Brooks Koepka leads the PGA Tour in strokes gained: chip on shoulder, and that chip got a little bigger this week with the release of ESPN’s Dominant 20, a compilation that strived to answer the question “who was truly elite in 2018?”
Koepka, the winner of two major championships in 2018 as well as the Player of the Year award on the PGA Tour, finished a career-best ninth in the FedEx Cup and had four top-10 finishes, including a pair of runner-up finishes at the World Golf Championships-HSBC Champions and Charles Schwab Challenge. He also overcame a wrist injury that sidelined him for a few months at the beginning of the season and cost him a chance of playing in the Masters.
Never one to let go of a slight, Koepka posted to Twitter on Tuesday with a string of emojis searching for his name on among the 20 most dominant athletes of 2018.
??? pic.twitter.com/hboyNl753P
— Brooks Koepka (@BKoepka) December 11, 2018
Included on the list over Koepka was, among other head-scratchers, a horse.
ESPN’s most dominant athletes of 2018 list…
No Brooks Koepka.
One horse. https://t.co/LG3HIW6wYp
— Alex Perry (@AlexPerryNCG) December 11, 2018
Golf wasn’t completely shut out, though. Ariya Jutanugarn ranked fourth with a Dominance Rating of 2.094, more than 1.2 points below 2018’s most dominant athlete, gymnast Simone Biles.
“In 2018, (Biles) was 3.25 standard deviations better than the typical top-four performer in all-around women’s gymnastics since 1998 — rendering her the year’s most dominant pro athlete,” the article stated.
For historical perspective, Koepka was the first player since 1989 to win back-to-back U.S. Opens and the first since Tiger Woods in 2000 to win both the U.S. Open and PGA Championship.
