One patch of every PGA Tour green takes more punishment than any other—not where players mark balls, but within three feet of the cup. Brooks Koepka has spent this season watching that circle turn into a mess of footprints, scuff marks, and rolled-down turf.
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“Not a huge fan of it,” the five-time major champion said this week on Dan Rapaport’s Dan on Golf show, pointing at AimPoint putting.
Koepka isn’t complaining about the pace of play, which is the usual target. He pointed at what repeated reads do to that circle on a Sunday afternoon, when the greens have dried out and turned firm and a full field has already walked across them: “How dried out and firm it is from three feet around the hole, I don’t know if it’s because guys are doing AimPoint more… the caddies are in there.” That shift in focus matters because nearly every AimPoint argument of the past five years has centred on time, and this one centers on turf.
Koepka suspected he floated the theory earlier this season with Justin Thomas. He tied the timing to his return since he now sees far more AimPoint users in the field than before. He admitted he cannot fully separate the two explanations, wondering whether the wear reflected the fact that he is back playing alongside more people who read greens this way.
The routine itself explains why those feet land in the same place. A player straddles his line to feel the slope underfoot, then steps behind the ball and turns that slope percentage into an aim point with his fingers. Koepka described the motion plainly: “You go this way, then you spin and do the other way.”
The trouble, in his view, is proximity as much as frequency. Players now run the routine inside that circle rather than out at the midpoint of a long putt, so the traffic lands where the grass already takes the most punishment. From four feet out, Koepka has watched one player stand “right here” and another settle just behind him on the same line, both working the same strip of turf.
Standing over a three-footer is where that wear becomes personal. “Sometimes you’re going like, wow, there’s a lot,” Koepka said, surveying the marks between his ball and the hole. “It’s very chewed up around the green.”
The critique is awkward because Koepka once used the technique himself. He adopted AimPoint before the 2021 Ryder Cup and called it a “double check” rather than a complete system, adding that it spared his knees from constant bending. He admitted at the time that he was “winging it” and never applied the method the way instructors teach it.
His comments also land in the middle of a longer fight that has mostly centered on time, though his interview touched on “trenching” near the cup. Lucas Glover called for a ban in 2025, arguing the technique was “kind of rude to be up near the hole, stomping around,” and Jim Nantz has voiced similar frustration on air. Collin Morikawa pushed back that AimPoint had “1,000 percent” helped him, conceding only that some players stand in the wrong spots.
That unresolved argument leaves Koepka’s concern in a gap between etiquette and the rulebook. The rules let players repair spike marks and other damage on greens, a change that arrived in 2019, but they forbid anyone from deliberately improving their line of play. A player facing a three-footer on a Saturday often taps down footprints left by earlier groups, which counts as legal repair of someone else’s mess rather than an advantage he gains.
Koepka’s own fix sounds simpler than any of this. He suggested tapping the marks down and then hitting the putt hard enough that it wouldn’t deviate, which treats the damage as a nuisance rather than a rules problem. Nothing in the rulebook stops the next group from adding to that circle, so the grass within three feet of the cup keeps collecting damage with every round.