AUGUSTA, Ga. — After the Friday round of last year’s Masters Tournament, Brooks Koepka stormed to a Mercedes-Benz parked at Augusta National Golf Club. He was in a fury, a four-time major tournament champion with a beat-up body, a war chest of pent-up ambition and another missed cut.
He tried twice with his fist to break the back window, which did not so much as crack, a pair of low moments in a year so overrun with them that one of the finest golfers of his generation found himself wondering whether he should play on.
“If I wasn’t going to be able to move the way I wanted to, I didn’t want to play the game anymore — it’s just that simple,” Koepka said on Friday, when he recounted how it sometimes took 20 minutes to get out of bed, or how he had sometimes feared demanding too much of his knee.