PGA Championship 2019: How Brooks Koepka won at Bethpage will only make him more difficult to beat in the future

May 20, 2019

Brooks Koepka got lucky on Sunday. The luck wasn’t in the fact that he hung on for dear life to win his second-straight PGA Championship. It wasn’t in any of the 74 shots he needed to get around brutally difficult Bethpage Black three days after shooting 63 on the same course—albeit under strikingly different conditions. It wasn’t even in his ability to use the always rowdy (to put it politely) New York crowd to fuel him at the exact moment when he most needed a boost.

No, the luck was in this: He learned an important lesson on a long, grueling day and, ultimately, didn’t have to pay a price for that lesson.