I know what I was thinking, as Brooks Koepka tried to Greg Norman his way out of the PGA Championship. I was thinking Jazz Janewattananond might have a shot at this after all.
Alas, the golfer from Thailand soared to a 77 Sunday at wind-whipped Bethpage Black, saving news readers and headline writers from some Greg Norman-ing of their own. Not to say all the put-upon scribes who would have spent a sleepless night wondering if they'd inserted a rogue "n" in Jazz's name (or omitted one) in their dispatches from the wilds of Long Island.
They owe a round of drinks to Koepka for saving them from that, even if for long stretches on this darkening Sunday it looked as if Koepka was going to commit the epic choke of all time, eclipsing both Norman and Jean van de Velde as an immortal golf verb. You come to Sunday with a seven-stroke lead, and somehow you lose?
Whoa. "I done Koepke-d the thing" would have been the go-to line for golfing chokery until judgment trump.
But with Dustin Johnson within a stroke and Koepka weaving all over the road, the latter somehow channeled his inner Young Tiger once more. He scraped together a few golf shots, DJ paused in his run of birdies to serve up a bogey, and Koepka staggered home with a 74 and a two-stroke W.
It wasn't exactly the victory lap everyone was anticipating. But it was enough to get Koepka his second straight PGA title, his third win in the last five majors, and his fourth in the last eight.
That's a run no one's seen since, yes, Young Tiger. And if Sunday demonstrated there is still something vaguely human about Koepka -- a notion Tiger rarely displayed when he was android-ing his way past everyone back in the day -- it also demonstrated he's got the same sort of pitiless steel in his spine Tiger does.
Which is not to say Koepka is Young Tiger reborn, nor anything like it. This current run certainly stirs echoes, but, as 29, Koepka has four majors. Tiger had 14 by the time he was 32. So the comparison falls apart pretty rapidly.
Still ... this two-year stretch might be the closest we're going to get to the total Tiger Woods experience. At least for awhile.
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