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By Joel Beall
Bryson DeChambeau will be making his first start since his U.S. Open triumph at this week’s Shriners Hospitals for Children Open. A start that will serve as a Winged Foot rematch of sorts.

DeChambeau, who won the Shriners two years ago, will be paired with Matthew Wolff and Cameron Champ for the first two rounds at TPC Summerlin.

The featured group is as close to a fireworks display as you’ll see on the PGA Tour. DeChambeau led the tour in driving distance last season with a 322.1 yard average, narrowly edging Champ (322.0 yard mark) for the distance title. Wolff wasn’t too far behind at a 311.6-yard clip, good for ninth on the circuit.

Of greater note, DeChambeau and Wolff were paired together in the final round at the U.S. Open. Despite beginning the day two back of Wolff, DeChambeau turned in the only under-par round that Sunday to clip Wolff by six shots to win his first major championship. Champ (73-78) failed to make the weekend proceedings in Mamaroneck, N.Y.

The tour announced three other featured groups Monday for the Shriners’ first two rounds: Jason Day, Hideki Matsuyama and Sergio Garcia; Kevin Na, Patrick Cantlay and Rickie Fowler; Webb Simpson, Collin Morikawa, Joaquin Niemann.

The Shriners begins on Thursday. Na is the defending champ.

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By Ryan Herrington
The inevitable fallout on the PGA Tour of Bryson DeChambeau winning the U.S. Open with his bombs-away strategy was that previously sceptical peers might be more willing to give the method a try. But it’s one previously sceptical peer doing the trying, in particular, that seems most intriguing.

Rory McIlroy notably praised DeChambeau on the Sunday of his victory at Winged Foot (“It’s kind of hard to really wrap my head around it.”) but did so with a seeming caveat.

“So I think … about the guy, I think it’s brilliant, but I think he’s taken advantage of where the game is at the minute,” McIlroy said. “Look, again, whether that’s good or bad, but it’s just the way it is. With the way he approaches it, with the arm-lock putting, with everything, it’s just where the game’s at right now.

“I’m not saying that’s right or wrong. He’s just taking advantage of what we have right now.”

Earlier in the summer, when asked if he might consider bulking up like DeChambeau to help increase his swing speed and get more distance, McIlroy noted he wasn’t inclined to do so since he felt he typically hit it farther when he was smaller.

And yet, on his Instagram story feed over the weekend, McIlroy shared a look at some numbers on a launch monitor in which he appeared to follow DeChambeau’s swing-it-hard lead with some eye-popping results.

Mind you, McIlroy was already no stranger to long drives; he has averaged between 306 and 319 yards in driving distance on tour each of the last five seasons. And whether he decides to crank it up in a tournament setting isn’t clear.

However, if McIlroy was fretful of DeChambeau “taking advantage” of today’s technology, it’s not enough to keep him from exploring whether it could work for him, too.

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By Dave Shedloski
Scottie Scheffler didn’t have the opportunity to celebrate his selection as PGA Tour Rookie of the Year in the manner he would have preferred. He didn’t get to celebrate it at all, frankly.

He was at home, isolated from friends and family when he should have been in New York preparing for the U.S. Open at Winged Foot. After finishing fifth in the final FedEx Cup standings with a season that included seven top-10s, a tie fourth in his first PGA Championship and the 12th sub-60 round in tour history, Scheffler found out the Monday of U.S. Open week that he was selected by his peers as the top rookie of the abbreviated 2019-’20 season.

But the day prior he had to withdraw from the year’s second major because he tested positive for COVID-19. The Dallas resident became the first tour player to test positive after six consecutive weeks without a positive case. The only consolation was that he was asymptomatic.

“That obviously stunk,” Scheffler, 24, said Wednesday at the Sanderson Farms Championship in Jackson, Miss., where he is making his first start since the Tour Championship. “I felt all right, and only one person I knew was also infected, and so we kept our circle pretty small, and it paid off. It was obviously scary for my coaches and the few people I was around that week, but everybody was feeling all right. We’re all recovered now.”

But he’s far from recovered from the disappointment of being at Winged Foot, despite it being a relative scoring nightmare for almost everyone not named Bryson DeChambeau.

