Golf Might Have Come
Naturally to Brooks Koepka. His
Steely On-Course Demeanor Didn’t.
The only things that have piled up faster than Brooks Koepka’s major championships over the past two years have been the plauditory diagnoses of Koepka’s psyche.
Bulletproof and immovable, CNN described him.
Bloodless, Golf Magazine contributor Josh Sens said.
Maybe the mentally toughest player on Tour, Golf Channel’s Brandel Chamblee conceded.
They are not wrong. But they are oversimplifying.
What talking heads call Koepka’s “mental toughness” is actually a constellation of learned skills that the four-time major champion has spent years honing: processing stress, playing through jitters, and rebounding from bad breaks. What looks robotic is, in truth, eminently human: the acceptance that he is imperfect, and the willingness to forgive moments of imperfection. No one makes it looks more natural than Koepka. It isn’t — for him, or for anyone else.
Johnny Miller called it “nerves.” He was more right than he knew.
. . .
Neuroplasticity is the concept that, for better or worse, human brains — like every other part of our bodies — are constantly changing: either evolving or devolving. Electricity flows through our brains across synapses — the gaps between communicating neurons. Generally, a given stimulus results in electricity passing across the same synapses over and over, traveling familiar pathways again and again — which is why our brains react the same way to the same stimulus, over and over, again and again. We curse a slice without even thinking to curse, because we’ve always cursed a slice. Over time, like trails worn down by years of heavy traffic, the synapses trafficked most frequently get stronger and easier to travel — while the infrequently used synapses get weaker.
But neuroplasticity is the brain’s capacity for change. A slice need not always be met with profanity. If we force ourselves to react to a familiar stimulus in a new way, then the electricity traveling through our brains begins to move across unfamiliar synapses. It’s hard at first, because these unfamiliar synapses are weak — the trail being traveled is overgrown and difficult to navigate. Over time, though, as these pathways become more frequently trafficked, they become stronger — and easier for the brain to access without being strong-armed into it. Force yourself not to curse after enough slices, and eventually, it becomes your normal reaction. That’s neuroplasticity.
Which is where Koepka comes in. Because when Koepka arrived at Florida State and met assistant golf coach Chris Malloy, “his brain was trained to act like an ass.”
“Brooks always reacted that way to golf shots because he saw other people do it, and it was just what he did,” said Malloy, now the head coach at Ole Miss since 2014. “I ask guys all the time, ‘Does that make you feel better when you do that?’ No, so why do you do it? They say, ‘That’s just the way I’ve always done it.’”
Malloy forced Koepka to change his behavior — and not solely through threat of running stairs at Doak Campbell Stadium. Malloy forced Koepka to think about his behavior. He surreptitiously videotaped Koepka’s meltdowns on the course, then later showed them to Koepka — who had no idea he’d looked so out of control.
“In terms of who he was, he was a hothead,” Malloy said. “He broke clubs. He cussed. He was hard on himself. He had a temper. Everything you see from Brooks Koepka now is a learned behavior. No part of that is in his personality to be that calm.”
. . .
Fairness demands acknowledging that Koepka’s way of handling bad breaks in his early days at Florida State was — for lack of a better word — normal.
“Stress comes from this idea that there’s some fear or danger associated with where we’re headed,” said Dr. Greg Cartin, a sports psychologist in Boston who has worked with golfers at every competitive level. “Biologically, we all respond the same way: our stress response kicks in. We get sweaty, we get tense, our heart rate increases; there’s a number of physical symptoms that we experience when we’re under stress.”
Tony Ruggerio sees it up close all the time. At his practice facility at the Country Club of Mobile on the Alabama coast, Ruggerio works with a stable of young pros. Ruggerio’s students praise his devotion to simplicity — giving them what they need, not loading them down with what they don’t. But Ruggerio offers something more, too. In an April 2018 profile in Golf Magazine, Alan Shipnuck described the assortment of roles that Ruggerio plays in his players’ lives; the last one was “shrink.”
“We don’t think of golf as a fast sport, but when you’re the player and you’re inside the ropes and leading a big tournament, and when you hit a bad shot, things get going pretty fast in your mind,” Ruggerio said. “I think the best players in the world have the ability to slow that down and keep their wits about them.”
Malloy calls this “separation” — literally moving on. He implemented a rule with Koepka (as he does with many players) to follow a bad shot by getting his club back in his bag within five seconds. “I just need them to separate the previous shot from what they’re about to do,” Malloy said.
It was neuroplasticity in action: weak synapses were firing, unfamiliar pathways were suddenly being traveled. It took time — years — but eventually, the meltdowns ended. Koepka’s demeanor changed because his brain had changed.
