Brooks Koepka is not his old self. That may change this week

There’s no more alcohol-soaked golf event than the WM Phoenix Open, the annual warm-up (no copyright issue here!) great game. Coors Light is the sponsor of the tournament. So is Jack Daniel; Don Julio tequila; LaMarca Prosecco wine; and Tito’s vodka. In this scene, we add (for the first time in several years) Brooks Koepka, with his full back body and his Michelob Ultra sponsorship. He won in Phoenix in 2021. He played there in 2022. No one would be surprised to see him compete. Brooks Koepka’s comeback tour.

Last week was a dress up game. In San Diego, we saw a nervous Brooks, returning to the PGA Tour after going to LIV for three years, short of the length of his contract. It was strange, at first, to see this male golf competitor with no space around him. But there’s something sad about the Farmers Insurance Open, the Torrey Pines course dwarfed by the Pacific Ocean, the morning fog acting as a fog for the rest of the business.

Phoenix is ​​no such thing. The tourney there is fun. Fan and player alike are uninhibited. Footballers thrive there. The guess here is that the BK 2.0 will start to look a lot like the OG edition, the one we know and are familiar with. He may not be ready to win, and he didn’t win anywhere in the world last year. But he will navigate the course in his old, familiar way. He will be among his people. All that beer-and-ball power.

This is a completely new experience for the PGA Tour, the returning golfer after an enriching LIV run. Patrick Reed will be back on ‘Labor Day. Kevin Na and Hudson Swafford are likely to get some form of play on Tour as well, or you’d be forgiven for not noticing. On the other end of the audio spectrum, Bryson. It wouldn’t be shocking to see DeChambeau come in from the cold next year, despite missing the once-in-a-lifetime deadline Feb. 2 of the Great Return Travel Member Program. If Bryson wants to come home, there will be an RMP II. He sounded uncomfortable, recently on the 72-holes-is-not-subscribed- words. Also, the rest of the LIV team – including your RangeGoats, your Cleeks, Bryson’s team of Crushers – isn’t even here yet. Bryson plays in another league anyway: Team YouTube. Kill-ing-it.

So Koepka is back and everyone on the PGA Tour is happy-happy-happy. Well then everyone everyone. Wyndham Clark has questions, as do Viktor Hovland and Hideki Matsyuama. But the Big Three are completely down as well: Brian Rolapp, in his first full year as the inaugural CEO of the PGA Tour; Tiger Woods, a 50-year-old golf icon who doesn’t really play anymore but has a full-time career as a golf entrepreneur and Brian Rolapp. consigliere; and Rory McIlroy, the most powerful man in golf. The reason is, he knows a lot about tournament golf, world golf, and he’s got the ear of the guys who are going to finance a lot of the future profitable businesses of the PGA Tour, Fenway Sports Group, which John Henry oversees.

It’s dizzying, thinking about how quickly things have changed here. As a wise man once said, management is about management change. When Koepka went LIV – June 2022 – The tour was still a trip, one that your grandparents would have been more aware of. There was a direct line from Joe Dey (the first commissioner) to Jay Monahan (the fourth and last). What tour leadership has done since LIV’s arrival is a change in management, sometimes in a strange way, now in a language that makes the world take notice: We’re going to make money.

Koepka is lucky he didn’t get this back when Joe Dey ran the show. Dey, who came to the PGA Tour as a freshman after a long stint at the USGA, was a golf ethicist. The sanctity of the score card was his first place, and golf’s first place, in everything. The behavior of the player was also sacred to him. To varying degrees, the commissioners who succeeded 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.) Any of the four commissioners might have issued a promise to the returning Koepka: Don’t wave five fingers at others after playing a 5-iron shot. And, my good man: Can you at least pretend that your media sessions are less annoying than those let’s-try-again second TSA inspections?

As for Reed, Dey and Beman in particular would have a field day with him, in his meeting with the principal before returning to Journey: We Can’t anywhere too many conflicting rules (events for the 2019 Warriors event and the 2021 Farmers tournament are at the top of the list), and we can’t anywhere many frivolous lawsuits aimed at popular members of the Green Division of the Fourth Estate.

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

Friendly bet here with Koepka 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 a roll and this game is FSG-closer; Coors Light will win the daytime exposure, the golf broadcast on CBS, but Mich Ultra and its older Anheuser-Busch cousins ​​will play the night on NBC, during the big game. Here it is Sunday. Bartenders really should be able to get deals on their TV remotes, what your grandparents call “the clicker.”

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