“It definitely stunk sitting at home all week watching the U.S. Open, especially the way I was playing leading into it,” Scheffler said. “I felt like I had a good chance of winning. It stunk, but it’s the world we live in. I felt OK so very blessed to have felt good through all of it and came out on the other side recovered. So all good.”

But it stunk. In case there’s any doubt how he feels about sitting out.

And that bit about watching it, well, he didn’t do much watching to an appreciable degree. “Not a huge golf watcher when I’m not playing, especially during COVID week … or during when I had COVID I was trying not to pay attention,” he said. “It kind of bummed me out watching everybody on TV.”

Scheffler had reason to feel confident about his chances of winning the U.S. Open. In his final six starts of the season, he finished no worse than his T-20 at the BMW Championship. And during that stretch he fired a second-round 59 at TPC Boston in The Northern Trust, the first playoff event. The former Texas Longhorn two-putted from 90 feet and sank a four-foot birdie putt on the 18th hole to complete the round.

“Yeah, it seems to come up a decent amount,” he said. “With my friends at home, they told me ‘good job’ and then kept making fun of me after that, so there wasn’t too much discussion there.”

Christian Petersen/PGA of America
Scottie Scheffler impressed when he held his own with Dustin Johnson in the final pairing on Sunday at the PGA Championship in August.

Scheffler comes to the Country Club of Jackson as the betting favorite. He is making his third start in the tournament, with finishes of T-45 and T-16, respectively, the previous two years.

The forced layoff gave him time to reflect on his successful rookie campaign, of which he is mostly satisfied. “If you had told me that was going to be my results going in, I would have been pleased. I would have liked to have had a win last year, but I feel like that’s coming on the horizon.

“I feel my game is still in a good spot,” Scheffler added. “I think there’s still a few areas that are a little rusty just from taking—having not played tournament golf in the last three weeks. A little different feeling coming into this week. I’m not as in rhythm as I usually am, but hopefully I’ll pick back up soon, but like I said, my game feels like it’s in a good spot.”

Thankfully, so is his health.

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By Ryan Herrington
John Pak wasn’t thinking about next summer when he was working his way around Winged Foot on Sunday, more caught up in the present than the future. The 21-year-old senior at Florida State was focused simply on trying to end the week at the U.S. Open on a positive note.

Yet while the finish was a bit bumpy, bogeys on his final four holes leaving him with a four-under 74, a T-51 showing when no other amateur made the cut could prove pivotal in nine months time. The performance helped Pak stake a firmer hold on the top spot in the latest PGA Tour University rankings released on Wednesday.

As part of the PGA Tour’s initiative launched this fall to reward college players who stay in school through their senior years, Pak could earn immediate membership on the Korn Ferry Tour if he were to remain in the top five of the ranking after next spring’s NCAA Championship. Finish sixth through 15th and he’d earn status on the PGA Tour’s developmental tours in Canada, China or Latin America.

The ranking accounts for performances in Division I college events and any official PGA Tour tournaments, including the majors. Pak, winner of seven individual titles with the Seminoles, was first in the initial listing that came out in July.

The chance to earn points at Winged Foot was a big deal for Pak considering that he won’t play in any college events this fall. As an ACC school, Florida State has followed the conference edict and cancelled all its fall tournaments for the 2020-’21 college season due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The hope is that the Seminoles can start their spring season, Pak the top man in their lineup.

“We start early, as early as January, I believe, and we’ve got a really good team,” Pak said. “I feel like we have a good shot at winning the national championship this year, so that’s something I’m really looking forward to.”

Pak’s performance also likely wrapped up another chance to play for the U.S. in the Walker Cup, the match scheduled for May at Seminole Golf Club in Juno Beach, Fla. Pak went 3-0 for Team USA in its win over Great Britain & Ireland at Hoylake in September 2019.

Pak wasn’t the only college senior to benefit from playing in the U.S. Open. Despite missing the cut at Winged Foot, Arizona State’s Chun An Yu, Georgia’s Davis Thompson Texas Tech’s Sandy Scott and Vanderbilt’s John Augenstein all earned points. Yu held on to his No. 2 spot, while Thompson moved to No. 3 (from 4), Scott to No. 4 (from 5) and Augenstein to No. 6 (from 9).

