LIV Golf winner Brooks Koepka reveals extent of injury that threatened career

Brooks Koepka was almost overcome with emotion after winning the LIV Golf Jeddah Invitational as he looked back on the struggles he has experienced in the last two years.

Having beaten Peter Uihlein in a playoff at the Royal Greens Golf & Country Club, the four-time major champion revealed that his career was almost over due to the constant problems caused by injury.

The 32-year-old has been winless since the Waste Management Phoenix Open in 2021 and before and since then, he has undergone a medical procedure on his knee and experienced dislocation and ligament damage, as well as problems with his hip and wrist.

He has described himself as glass before and at a previous Masters tournament, he was forced to bend down in a certain way to read putts to avoid pain in his knee.

Koepka has broken through on the LIV Golf Tour with a win at the final individual tournament in Saudi Arabia ahead of the Team Championship in two weeks' time.

An emotional win for @BKoepka #LIVGolf #LIVGolfJeddah pic.twitter.com/IUes22ss3l

— LIV Golf (@LIVGolfInv) October 16, 2022

"They haven’t been fun. So, it’s been a long road. I’m super excited. My whole team, we got the band back together, literally, a couple of months ago. We got Claude back on the team; and Pete - I’ve worked with Pete very, very hard; and Jeff as well. So a shout-out to them. This is for them," he said.

"Yeah - I didn’t know if my career was over for a half-second. So to be able to - I told Claude I wasn’t sure I was going to play. So it’s nice to be able to come back and be able to win.

"I still - eventually I’m going to have to have a knee replacement in a few years, but I didn’t know what was - I wasn’t sure whether I could even move the same way and if I wanted to play if I couldn’t move the way I wanted. I’m fortunate to be in the spot that I’m in right now," he added later in the press conference."

Before he made the controversial move to the Saudi-backed series, Koepka's potential on the PGA Tour had been halted by his damaging injury record which began with surgery on his left knee in 2019.

At the end of the 2019 season, he was a four-time major champion and one of the most formidable competitors on the Tour. We finally saw another glimpse of this intensity at the weekend.