Southport, England
He reckons he made it home by July 1 or so. He did get to the gym but played almost zero golf. “You’re going to laugh when I tell you,” he said. “I played once with my manager.”
He believes that occurred on July 6 or 7, the first time he’d touched a club since June 18. He touched a club again for a photo shoot, then practiced here last Saturday and Sunday.
He went out on Thursday and shot 5-under-par 65 in the British Open.
What a loathsome individual.
The harmlessness of a respite got a big display in the first round of the 146th Open Championship, from two bright-light Americans whose presence atop the leader board should have wreaked a mass uh-oh. The U.S. Open champion Koepka had not competed in five weeks. The two-time major champion Jordan Spieth had not competed in four. In the gusty drear of the morning and then the breezy sunshine of midday amid the rude crosswinds near the Irish Sea, they shot their 65s. Spieth sprinkled the course with his humongous talent, as with his approach shot to the diabolical No. 6 and his up-and-down from a bunker on No. 16.
Koepka eagled No. 17 from a terrible lie in a rake mark in a bunker.
Fellow American Matt Kuchar later joined them atop the leaderboard.
If they were rusty, you’d hate to see greased.
No British Open champion this century has come in after more than three weeks idle from competition, and only two (Stewart Cink and David Duval) have had it as long as three. Every Open champion this decade has come in straight from some fracas that ended the previous Sunday — the Scottish Open for six of them, the John Deere for the other.
In their rarity, Koepka and Spieth have something else in common: Both won last time out. Koepka somehow distanced himself singularly from a crowded leader board at the U.S. Open and, one Sunday later, Spieth holed that playoff bunker shot in Connecticut that turned the Travelers into something even the non-nuts noticed.
“I’ve been putting in a lot of work with the putting and trying to get it back to the confidence that I’ve had the last couple of years,” said Spieth, whose past five majors drifted slightly but not garishly from his impossible standard of 2015, when he won the Masters and the U.S. Open, placed second at the PGA Championship and tied for fourth at the British Open. “It’s just been the one thing that’s been off this year. My ball-striking has been better than in any years that I’ve ever played golf. It’s been about capitalizing, which is frustrating, considering I’m used to seeing the ball go in. And then I’m hitting it tighter, but it hasn’t been going in.
“But then we won three weeks ago, and then I had some rest. So I feel rested and confident, which is a good feeling. It’s tough to have that feeling this late in the season. I thought that was an important break for me.”
Koepka’s case is much more exotic at age 27 (four years beyond Spieth). He seems to have a singular inner motor that responds to utmost challenge and finds tedium in depressurized situations. His major record is stellar even beyond that U.S. Open. He has entered 15 majors, made the top 20 nine times, the top 10 five times, the top five four times. He has missed the cut just twice and stopped doing that in 2013.
If he’s playing with friends or by himself, it’s just “hard to get up for it,” he said.
If he’s playing his father, he said, he’ll “shoot 75 every time, or higher,” he said.
If he’s playing “four or five weeks in a row, everything just seems to be nonchalant, I guess you could say,” he said.
He explained: “You get to be in the routine and get used to it. And it just doesn’t seem — it just doesn’t ever seem like I’m fully ready to play. If you take some time off and kind of recharge mentally, physically, I feel like I’m in really good shape right now, even with that time off mentally. It’s nice to come back. You get excited to play golf. And anytime you’re excited, you’re extremely focused when you’re out here.”
As for the rustiness, here’s another thing one might choose to envy on a planet full of tortured golf swings and changing golf swings: “I’ve done the same thing (swing-wise) for years, so it shouldn’t take too long to get back into it.”
He even adores links golf, having ventured around the world on the Challenge Tour before his big boom in the United States, and having won before in the vile weather once in Aberdeen, Scotland, and so on.
“I don’t really care that much,” he said of the kind of weather forecast for Southport today, and said of the links, “I see so many different shots out here, and having to pick one is kind of hard, to be honest with you.”
Spieth had everything down to his usual science. His coach, Cameron McCormick, even brought along a TrackMan unexpectedly to measure Spieth’s ball speeds in the 55-degree weather versus the 90 of Dallas. Even though he teed off at 9:47 a.m., he already had watched enough TV to know to read a little less break than players were reading from behind the hole on No. 1. In that bunker at No. 16, he “could have played hockey there, I could have gone back and forth,” but he put “a ton of velocity with an open face to it” and enabled a par that “was harder than hitting a 7-iron to 15 feet and making it.”
His only departure from his typical reliability was that he brushed his teeth and ate his breakfast in the wrong order, thereby accepting a piece of gum from McCormick, thereby figuring he had to keep the gum after he finished two holes at 1-under, thereby still having the same gum in his mouth afterward and figuring it might be time for replacement.
By then, he shared the lead with the guy who had been to Las Vegas since the big galleries last saw him, and who fielded a question from a reporter seeking verification that Koepka did not play golf while there.
“Good guess,” Koepka said.