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By Ryan Herrington
In the wake of Bryson DeChambeau’s convincing six-stroke triumph at the U.S. Open, there was an avalanche of analysis regarding the short- and long-term impact his victory might have on the game. Golf Digest contributor Shane Ryan summarised well what the Bryson Effect could wind up looking like, noting the immediate upshot was that DeChambeau could no longer be labelled a “pretentious pseudoscientist” but rather as a major champion whose bombs-away strategy have been validated on one of golf’s grandest stages.

Indeed, during the summer, when tour pros were asked about Bulked-up Bryson and his extreme approach to the game, many of them answer with curiosity in their voices, but it was often laced with scepticism, too. A few, like Tony Finau, had fun trying to mimic DeChambeau’s speed demon approach, but most chose to let Bryson be the unicorn.

But now, well, it’s hard to dismiss the man when he Secretariat’s the field on a golf course that many believed would disprove DeChambeau’s strategy as fool’s gold.

If you don’t believe that a U.S. Open win is going to grab tour pros attention, consider this response from Charley Hoffman when asked earlier this week about his thoughts on DeChambeau’s win.

“It’s very hard to win any golf tournament on the PGA Tour, let alone a U.S. Open, but to go out and shoot under par on a day that no one else broke par in the final group, it’s special,” Hoffman said during a press conference ahead of the Corales Puntacana Resort and Club Championship. “He’s changing the game of golf.”

Jamie Squire
Bryson DeChambeau watches his tee ball on the 13th hole during the final round of the 120th U.S. Open.

Hoffman then offered more details that suggest he wasn’t just paying lip-service to DeChambeau, or taking the safe answer to the question posed.

“Fairways are important, but getting it close to the hole is the most important thing,” Hoffman said. “I think he sort of made you think differently around the golf course. When I first came on tour, you wanted to sort of plot your way around the golf course in between bunkers and give yourself opportunities that way. Now it’s hit it far, go get it, and the ones you hit in the fairway you can really attack and the ones you don’t you’re just sort of trying to make par.”

Sounds like somebody has been convinced.

Hoffman is only one member of the PGA Tour, but he’s an interesting member to listen to. The 43-year-old San Diego native has had his card since 2006. He’s made just shy of $29 million during his career, winning four times. He is just one of nine players that has qualified for the FedEx Cup all 14 years of its existence. He sits on the tour’s Player Advisory Council.

Also consider the kind of player he is. In his first few seasons on tour, Hoffman consistently ranked in the top 50 in driving distance as well as the strokes gained/off the tee metrics. As he’s gotten older, however, and a younger generation of even longer bombers has joined the tour, Hoffman has seen his distance numbers hover around the same spot, just shy of 300 yards, but with the average rising that means he now ranks between 50th and 100th each year.

Hoffman’s comments acknowledge a change in thought, one that the veteran appreciates might not settle well with all golf fans.

“So it’s something the modern game of golf is. You can like it, you cannot like it, but it’s just the reality. As I say, athletes are playing golf now, we’re training in the gym harder, we’re trying to find speed. It’s not the game that I grew up playing originally, but I’m trying to adapt and I love watching these young guys explore different avenues and Bryson’s definitely doing that.”

And so will others.

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—Rory McIlroy, on Bryson DeChambeau

“So many times I relied on science, and it worked every single time.”

—DeChambeau, following his U.S. Open victory

For a moment, let’s forget the specifics. Let’s forget the weight and distance gain, the muscle activation fitness regimen, the protein shakes, the single iron length, the putting lasers, and a thousand other things that fall under the umbrella of “science.” Forget it all and think broadly. We need some distance to understand Bryson DeChambeau’s win at the U.S. Open—the most consequential result for golf since Tiger Woods won the Masters in 1997—and to internalise the only conclusion that really matters: On an intellectual level, nobody else is trying hard enough.

