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PGA Championship: Brooks Koepka takes record seven-shot lead into final day with victory all but inevitable | The Independent

For the most fleeting of seconds, Brooks Koepka ’s robotic armour looked to have finally been breached. After another imperious start, flushed with birdies and jet-plane drives, his birdie putt on the ninth raced two feet past the hole. Moments later, the rungs of New Yorkers packed around the green gasped in unison and rubbed their eyes out of sheer disbelief as his ball horseshoed out of the hole for only his third bogey of the week. In 45 holes, on a golf course that’s strangled the will of all this week’s grieving competitors, golf’s stone-faced metronome had blinked for the first time. On the tenth, still struggling to programme the horror of what had just occurred, Koepka’s drive trickled into the rough, his approach snagged in the long grass shielding the bunker and after a heavy-handed chip, another bogey followed. Suddenly, the chatter was charged on megaphone. “Surely not,” came the baffled murmurs from crowd and commentary. But then it was over. An angry swat that split the centre of the following fairway, the steady flight resumed as Koepka continued his relentless march to what now seems an inevitable victory. If this was to be his greatest patch of turbulence, the creeping period of rocksteady angst that’s supposed to unravel someone in a high-profile event, perhaps it’s apt they were dealt with in such a clinical, blasé and ultimately anti-climactic fashion.From 15p €0.18 $0.18 USD 0.27 a day, more exclusives, analysis and extras.By the end, his lead remained at seven, a PGA Championship record and victory is effectively sealed. He has dominated this event since before even teeing off on the first hole when he vowed to win “double-figure majors”. A course and championship record opening day, an unprecedented 36-hole marker and now a lead even Jean van de Velde couldn’t blow to take into the final day after an even-par 70.Beside the 14th green, after Koepka hacksawed from the rough up a sheer slope in a display of such brute strength it was almost ungolfly, a cry of “Tiger Woods” came from one well-lined fan. And while still provoking a wince of embarrassment, in many respects the idiocy carried truth. This lead is unseen and incomprehensible. Koepka has well and truly entered a territory unlike anything witnessed since Woods in his prime. He is the evolutionary product of modern golf; athletic, unreasonably powerful and mercilessly straight. There is no flair, no theatrics, it is a permanent, crushing form of automated cruise control, dismantling his way round step-by-step in video game-esque manner.