Brooks Koepka finds momentum at the Masters after year of frustration

T welve months ago Brooks Koepka finished the Masters by trying to put his fist through a car window round the back of Augusta National’s caddie hut. He had just signed for a score of 75, which meant he missed the cut and finished in a tie for 59th. “I don’t even know if I should be saying this,” he admitted on Friday, “but I tried to break the back window with my fist.”

First time it bounced right off again. So then he tried again, and it still did not break. “Yeah,” he said with a chuckle, “I guess Mercedes makes a pretty good window.”

The ride home that night “was pretty silent”. Koepka was, at that point, still working his way back to fitness after having surgery to repair a shattered knee cap. It was only three years earlier that he had won his fourth major, when he won his second PGA Championship at Bethpage Black. Now he found he was so frustrated with how badly his recovery was going that he was thinking about quitting professional golf. “If I wasn’t going to be able to move the way I wanted to, I didn’t want to play the game any more. It’s just that simple. There were definitely moments of that.”

And now here he is, well on his way to winning his fifth. Koepka followed his opening round of 65 with a second of 67, which put him 12 under. Watching him play these past two days has been to see him remember who he used to be back before he broke his knee. When he is playing like this, Koepka’s golf feels as inevitable as the weather: he has hit 25 fairways out of 28 and found 29 out of 36 greens. There has been just the one solitary dropped shot, the bogey he made on the 13th on Thursday. He has been utterly relentless.

On Friday Koepka knew his early tee time gave him an edge over the two men he was tied with