If that sounds like an insult to a group of professionals who have dedicated their lives to becoming elite practitioners of the sport, so be it. DeChambeau is putting them to shame simply because he has the courage not just to seek out innovative ideas, but to pursue them with monomaniacal energy. His commitment is so rigorous, so fanatical, that everyone else comes off looking like a dilettante.

This makes people uncomfortable, fans and players alike, but the ultimate legacy of his astonishing win at Winged Foot—a course that was supposed to be the antithesis to and kryptonite for the DeChambeau Style—is that we can no longer dismiss him as a pretentious pseudoscientist. That comfort is gone, and now we reckon with a reality that forces from the mouths of the doubters the three most painful words imaginable.

He was right.

• • •

Let’s talk about Tiger in ’97. With that win at Augusta, which so quickly validated and then exceeded every bit of hype, the game was fundamentally changed. The kids who watched him then, and who are dominating the PGA Tour today, understood golf entirely through the context of Tiger. His power, his fitness, his passion, his competitive edge. These were the templates they followed. Some, like Patrick Reed, even began to wear red on Sunday and to speak with the same clipped cadence. Even in less extreme cases, Tiger’s physical and psychological influence was felt. You see it everywhere today; the game exists in his image.

What will the DeChambeau Effect look like? In 15 years, will we watch a new generation of hulked-up bombers chain-guzzle protein shakes, pecs bursting out of their golf shirts, each iron as long as the next, as they analyze complex topographical charts and an assistant clocks the speed of their putts?

The answer is, probably yes. DeChambeau is so full of good ideas that some of them are going to trickle down, particularly if he keeps winning. Whatever Chris Como, his coach, is doing, other coaches will do. Muscle activation technique, which has been a staple in the NFL for years, will become widespread in golf. Barring any major rules change, power will reign even more completely than it did before, and player physiques will reflect it. All of DeChambeau’s good ideas will be copied.

That’s because DeChambeau is golf’s answer to Billy Beane. He takes a Moneyball approach to every facet of the game; he’s open to literally any idea that might make the sport easier and help him shoot a low score, and he’ll pursue the slight edges with monastic fervor. Playing within a game that hews closely to tradition, socially and competitively, DeChambeau has the self-confidence to ignore conventional wisdom. The difference is that Beane sought out market inefficiencies because his Oakland A’s operated from a major payroll deficit. DeChambeau, on the other hand, was already supremely talented. When an NCAA and U.S. Amateur champ opens his mind to the cosmos in an effort to squeeze every possible advantage, Winged Foot is the result.

Writ large, that’s both the lesson and consequence of the past weekend, and the single element that young aspiring golfers should take to heart. To compete in the Bryson Era, it’s not enough to have talent and to work hard. You better think hard, too. You better be so committed that you treat golf like an experiment to be solved, and you better stumble upon your own innovations. DeChambeau’s long-lasting effect on this game won’t be physical. It will be mental.

• • •

Do you find DeChambeau invigorating, or infuriating? The answer probably says less about DeChambeau, and more about you, how you feel about change, about tradition, about innovation, and about the limitations of what golf should be.

Of all the players who commented on DeChambeau when it became clear that he would win the U.S. Open, Rory McIlroy’s remarks were the most interesting.

“I don’t really know what to say because that’s just the complete opposite of what you think a U.S. Open champion does,” McIlroy said. “Whether that’s good or bad for the game, I don’t know, but it’s just—it’s not the way I saw this golf course being played or this tournament being played. It’s kind of hard to really wrap my head around it … I think it’s brilliant, but I think he’s taken advantage of where the game is at the minute.”

Nobody explicitly asked him for an appraisal on whether it was “good or bad,” but in Rory’s defence, that part of the question is implied. Still, if you’re like me, you read a bit of negative judgment in the answer, and a bit of frustration. DeChambeau seems to have found a cheat code, and the idea that it’s working might seem unjust, especially to a player like McIlroy who has experienced a slew of difficulties at the majors in the last half-decade.

Tom Pennington
Bryson DeChambeau and Rory McIlroy bump fists after finishing on the 18th green during the final round of the Charles Schwab Challenge in June.

