Brooks Koepka swung, and his ball worked right to left on the 15th at the Albany Golf Course. “Nice swing, dude,” Chase Koepka, his younger brother and caddie, said. It was. And it was. Koepka’s second shot on the par-5 during Friday’s second round of the Hero World Challenge dropped about 15 feet from the cup.
The draw also flew through his upper-left window.
You, Brooks Koepka fan, see his scores, and you see that his game is trending back up. A pair of 67s during the first two rounds of the Hero, which place him a shot out of the lead heading into the weekend. A convincing match-play win over the Hero’s leader, and Koepka frienemy, Bryson DeChambeau, at the Match last Friday. And while Koepka no doubt sees the scores, too, he knows he’s running best when he’s also seeing something else.
“I always picture when I’m hitting the golf ball I’ve got nine windows in front of me,” he said Friday. “When you’re trying to hit the low, stinging draw, you go to the bottom right or whatever. I always feel like I’m kind of hitting the upper left-hand corner, and I’m finally starting to do that, and it’s matching up to what I’m feeling.
“That’s been the big thing, I think, is matching the feels. OK, I felt like I missed it right at impact, it’s missing right, or if I’m missing left, I feel that at impact. So I’m very happy with the direction we’re going.”
If you think you’ve heard of the nine-windows trick before, maybe from the man who’s hitting 3-woods off to the side this week at the Albany Golf Course, it’s because you have. Yes, Tiger Woods, among others, also employs it, and the rehabbing 15-time major champ went in depth on it earlier this year on a pre-accident video for TaylorMade.
“It’s basically three different trajectories — high, medium, low — and from there, it’s about whether you cut them or draw them,” Woods said on the video. “Those are your nine windows.”
“When I get into a tournament situation, under the gun, I don’t think of anything but that [the nine windows],” Woods said later in the video. “Now, do I do a hell of a lot of position work? Yes, in front of a mirror or on the range. But if I have to hit a shot now, to play this shot in a tournament — we’re on a range, but I’m imagining that I’m on a golf course; how I talked you through that little cut, where I need that ball to start off at that little ball and ended at the tree — that’s all how I’m looking at this golf shot and feeling it.”
Before Koepka’s recent run, he had been in a slog. Back-to-back missed cuts. Before that, a finish of no better than a tie for 22nd in six events since the Open Championship in July. The video shared by the PGA Tour of Koepka hitting driver after driver after driver on the range after the first round of Houston Open early last month was telling.
