Bryson and Brooks: Family Feud or Just Click Fodder?
The Bryson DeChambeau/ Brooks Kopeka brouhaha seemingly won’t go away. Sometimes it overtakes golf, mainly because people keep asking them about it, perhaps making it a bigger story than it is.
However, Kopeka and DeChambeau say it’s no big deal. Both of them were fine with the contretemps, and neither seemed interested in discussing it in any detail at their U.S. Open press conferences.
“I’m worried about what I’ve got to do and what I’m doing,” Koepka said. “I’m not concerned about what other people think. If I was concerned about what everybody else thought, I’d have been in a world of pain.”
Spoken like the Mr. Tough Guy that he seems to be. And as far as how it reflects on the game, he thinks it grows it. He thinks it brings more people in. DeChambeau actually doesn’t disagree on that point.
“Look, for me, I’m always going to be trying to play my game and not really worry too much about what other people are doing,” DeChambeau said. “At the same point in time, all of it’s been good fun.”
According to Wisconsin Golf, it all began with Koepka not liking DeChambeau’s pace of play. Face it. He can be pretty deliberate. Then DeChambeau went after Koepka’s abs. Koepka apparently followed with an implication that DeChambeau did not bulk up naturally.
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More recently, just as an interview by Todd Lewis of Golf Channel was beginning after one of the rounds of the PGA Championship, DeChambeau walked behind Kopeka, muttering something as he went. Koepka saw DeChambeau coming, which people interpreted as an eye roll. It was more a moment of I see him, and he’s going to distract my answer, and I can’t do anything about it. But still Kopeka lost his train of thought as DeChambeau marched from camera left to right. He was clearly not happy with DeChambeau’s movements at that time.
In fairness to both golfers, Lewis or the camera operator should have stopped the interview when they saw Koepka was uncomfortable, which he clearly was. They were probably going for the gotcha moment, and they succeeded. The people in production should never have allowed any copy of the incident to go public. But it might have been a fan who just happened to catch it. Right place, right time. Wrong result.
It didn’t stop there.
At The Memorial, again according to Wisconsin Golf, fans were calling DeChambeau “Brooksy.” A few of them were escorted off the property. Koepka offered to send them free cases of beer.
“Shoot, to be honest, people saying Brooksy’s name out there, I love it. I think it’s hilarious,” DeChambeau quipped in his press conference.
Steve Stricker, Ryder Cup captain, was then drawn into it when people started to ask him what he was going to do with the two of them at the matches this fall.
“You can’t have an outlier, or outliers, making trouble for everybody else. But I’m sure they’re big men and they can put their differences aside and go from there,” Stricker told Wisconsin Golf during the tournament he hosts in Madison.
But he also said that it was unlikely he would pair them for any of the sessions, thereby solving the problem for most of the players.
Ernie Els, playing at the American Family Insurance Championship with Stricker, said while it was interesting to watch, he did not want to say it was fun to watch.
A lot of people on the outside looking in would say, no, Ernie, it IS fun to watch. A couple of big, literally, rich guys trading barbs in a social media pillow fight. Neither one of them can really do anything to hurt the other, and honestly, as miffed as each might be, it’s doubtful that they would do more than trade taunts on twitter and Instagram.
Arron Oberholser on Golf Channel said his elementary-schooler handled disagreements in a better fashion, which was a really interesting way to look at it. A lot of parents would agree. A lot of people who aren’t yet parents still think it’s a fun feud.