Brooks Koepka and Shane Lowry are teaming up for this week’s Zurich Classic of New Orleans, a pairing that will open Thursday at TPC Louisiana in the PGA Tour’s rare team event. The tournament’s Zurich Classic format asks players to compete as self-selected two-man teams, with four-ball in the first and third rounds and foursomes in the second and final rounds.
Lowry did the asking. He said he told Koepka he might need a partner for New Orleans, and Koepka’s answer was immediate: “Well, I’m going to have to play there.” Lowry and Rory McIlroy won together in 2024 after playing the previous two Zurich Classics as partners, but McIlroy bowed out this year, leaving Lowry looking for a new teammate.
For Koepka, the pairing comes after his return from LIV Golf to the PGA Tour in January, a move that left him short of the FedEx points needed to qualify for the Signature Events. The two have known each other since 2012 and 2013, and their paths have crossed often enough that Koepka said the combination makes sense even if it may not look that way from the outside. “Everybody plays the same golf courses, so we see each other pretty much every other day,” he said. “I don’t go a day without seeing a guy out here, so there’s always conversations. There’s always people talking, having lunch, doing whatever, practicing together. It happens way more frequently than I think people realize.”
That familiarity goes beyond locker-room nods. Lowry and Koepka have moved in the same South Florida golf circles, including rounds together at Grove XXIII, and they were both part of the Ryder Cup in Rome in 2023. In a week when the format forces players to lean on someone else’s shot, that shared history may matter as much as form. The question now is whether a partnership that began with a simple ask can survive the pressure of two-man golf through Sunday’s final foursomes.
