‘I don’t think many people want to talk to him regardless’: Brooks Koepka rekindles beef with Bryson DeChambeau
David Becker
Wayyyyy back in 2025, in the wake of McIlroy winning his first green jacket, Bryson DeChambeau sat down in front of a room full of reporters and aired out a little dirty laundry. Asked about the duo’s interactions while playing together in the final pairing on Masters Sunday, DeChambeau said.
"No idea. [Mcilroy] Didn't talk to me once all day.”
It was the kind of comment that’s generally supposed to remain behind clubhouse doors, and it ruffled a few feathers, most notably McIlroy’s, who was almost incredulous at the PGA Championship a month later.
“I don’t know what he was expecting,” McIlroy said. “We’re trying to win the Masters. I’m not going to try to be his best mate out there.”
Since then, the bad blood between DeChambeau and McIlroy has continued to simmer. So much that it’s easy to forget that McIlroy isn’t DeChambeau’s first on-tour feud. That honor belongs to Brooks Koepka, who presided over one of the most public and visceral beefs golf has ever seen as he clashed with DeChambeau throughout much of 2020 and 2021.
The war of words eventually cooled as Koepka and DeChambeau found themselves on the same side of the LIV-PGA Tour divide, but that doesn’t mean they became best buds. That much was obvious this week when Koepka joined Dan on Golf for a quick range chat with host Dan Rapaport. Eventually, and cleverly, Rapaport brought up McIlroy and DeChambeau’s Masters disagreement, and Koepka … well, let’s just say he took the bait.
“I don’t think many people want to talk to him regardless,” is a dagger with a twist. This kind of trash talk is fairly common in gladiator-adjacent sports like football, basketball and MMA, but in professional golf, where guys do everything in their power to blend in, not stand out, it’s practically an assasination.
We’ll see if this reignites Koepka and DeChambeau’s cold war of words. From the outside looking in, it seems like both Koepka and DeChambeau have more important things to worry about right now (Koepka on securing Championship Series status and DeChambeau deciding what to do about LIV Golf 2.0). But judging by what we’ve seen in the past, under no circumstances should we underestimate the pair’s pettiness.