Yet to call it a shortcut is to undersell DeChambeau’s outrageous work ethic, the months of body transformation during the pandemic, the Saturday night range session under the lights at Winged Foot. Still, the ideas themselves aren’t so wild. If there’s a comical angle here, it’s that despite the caricature of DeChambeau as some kind of occult physicist, the fundamental beliefs behind his “innovations” are fairly simple. In July, I learned all about his weight gain and muscle training regimen, and while the specifics get pretty complicated, the reasoning behind it can be expressed with a very simple equation: More weight and more strength = more distance = more wins.

It’s not even a new concept. Tiger’s fitness regimen changed the game in similar ways, but DeChambeau wanted to do more than simply follow in Tiger’s footsteps. He wanted to continue the evolution and blow it out to its most extreme form, and his self-belief is so total that he refuses to be held back by cautionary tales.

Example: The reason most people thought he’d fail at Winged Foot is because the thick rough punishes errant tee shots, and DeChambeau’s length comes at the expense of accuracy. If you can’t hit fairways, you can’t win—not there. It sounds logical, but look closer and it’s easy to see how conventional wisdom fails. What actually happened, and what DeChambeau noticed before the week began along with his coach Chris Como and Mark Broadie, is that the fairways were so narrow that they punished everyone, long hitter or short. Nobody hitting driver could reasonably be expected to hold a high percentage. So, in that case, why not be long?

“Everyone talked about hitting fairways out here,” Xander Schauffele said on Sunday, when asked about DeChambeau. “It’s not about hitting fairways. It’s about hitting on the correct side of the hole … you’d rather be the guy in the rough with a lob wedge than with an 8-iron or 7-iron.”

Precisely. Of course, wide fairways pose the same conundrum. Punish everyone, and length wins. Punish no one, and length wins. You see the common denominator: Length wins.

Now, it’s not quite that simple. DeChambeau had a comprehensive game plan, played beautifully from the rough and was spectacular with the putter, particularly on Sunday. But it starts with rejecting the original idea, that aggression won’t work. It starts by rejecting the warnings.

Darren Carroll
DeChambeau poses with the U.S. Open trophy after his six-shot victory.

• • •

The nice thing about athletic innovation is that the results are measurable. DeChambeau’s physical transformation attracts the bulk of public attention, and puts the focus on his drives (which are spectacular). Did it work? Well, in the 2020 season, he finished first in strokes gained/off the tee. That’s compared to 24th, 12th, and 35th in prior years. It worked.

His putting game deserves its own feature-length article, but you can get a small taste from this quote: “If I hit a 40-footer and it says 10.1 miles per hour on the device, I know that I’ve executed it correctly. And if I see the ball go two feet past that 40-foot mark, I know it’s perfect.” So it involves radar and arm locks and lasers and men holding towels when necessary. Did it work? In 2020, he finished 10th in sg/putting, compared to 28th, 32nd and a woeful 145th in prior years. It worked.

Today, his approach game is relatively poor (119th by the strokes gained metric last season), but you can bet he’ll find a way to improve that, too, and if his performance from the thick grass at Winged Foot is any indication, he’s on his way. “I don’t think they can set it up for him, to be honest,” Louis Oosthuizen said on Sunday, “he’s so strong out of the rough.” In fact, DeChambeau was first in the entire field at Winged Foot in strokes gained/approach, accumulating a massive 7.551 strokes in four rounds. It’s working.

You can view this success as a referendum on the specific techniques DeChambeau is using to improve his game. Yes, there will be copycats. He’ll be very influential in that regard, perhaps more than anyone since Tiger. But as DeChambeau himself readily concedes, “not everybody has to do it my way.” The fact that he’s thrived with muscle activation technique and lasers and protein shakes doesn’t mean that everyone will. It doesn’t even mean that he will, at least not forever.

The true revolution that DeChambeau has initiated is not a physical or technical one, brilliant as those elements might look today. No, he’s leading an intellectual transformation, and it’s defined by both the ability to consider golf in new and counterintuitive ways and the courage to pursue those ideas with a zealot’s obsession. In that sense, he has already lapped his contemporaries and put them on the defensive, and he’s done it on the basis of principles (“length wins!”) that seem shockingly obvious.

