Does Brooks Koepka need a new marketing manager?
Golf Magazine has already dubbed the 2019 PGA champion as the no-nonsense superstar golf needs. That’s Brooks Koepka, the handsome but stone-faced winner of a fourth major in his last eight starts. The last golfer to do that was… nope, not Tiger, but someone named Old Tom Morris when they used to play with wooden shafts and the clubs were called mashie and niblick.
The muscle-bound Koepka is the game’s new masher, blasting the ball off the tee with amazing accuracy and hitting majestic approach shots to the greens that usually find them. He brought the tortuous Bethpage Black course to its knees, taking a seven-shot lead into the weekend and survived a charge by the loose and lanky Dustin Johnson to win the PGA for the second straight year.
Oh, yes, the 29-year-old Atlas of the Airways and Fairways also won back-to-back U.S. Opens in the last few years. He missed a birdie putt on the final hole of the Masters in April that would have sent him into a playoff with Woods, and Koepka actually cracked a sly smile when he walked off the green, looking like he was thinking “I’ll get him next time.”
The guy who went to Florida State has everything but a personality on the course. He shows the same stoic expression if he hits it stiff or, very occasionally, yanks one into the rough — from where he generally muscles the ball out of the briar patch with little trouble. He wears non-descript slacks and golf shirts with the sleeves sucking up to his bulging biceps.
He has a girlfriend waiting for him at the end that he barely pecks on the lips, and he hands golf balls to kids in the gallery so discreetly that if you blink you miss it. At press conferences, he is well-spoken — if a little a-grammatical, like saying “I played good” instead of “I played well.”
Somewhere out there is a marketing guru who is thinking, “I can make this kid millions.” My guess is that all this kid wants to do is beat the pants off the field and go lift weights somewhere.
Alone.
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