting back into shape, making sure everything’s right,” Koepka said. “And been going since December getting ready for this.”

Masters implosions resonate more than any others if only because, unlike the other majors that are played at rotating sites, Masters implosions happen on the same hallowed grounds. For me, the back-nine disaster that cost Spieth a five-shot lead in 2016 sits at the head of the class, but what happened to Koepka stands solidly in second place.

Spieth was only 22, but he’d played in eight majors, had won two, and was the defending Masters champion.

The rest aren’t close.

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Scott Hoch’s putter abandoned him on the 17th and 19th holes Sunday and short misses gave Nick Faldo the 1989 title. Ken Venturi blew a four-shot lead in 1956, but Venturi wasn’t Brooks Koepka; he hadn’t won a PGA Tour event, and of his 11 eventual wins, his only major was the 1964 U.S. Open. In 1985, when Curtis Strange blew a two-shot lead with six holes to play, he was still three years away from his first major win. Ed Sneed blew a four-shot lead in 1979, but he won just four times on tour and had just one other top 10 in his 31 majors. In 2011, Rory McIlroy was a 21-year-old with one PGA Tour win when, with a four-shot lead, he shot a final-round 80.

In 1996, Greg Norman took a six-shot lead into Sunday but lost seven shots in the final 10 holes in his last, best chance to win a third major championship. But by 2023, Koepka had won twice as many majors as Norman, and had done so in the much more competitive post-Tiger era.

The only factor that figured to mitigate Koepka’s ability to close was that maybe he hadn’t fully recovered from a three-year run of injuries. Perhaps playing major-tournament golf, compressed into a grueling, stop-and-start schedule, in cold, windy, rainy conditions took its toll. On Sunday morning, Koepka and Rahm had to putt out on No. 7, then play the last 11 holes of the suspended third round. Perhaps walking those slick North Georgia hillsides exhausted Koepka by 2:33 p.m. Sunday.

Only Koepka knows for sure, and he’s not telling.

Maybe he’ll confess if he wins it all this year.