• • •

There’s a story, almost certainly apocryphal, about Christopher Columbus attending a dinner party at a nobleman’s castle after his voyages. At one point, a guest spoke up to say that discovering a new trade route to the Indies wasn’t such a great accomplishment; really, anyone could do it. Rather than respond, Columbus asked for an egg. When it arrived, he challenged everyone at the table to stand the egg straight on its end. They all tried, they all failed; the egg toppled every time. When they were done, Columbus took the egg, cracked the end, and stood it straight up with no problem. “And now that I’ve shown you how it’s done,” he said, “any fool could manage.”

Bryson DeChambeau has cracked the egg. What happens next is up to everyone else.

The post The Bryson DeChambeau Effect: Ready or not, the game is about to change appeared first on Golf Digest Middle East.

Finishing up his third round, Lee faced a four-footer for par at Winged Foot’s 18th hole, a putt he could not convert. Lee missed the comebacker as well and proceeded to play “whack-a-mole,” nonchalantly swiping at the ball until it found the cup. Lee ended up with six putts on the green, equating to a quintuple-bogey 9. Shortly after his score was posted, Lee withdrew from the event citing a wrist injury.

Three days after the incident, Lee took to Instagram to issue a mea culpa.

“I apologise for my poor actions at U.S. Open last week,” the statement read. “It was very unprofessional and foolish. obviously hurt lots of my fans and followers and my sponsors out there… my frustration took over me and combined with injury I had to fight with it for all week.

“Still it’s just an excuse. I shouldn’t left like that… and also like to apologize to USGA they did Tremendous job last week at Winged Foot. On the course and off the course. Now I’m going to take some time off and think about what I did and starting next time I’ll show up as a better person and have better sportsmanship. Thank you.”

Lee, 27, made 22 starts on the PGA Tour last season and finished 45th in the FedEx Cup. He is not in this week’s Corales Puntacana Resort & Club Championship field.

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By E Michael Johnson
Coming into the 120th U.S. Open, it was questioned if Bryson DeChambeau’s bomb-and-gouge style of play could work at a U.S. Open venue where the fairways are narrower and the rough meatier than a typical tour event. His six-shot win at Winged Foot answered that question, but there is one other query we sought to answer: Just how much of an advantage did DeChambeau own over his closest competitors?

We looked at Sunday’s round and found three distinct examples where DeChambeau’s length off the tee provided a significant advantage over Matthew Wolff, Harris English, Louis Oosthuizen and Xander Schauffele, four players who rounded out the top-five finishers and were, in effect, the only players with a legitimate chance of catching DeChambeau.

The par-5 ninth (above) is perhaps the only true hole where players expect to make a birdie at Winged Foot (a three at the short par-4 sixth is nice, but par is fine). Make par at the ninth and you feel like you’ve given something back. DeChambeau unloaded a 374.7-yard bomb that left him with 182 in—a yardage he covered with a pitching wedge—leading to an eagle 3. The other four averaged 338.25 off the tee, leaving 220.5 in. Take out Wolff’s 388.5-yard blast that also led to eagle and the other three averaged 321.5 yards, leaving them approximately 50 yards short of DeChambeau. That trio accounted for two birdies and a par. Modest advantage, DeChambeau.

The 365-yard par-4 11th (above) is perhaps the starkest illustration of where the power game came into play. A pair of bunkers guard the fairway about 300 yards out. While his challengers all laid up with an average tee shot of 236 yards, leaving 129 yards in, DeChambeau whaled away, producing a 319.8-yard tee shot that left him with a paltry 44 yards to the pin, from which he knocked it to 12 feet, 7 inches and made birdie. The other four’s average approach ended up 23 feet, 6 inches from where only one, English, made birdie, allowing DeChambeau to make up a full stroke on the others.

At the 16th (above), DeChambeau let go another laser—this one 365 yards that bit off a good chunk of the dogleg left, leaving 137 yards in. The other four averaged 297.25 off the tee and had approaches averaging 217.45 yards—that’s an 80-yard difference. DeChambeau made par while the others were three over par in aggregate, or a pickup of about three-quarters of a shot on his nearest challengers.

