Brooks Koepka hasn’t been his old self. That could change this week

No golf event is more alcohol-soaked than this WC Phoenix Openannual warming act for (no copyright problem here!) great game. Coors Light is a tournament sponsor. So is Jack Daniel’s; Don Julio tequila; LaMarca Prosecco wine; and Tito’s vodka. To this scene we add (for the first time in a few years) Brooks Koepkawith his defender’s physique and his Michelob Ultra sponsorship. He won in Phoenix in 2021. He went out there in 2022. No one would be surprised to see him claim. Brooks Koepka return tour.

Last week was a dress rehearsal. In San Diego, we saw a nervous Brooks, returning to the PGA Tour after going to LIV for a three-year stint, one less than the length of his contract. It was strange, on this debut, to see this most enjoyable golf not owning the space around it. But there is something subdued about it Open Farmers Insurancethe Torrey Pines courses dimly from the Pacific Ocean, the morning mist acting as a silencer throughout the enterprise.

Phoenix is ​​nothing like that. The tour there is swell. Fans and players are unhindered. That’s where ball players thrive. The assumption here is that the BK 2.0 will start to look a lot like the OG edition, the one we know and know. He may not be ready to win yet, and he didn’t win anywhere in the world last year. But he will work his way through the course in his old familiar way. He will be among his people. All that beer and football energy.

This is an entirely new thing for the PGA Tour, the golfer returning after an enriching LIV run. Patrick Reed will be back around Labor Day. Kevin Na and Hudson Swafford will likely get some sort of playing status on Tour again, though you’d be forgiven for not noticing. On the other end of the noise spectrum, Bryson. It wouldn’t be shocking to see DeChambeau come in from the cold next year, regardless, despite missing the once-in-a-lifetime Feb. 2 deadline for the grand tour. Returning Member Program. If Bryson wants to go home, there will be an RMP II. He has been sounds indecisivemost recently with his 72 holes is-not-what-we-signed-up for INTRODUCTORY NOTES. Also, all of Team LIV’s work—which includes your RangeGoats, your Cleeks, Bryson’s own Crushers squad—hasn’t caught fire yet. Bryson plays in a different league, though: Team YouTube. To kill.

So Koepka is back and everyone on the PGA Tour is happy-happy-happy. Well, no everyone everyone. Wyndham Clark has questions, as do Viktor Hovland and Hideki Matsuyama. But the Big Three are outright failures: Brian Rolapp, in his first full year as the PGA Tour’s first CEO; Tiger Woods, the 50-year-old golf icon who no longer plays but has a full-time gig as a golf entrepreneur and Brian Rolapp ADVISORS; AND Rory McIlroythe most powerful person in golf. The reason is that he knows a lot about tour golf, global golf, and has the ear of friends who will finance many of the PGA Tour’s future profitable enterprises, Fenway Sports Group, John Henry lead.

To think how quickly things have changed here is deceiving. As a wise man once said, management is about management change. When Koepka went to LIV – June 2022 – The tournament was still the tournament, the one your grandparents would have been very familiar with. There was a straight line from Joe Dey (the first commissioner) to Jay Monahan (the fourth and last). What tour leadership has done since the advent of LIV is manage change, sometimes clumsily, now in language that makes the whole world take notice: We’ll make you some money.

Koepka is lucky he’s not making this comeback when Joe Dey was running the show. Dey, who came to the fledgling PGA Tour after a long career at the USGA, was a golf ethicist of the rule of law. The sanctity of the scorecard was his starting point and golf’s starting point for everything. The player’s composure was also sacred to him. To varying degrees, the commissioners who followed Dey — Deane Beman, Tim Finchem, Jay Monahan — all carried Dey’s flame. There was something right about being a golfer on Tour, at least when the sun was out. (At night, you were on your own.) Each of the four commissioners could have taken one promise from the returning Koepka: Don’t give five fingers to others after playing a 5 iron shot. Also, my good man: I can at least profess that your media briefings are less irritating than, let’s try that again, TSA secondary inspections?

As for Reed, Dey and Beman in particular would have had a field day with him in his keynote session before he returned to the tour: We can’t have any more rule-breaking (incidents at the 2019 Hero event and the 2021 Farmers tournament top the list), and we cannot have any more frivolous lawsuits aimed at beloved members of the Green Division of the Fourth Estate.

Koepka’s comeback has set a template for how you come back. You write a letter, you sign a check, you play a tour feeling somewhat embarrassed, you get your groove back over time.

Friendly betting tips here are Koepka’s top 10s this week; The New England Patriots will cover the spread (and then some) in the big game, for no other reason than Fenway Sports Group is on the roster and this game is adjacent to FSG; Coors Light will win the daytime exposure game, the golf telecast on CBS, but Mich Ultra and its grown-up cousins ​​Anheuser-Busch will carry the night on NBC, during the big game. Here’s to Sunday. Bartenders really need to be able to get endorsement deals on their TV remotes, what your grandparents used to call “the click.”

Michael Bamberger welcomes your comments at michael.bamberger@golf.com.