How Brooks Koepka’s 2023 Masters meltdown led to a revelation about his game

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.