MIAMI — Brooks Koepka finally got home to West Palm Beach at 12:30 a.m. It was April 10, 2023. And thank goodness, because that meant it wasn’t April 9, the date Koepka blew the lead at The Masters. At least, that’s what you might guess Koepka was thinking.
But Koepka wasn’t done with April 9. He wasn’t done with The Masters. Rather than head to bed, the golfer went to the porch with his friend Dan Gambill. They stayed up all night. Not drowning their sorrows. It was actually the total opposite.
Koepka and Gambill worked through every single shot from Koepka’s final round at Augusta. No tablets or phones were necessary. They just worked from Koepka’s memory — his mental archive of the round. It must have been brutally painful to recount his three-over-par round after starting the day with a two-shot lead. It must have been painful to figure out how Jon Rahm finished atop the leaderboard by four strokes.
But Koepka isn’t one to shy away from discomfort. He ripped off the band-aid. And if he hadn’t, he likely wouldn’t have won the PGA Championship one month later, his first victory in a major since 2019. It was a necessary “building” moment, he said.
“You have to be really truthful with it and break it down into the finest points and really assess it,” he told FOX Sports at the LIV Golf Miami tournament last week. “I think that’s probably one of my better qualities. I can really assess it and figure it out. We realized why the outcome went that way.”
Out on that porch, Koepka said he recounted the following for each shot: 1) the plan and thought process, 2) where it missed, 3) what the shot felt like and 4) whether the execution was there.
That took more than six hours.
It’s typical for Koepka, who’s currently 10th in the LIV individual standings this season, to do this after a loss. It’s a part of his process. What was atypical was the urgency with which he approached the breakdown. It had to happen that morning.
“You don’t ever reflect on your wins,” he said. “I reflect more on the losses, trying to figure out why. Why certain events happened. Why I hit it here. Why was the execution wrong? What was the thought process? What went awry? So we just narrowed it down and we figured it out.”
When the sun rose at about 7 a.m., Koepka went to bed with a revelation about his game.
You’re probably curious about what he learned.
Well, he’s not telling.
“I won’t tell anybody,” he said with a smirk. “I don’t even know if my wife knows.”
When it comes to self-critique, the process is just as important as the outcome for Koepka. Particularly when it comes to winning major championships.
“I think the majors, a lot of it’s more mental than anything. You’ve got to figure out why. You look at all the second places that I’ve had. Those are the ones where you reflect more,” he said.
Koepka tries to work out of trouble on the 17th hole during the final round of the 2023 Masters, the last of his six bogeys that day. (Photo by Andrew Redington/Getty Images)
Koepka said he has four second-place finishes in majors, but he’s actually had only three. Maybe the act of drawing them out in this way makes the number feel larger. But it’s the life of an athlete: studying the bad performances to give way for improvement. And if we learned anything from his appearance on Netflix’s “Full Swing,” Koepka seems to toil as much as any golfer.
“Obviously, there were mistakes, so you got to make sure that you never make that mistake again. I’m OK with making a new mistake, yeah? And then correcting it,” he said. “Then you go, like, ‘That’s life,’ right? You’re gonna make mistakes, but just don’t make the same mistake again.”
Maybe he won’t tell us this particular revelation. But when he first revealed the information about this all-nighter to YouTuber Rick Shiels, there were more slivers of the secret around his 2023 Masters performance.
“I got so obsessed and focused on — I wanted it so bad that that was the problem,” Koepka said. “All you’ve got to do is finish 18 more holes. I got so far ahead. And when you get so far ahead, you lose what’s going on. It just became a disaster and a snowball effect, and you’re just going down and down.”
Then he added: “It’s going to help me years down the road now.”
It wasn’t a golden bullet.
Those don’t exist in golf, a sport that Koepka repeatedly told me is about “missing in the correct spot that you’re trying to miss it.” It’s almost a double negative, and it’s enough to make your club head spin.
Last year, he was 45th in The Masters and didn’t have a top-20 finish in any of the majors — which are typically Koepka’s specialty. But it’s not like he hasn’t found success elsewhere. Koepka won two LIV tournaments last season. This year, he doesn’t have an individual win after five tournaments, but he went to a playoff with Rahm in Singapore. And over his LIV Golf career, Koepka has a third-place finish in 2023 and a fifth-place finish in 2024 in the individual championship standings. At 10th right now, he’s within striking distance of the top of the leaderboard.
Brooks Koepka’s best moments at LIV Golf Singapore
RELATED: Why Jon Rahm doesn’t consider himself the Patrick Mahomes of golf — yet
He had a forgettable outing at LIV Miami last weekend, when he finished tied for 18th at four-over par. With gusty winds and fast greens at Trump National Doral, Koepka was steady (shooting 73, 74 and 73 in his three rounds), but he didn’t have any truly special days to vault himself into contention.
It was good for Masters prep, with all of Augusta National’s physical and mental challenges. But it’s hard to say if it’ll be indicative of where his game stands heading into Masters week, particularly for Koepka, who is known to rise to the occasion when major season kicks off.
“I’m typically a slow starter. It takes me a few events just to kind of get comfortable and figure out where my game’s at,” he said. “And then from there, just kind of have a little bit of a regroup. … Kind of happening after Singapore, just to make sure that, OK, this is what we got to do. Get some stats back. Look at some things and figure out, well, why is this this way? And then really attack that.
“And then you spend the last two weeks really honing in on it and making sure that any little cracks are buttoned up. You feel like you’ve got a good sense of feel, touch — whether it be around the greens. I think that’s huge for Augusta.”
He seems to know a few other things about Augusta that are huge — even if he won’t tell us. But no one is hoping more than Koepka that those secrets will lead him back to the top of the leaderboard at The Masters on Sunday.
Prior to joining FOX Sports as an NFL reporter and columnist, Henry McKenna spent seven years covering the Patriots for USA TODAY Sports Media Group and Boston Globe Media. Follow him on Twitter at @henrycmckenna.
Want great stories delivered right to your inbox? Create or log in to your FOX Sports account, and follow leagues, teams and players to receive a personalized newsletter daily!
Get more from LIV Golf Follow your favorites to get information about games, news and more
