Steve Stricker isn’t enamored with the simmering feud between Bryson DeChambeau and Brooks Koepka.
“Yeah, it’s not making my job any easier, you know?” Stricker said in a recent interview with Wisconsin Golf.
Stricker, after all, is the United States captain for the upcoming Ryder Cup on Sept. 24-26.
Stricker has three months to get DeChambeau and Koepka on the same page — or at least somewhere closer in the book — before the U.S. challenges Team Europe at Whistling Straits in Kohler, Wis. The event was postponed a year due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
“I haven’t talked to either one of them,” Stricker said. “I will have to at some point. We’ll see where it goes from there. Hopefully, they can put their differences aside for the week, be big boys and come together as a team.”
Hopefully appears to be the operative word.
Koepka wasn’t even competing at last week’s Memorial Tournament, where fans at Muirfield Village were heard referring to DeChambeau as “Brooksy” — with on-site security officials reportedly removing a number of spectators. Koepka responded by posting a video to social media offering free beer to anyone who had their day “cut short” at the golf course.
DeChambeau said Saturday that he thinks the PGA Tour needs to handle situations like that.
As for that viral video from the PGA Championship, Koepka revealed that he had become distracted during an interview with Golf Channel after a talking DeChambeau had walked by. The video showed Koepka rolling his eyes and dropping a choice word in the process.
“Obviously, I probably wouldn’t pair them together, but I think as the team room goes, you want everybody on board,” Stricker said. “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.”
–Field Level Media