But owing to golf’s byzantine, Edith-Wharton-style bylaws of decorum, it verges on impossible to get any of them to come out and say this.
SECRET ANIMOSITY PRO
To cover the sport is to know of a nontrivial number of players who wouldn’t cross the street to pour water on a fellow pro who erupted in flames. The magisterial slowness of the contest creates a false intimacy among competitors, who are often paired together, moving down the course in a dance as awkward as anything Larry David could concoct. Part of the explanation has to do with the game’s by-design status as the most passive-aggressive of televised sports. It’s difficult to describe exactly why this burst of antagonism between large men was so enchanting to golf media. A sketch-comedy program would be hard pressed to conjure a funnier reaction shot than Koepka’s journey from annoyance to exasperation to exhaustion his eyelids seemed forcibly pulled shut by the sheer magnitude of his disgust. “I lost my train of thought,” he fumed, and a flurry of expletives ensued. Within seconds, he was so discomposed that he could no longer continue the interview. DeChambeau appeared to say something while walking by - we still don’t know what - but his mere presence was enough to render the environment charged with animosity and turn the normally unflappable Koepka’s facial expressions into a symphony of malice. Suddenly DeChambeau’s massive figure materialized in frame, ambling behind him. Championship at Kiawah Island, providing standard-issue responses to standard-issue questions about course conditions and putting surfaces. Koepka was being interviewed following his Friday round at the P.G.A. Since then the rivals have badgered each other on Twitter to great comic effect, but an in-person confrontation, much longed for by fans, has proved elusive. Both are very beefy and very good - two figures on the leading edge of golf’s turn toward overwhelming power as the tactic of choice - and they have been openly feuding since 2019, when Koepka publicly complained about DeChambeau’s overly deliberate pace of play.
Bryson DeChambeau and Brooks Koepka are the P.G.A.’s No. For those of us who follow golf, pleasure rarely comes as pure as it did a few weeks ago, when some golf-world insider leaked an unaired confrontation between the sport’s most notable warring hulks.
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