Brooks Koepka using CJ Cup to get back on track for Masters

Brooks Koepka makes his return to the PGA Tour this week at the CJ Cup at Shadow Creek after missing more than two months with knee and hip injuries.

A typical player might treat this first event as a chance to get back into the flow, test his body and hope for a pain-free week.

Koepka is not your typical golfer. Asked what would be a successful week at Shadow Creek, his answer was crystal clear.

“Winning.”

He’ll have his work cut out for him. He’s facing one of the strongest fields in golf while playing a course that has never hosted a PGA round.

“Look, I know physically I’ll be able to play four rounds, walk four rounds and have no issue with it,” he said Tuesday. “From there, it’s just go out and win.”

Winning is not something Koepka has done during 2020. He has played 13 events, missed five cuts, withdrew from another and posted just two top 10s. He contended at the PGA Championship in August, but one week later shut his game down when the pain in his body became too much to tolerate.

“In my backswing I could feel my hip,” he said of playing in pain. “There’s a tear in my labrum, in my left hip, and then obviously the knee issue, so it was kind of the hip was caused because of the knee. I was trying to find stability in something, so that caused that. It’s all kind of compounded with the knee.”

The knee is his left, which had a partially torn patellar tendon last fall. He underwent stem-cell treatment to repair it, then re-injured it when he slipped on some wet pavement in South Korea last October. Despite shutting down his game for nearly three months, the knee injury lingered and led to issues with his hip.

Now, he believes, it is all in the rearview mirror.

“Everything feels good,” he said, calling his body a million times better than it was at this time last year. “We’re doing all of the strengthening in all the right places.”

Koepka has never been one to make excuses for his play, and his hip was obviously hurting at the PGA Championship, where despite playing well he was seen getting physiotherapy on the course during the second round.

Asked Tuesday how much the injuries affected his season, Koepka pulled no punches.

“It’s the whole reason I played like crap,” he said.

Koepka will play this week in Las Vegas, take the following week off to continue his rehab, then play in Houston before The Masters. This stretch, he said, can salvage 2020.

“I feel good now, so I’m just pleased to finally feel good,” he said when asked about a lost season. “Still got a couple of events, and then Augusta. You know, the year’s not over.”

But the real bulk of the season did pass by without him. Sitting out two months while rehabbing meant missing all of the FedEx Cup playoffs, the Tour Championship and the U.S. Open, a tournament he won in 2017 and 2018.

Not only did he bypass Winged Foot for the national championship, he didn’t even pay attention to it.

“I didn’t watch a shot of it,” he said. “I didn’t see anything.”

And even though he didn’t see Bryson DeChambeau turn the golf world on its ear with his U.S. Open performance, that doesn’t mean Koepka is unaware of what happened.

“It’s something he’s found that’s working for him,” Koepka said of DeChambeau’s bomb-and-gouge style of play. “It’s cool to see him just kind of as a fan of the game. I don’t see anything wrong with it. It’s working for him.”

Koepka has no desire to copy DeChambeau’s style or to put on extra weight in an effort to get longer. He’s already averaging 307 yards off the tee, and at this point just wants a healthy body to make it through the season.

“I didn’t know how bad I felt until I actually feel good,” he said of his year of pain. “It’s nice to be back.”

Greg Robertson is a freelance reporter who covers golf for the Review-Journal. He can be reached at robertsongt@gmail.com