Brooks Koepka is the lone LIV golfer of 24 playing in this week’s Ryder Cup at Marco Simone in Rome, Italy. The five-time major winner captured the 2023 PGA Championship, his third Wanamaker trophy, to essentially clinch his spot in the field.
And Koepka, never one to mince words, said this when asked whether LIV golfers were snubbed in the selection process for the biennial competition between the United States and Europe.
“Play better,” he said. “That’s always the answer.”
Bryson DeChambeau, who last week won the LIV Golf event at Rich Harvest Farms in Chicago, has said numerous times he felt snubbed by U.S. captain Zach Johnson, even saying he never received a call in the weeks leading up to the captain’s selections. Not even after he shot 58 to win the LIV Golf Greenbrier event in August.
“If you look at it, it would have been nice to at least just have a call,” DeChambeau said. “There’s numerous people that I think Zach should have called out here, and we didn’t get that.
“I understand, I get it, but we’re nothing different. We’re still competing. We’re still working super hard to be the best we possibly can be.”
In addition to DeChambeau, who represented the Americans at Whistling Straits in 2021, Dustin Johnson also commented recently he probably would’ve made the team if he was playing on the PGA Tour.
Meanwhile, Koepka, who also finished T-2 at the 2023 Masters, said the Ryder Cup came into focus after that week in Augusta, Georgia. He admitted he had a lot of other things going on in his mind when he made the jump to LIV last summer, and the Ryder Cup wasn’t one of them.
But a T-2 and a win in the first two majors of the year vaulted him up the board, and he earned one of six captain’s picks to head to Rome. Yet Koepka doesn’t think anyone was snubbed.
“I don’t make the decisions,” Koepka said. “It doesn’t — everybody had an opportunity to get there. I mean, I had the same opportunity as every other LIV player, and I’m here.”
This is Koepka’s fourth consecutive Ryder Cup, where he has a 6-5-1 record and is 2-0-1 in singles.
