Brooks Koepka has become a rather outspoken guy in the last couple of weeks, and he has been immediately transformed from someone perceived as milquetoast to one of the best quotes in golf.
Koepka first criticized Bryson DeChambeau's pace of play and the amount of time he takes to figure out the details of each shot, particularly as he was running away from the field down the stretch of the Omega Dubai Desert Classic.
Then the reigning US Open and PGA champion leaned in on Sergio Garcia's bunker-blasting and green-ruining antics at the Saudi International.
“That's just Sergio acting like a child,” Koepka said on the Playing Through podcast. “It's unfortunate that he's got to do that and complain. Everybody's got to play the same golf course. I didn't play very good, but you didn't really see anybody else doing that. You're 40 years old so you gotta grow up eventually."
And then Koepka returned to the dreadful pace of play throughout professional golf in another media appearance.
Speaking with Danny Kanell on Sirius XM Radio, Koepka admonished the game's governing bodies and presenting global tours for largely being unwilling to penalize players with strokes for slow play.
"It is frustrating. There's a lot of slow players, a lot of them are kind of the very good players, too, which is kind of the problem," Koepka said. "I think it's weird how we have rules where we have to make sure it's dropping from knee height or the caddie can't be behind you and then they also have a rule where you have to hit it in 40 seconds, but that one's not enforced. You enforce some but you don't enforce the others."
He added, "[Slow players are] breaking the rules but no one ever has the balls to actually penalize them."
Remarkably and perhaps ingeniously, Koepka admitted to sometimes slow-rolling his own pace of play to make sure his group is put on the clock, forcing slower players competing in the same group as him to move faster.
"Some of these guys are so slow, I'll take my sweet time getting to the ball," Koepka said. I don't have to go to the bathroom. [I] just go to the restroom and just kind of chill in there for five minutes, so we get on the clock, and now we're playing at my pace.
"It's probably not the right thing, but it is what I do."
Koepka has pretty much nailed it in everything he's said, and it's those Brooks Bombs that have suddenly made him a darling in addition to a three-time major champion.
