Brooks Koepka’s Chase toward Immortality and the All-Time Greats
By Bill Felber
Brooks Koepka’s standing among the game’s all-time elite might be impacted by his performance this week at Pebble Beach.
Brooks Koepka won’t be 30 for close to another year. Yet if he wins the U.S. Open at Pebble Beach, he will establish himself among the game of golf’s all-time greats.
Such a victory obviously would be Koepka’s third in succession, following up on his 2017 and 2018 victories at Erin Hills and Shinnecock Hills. Only one player has ever won three straight, and that player – Willie Anderson – did it 115 years ago, when the American game was very much in its formative stages.
But Koepka’s prospective greatness can be measured by more than a generalized comparison with one player who died more than a century ago. As measured by the method outlined in “The Hole Truth, Determining The Greatest Players in Golf Using Sabermetrics,” a Koepka victory would almost certainly propel him to a place among the 10 or 12 most dominant figures in the history of men’s golf in the world.
In its essentials, the rating system bases a player’s “peak” score on the average of the player’s 10 best finishes in majors – as measured by standard deviation – from the player’s best five-season period.
Using that method, Koepka entered the 2019 season with a rating of -1.58, good for 44th place in the history of men’s golf. That put him on a par with players such as Fred Couples, Jimmy Demaret, Retief Goosen and Bobby Locke.
But the 2019 season has already been an invigorating one for Koepka, who coupled his PGA Championship with a runner-up finish at The Masters. In tandem, those showings skyrocketed Koepka’s peak rating to -1.86, good for 17th place on that all-time list. As the U.S. Open begins, he sits just in front of Tom Weiskopf and Jock Hutchinson, and fractionally behind Gene Sarazen and Nick Faldo.
What impact could his performance at Pebble Beach have on Koepka’s rating? Let’s do some speculative math to find out.