Brooks Koepka withdraws from Players Championship with knee injury

Brooks Koepka has withdrawn from the Players Championship with a knee injury, the PGA Tour announced on Sunday afternoon.

“Brooks strained his right knee and he is scheduled to further consult with doctors this week to receive a more extensive evaluation and outlook,” said Blake Smith, Koepka’s manager, in a release. “We will be able to provide additional updates and information as we learn more.”

Coming off three straight missed cuts from December to January, Koepka won the Waste Management Phoenix Open in early February for the eighth win of his PGA Tour career. He tied for 38th two weeks later at the Genesis and tied for second at last week’s WGC-Workday Championship at The Concession. He was one of the betting favorites to win the Players and was announced in one of the featured groups before his WD.

Up until this announcement, it had been Koepka’s other knee that had given him issues. Koepka slipped and injured his left knee at the 2019 CJ Cup and missed a couple of months with a partially torn patella tendon. He returned, but his knee never got much better and was winless in 2020. In January 2021 at The American Express, he said his knee is “basically fully healed,” but admitted the next week in Phoenix that “there was a period maybe for about two months where I just questioned whether I was ever going to be the same, whether I was even going to be somewhat remotely the same golfer that I ever was.”

Anirban Lahiri will replace Koepka at the Players, which begins on Thursday.

Josh Berhow

Golf.com Editor

As GOLF.com’s managing editor, Berhow handles the day-to-day and long-term planning of one of the sport’s most-read news and service websites. He spends most of his days writing, editing, planning and wondering if he’ll ever break 80. Before joining GOLF.com in 2015, he worked at newspapers in Minnesota and Iowa. A graduate of Minnesota State University in Mankato, Minn., he resides in the Twin Cities with his wife and two kids. You can reach him at joshua_berhow@golf.com.

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