“I feel like — it's simpler than what guys think,” Koepka said on Saturday night at Bethpage. “Guys make the mistake of trying to figure out, when they get to a major, what's going on, what's different. It's not. It's just focus. It's grind it out, suck it up, and move on. You're going to make a lot of mistakes; it's a major championship. You know that's going to happen, and guys have a hard time letting that go.”
Koepka would know. He used to be one of them.
. . .
On Saturday afternoon at the PGA Championship, Koepka arrived at Bethpage Black sitting on a commanding 36-hole lead. Amidst a throng of cameras and hangers-on, he walked calmly, bulletproof, and undistracted toward the clubhouse.
As the scene played out on CBS’ broadcast, Nick Faldo repeatedly described Koepka as “oblivious” to the distractions around him.
Faldo could not have been more wrong. Koepka was the exact opposite of oblivious: he was fully aware of it all, freely allowing himself to acknowledge both the circus around him and his own feelings about it. Koepka wasn’t unaware of the chaos — he was just unmoved by it, precisely because he allowed himself to be aware of it.
“For me, mental toughness is not an ability to think a certain way. It’s the ability to accept what we’re thinking and know that we can perform at a high level regardless,” Cartin said. “Our thoughts don’t matter. That’s hard to do.”
And therein lies the first irony of Koepka’s mental toughness: it derives from being vulnerable, not tough. Koepka looks the part of a stone-cold killer, oblivious to the stressors around him precisely because he’s not oblivious to them.
Herein lies the second irony: it’s not replicable.
In 2015, when Jason Day was on a months-long heater that included five wins, a PGA Championship, and an ascent to No. 1 in the world, Cartin’s clients frequently asked him to help them replicate Day’s glacial, half-comatose pre-shot routine. Now, he is asked to help them build an on-course personality as unflappable as Koepka’s. Players see what winning players are doing, and they want to do it. That’s a dangerous plan, Cartin explains.
“We see these guys on TV, we try to do what they’re doing without really knowing what they’re doing, and the whole time the only thing we’re doing is resisting ourselves,” Cartin said. “‘I’m not good enough, I need to be like somebody else’ — that’s resistance. ‘I’m not thinking the right way, I need to think like this person or that person’ — we don’t have control over that. To create a more stress-free environment, you need to not do what others are doing, but accept what you’re doing as being correct and not resisting yourself. The stress will go away the second we stop trying to think like somebody else.”
In other words, Koepka isn’t mentally tough because he’s a stone-cold killer; he’s mentally tough because he allows himself to acknowledge the stress of a final-round lead in a major, accepts his reaction to that stress — whatever it is — as legitimate, and understands that it need not overwhelm him, understands that it is not real. In Koepka’s case, the result looks the part of a stone-cold killer, but that’s not necessarily intentional; what’s actually happening is that he is being his best version of himself, accepting bad breaks and moving on from them. Koepka doesn’t ignore stress — he accepts it.
“The thing I impress upon my players is that it’s OK to be nervous; it’s OK to have bad thoughts,” Ruggerio said. “Whether players admit it or not, I think when they get those thoughts, internally you feel like you’re not supposed to have those thoughts and that means I’m weak or not good. But once you start accepting that everybody has them and that doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong, and that it’s OK to think bad shit — then you can think, ‘I’m aware of those bad thoughts, and it doesn’t mean I can’t hit a good shot here.’”
. . .
The morning after Koepka became only the 29th golfer in history to win four major championship, Brandel Chamblee — to whom Koepka attributed the greatest disrespect of his career — sought to distance himself from pre-Bethpage comments that had questioned Koepka’s mental toughness.
“It wasn’t that I was questioning his toughness,” Chamblee said on Golf Channel. “Every player on the PGA Tour is a mental badass. … You don’t make it through Q-school without being a mental badass.”
But even that undersells Koepka and both the rarity of his skillset and the purposefulness that its development required. “I know firsthand of many players who are not like that,” Cartin said. “But they start to learn that they don’t need to be like that. I think that’s the difference. Athletic culture breeds this idea that we can block out our thoughts and we don’t get bothered and we can think the way that we want at will. One, it’s not possible. But two, the most important piece is that it’s just not necessary.”
Ironically, the man who has benefitted more than perhaps any golfer alive from a shift in psychology eschews the profession. “I don't need a sports psychologist,” Koepka said at Bethpage. “I'm pretty good at it. I know what I'm doing.”
There is a hubris to this. Koepka ought to know that’s not mentally tough.
. . .
All photos: credit PGA of America