Four-time Major champion Brooks Koepka and long-time announcer Peter Kostis have aided further gravitas to the cheating claims levelled against Patrick Reed.
The under-fire American golfer has found two vocal critics after his questionable play during the Hero World Challenge. He was assessed a two-shot penalty but the incident has followed him since.
‘If you play the game, you understand the rules,’ Koepka said. ‘You understand the integrity that goes on. I mean, there’s no room for it.’
‘I mean, I don’t know what he was doing, building sandcastles in the sand, but you know where your club is,’ Koepka told Sirius XM‘s Sway Callaway. ‘It’s one of those things where you know if you look at the video obviously, he grazes the sand twice and then he still chops down on it.’
He has since been joined by Kostis, who has retired from his role as one of the game’s leading voices.
‘I was told by Frank Chirkinian, the godfather of golf on TV, that we are there to report the story, not be a part of the story,’ Kostis said.
‘We could never call a penalty on a player, but we could comment if a penalty was called on a player. I’ve seen Patrick Reed improve his lie up close and personal four times now. You can go on YouTube. It’s the only time I ever shut [announcer Gary] McCord up – he didn’t know what to say when I said, “The lie I saw originally wouldn’t have allowed for this shot.”
‘He put four, five clubs behind the ball, kind of faking whether he’s gonna hit this shot, hit that shot, by the time he was done, he hit a freakin’ three wood out of there,’ Kostis told the No Laying Up podcast.
‘It was a sand wedge lay-up originally.’
Photo: Ben Jared/Getty Images