DeChambeau’s win at Winged Foot’s famed West Course was dominant in many respects. His six-shot margin of victory tied for the sixth-largest spread in the last 100 years. He picked up more than 21 strokes on the field average and his three-under-par 67 Sunday was the only subpar score of the day. It also underscored how much of a benefit being superior off the tee distance-wise can be. As DeChambeau himself said afterwards, “It’s always an advantage pretty much anywhere.”

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By Max Adler
“You don’t win the U.S. Open, it wins you,” are the famous words first spoken by Cary Middlecoff, which also apply to host clubs and the golfer whose image will be affixed to their history and maybe a wall in their locker room.

When Bryson DeChambeau sank the final putt to win the U.S. Open, there was polite applause. Matthew Wolff got about the same when he tapped in for solo second. Hidden behind the masks of the couple hundred people surrounding the 18th green—most of them Winged Foot members who volunteered to do things like spot balls in the rough, score, operate laser trackers and other rote tasks in order to witness the sixth chapter of their club’s U.S. Open history—were their true feelings.

The USGA controlled the rough height and what time the bar opened, two things where it’s impossible to please everybody. Had the rough been mown an inch higher, DeChambeau probably would’ve won by more than six. Tall grass doesn’t bother a wedge like it does the poor sap standing back there with a 7-iron, because even short hitters miss a lot of fairways at Winged Foot. The dogleg turns of the club’s beloved Tillinghast holes were rendered irrelevant and similar by DeChambeau’s moonshot tee balls that averaged 325 yards. If the greens weren’t insulted by his rigidly unorthodox putting stance, they were when a hot mic caught his opinion of them (“These greens suck.”) during Round 1. Never mind that several other players voiced quite the opposite view of the course and conditioning. Tiger Woods grouped Winged Foot with Oakmont and Carnoustie when saying, “I think those three golf courses can host major championships without ever doing anything to them.”

The most important victory was that a U.S. Open had been contested at all, the many complex challenges posed by postponement and the pandemic overcome, with glorious weather to boot. The popularity of any winner was secondary. In response to the first question asked of him after raising the trophy, he thanked his sponsors.

DeChambeau made his first impression on Winged Foot during the summer of 2016. Seeing some hacker guests duff their tee shots on the first hole, he decided he couldn’t suffer playing behind them and left his group as a three-ball. Shortly after in the grill room, a former club champion made small talk and inquired if he might like to get a game the next day. DeChambeau didn’t. “I don’t play golf,” he said. “I practice golf.”

That he did this week of his first major win, late into the cold pitch black requiring the folks working the range to switch on the floodlights. After one such session, an assistant let him into the shop to check his clubs on the lie/loft machine.

Recreational golfers can have trouble appreciating the humourless dedication of an unremitting professional. Bryson is not the story-telling, high-fiving, grill room-hanging Phil Mickelson the club once thought it was getting as its champion before everyone got sucker-punched.

DeChambeau’s performance was impressive, a monumental validation of the new path he is forging in the game, everything from the single-length irons, jumbo grips, Homer Kelley calculations and endless protein-shakes. But before recoiling at the brutishness of his playing style, remember what Bobby Jones said upon first seeing Jack Nicklaus: “He plays a game with which I am not familiar.” When Nicklaus won his first major, the 1962 U.S. Open at Oakmont Country Club, the members there were not enthused about the beefy and brash youngster who had defeated their local hero, Arnold Palmer. Of course, the player and person Nicklaus became changed that feeling.

This isn’t the first time golf has witnessed a new level of power, but in all that came before Bryson—John Daly, Vijay Singh, Tiger Woods, Dustin Johnson, Rory McIlroy—there was grace and a sort of classic athleticism familiar to traditional golf. What Bryson has figured out is something new entirely, and it’s taken remarkable strength of character to go his own way in an often conformist game.

Jamie Squire

No one likes to hear another golfer say they’ve figured out the riddle of the game. That doesn’t fly in the grill room at Winged Foot, which might explain why that applause on 18 was restrained even by no-fans-during-a-pandemic standards. The club seemed to be echoing the sentiments of NBC’s Roger Maltbie, who Saturday night confided, “Every part of me wants to not like this,” before allowing, “but this is impressive.”

Whether a new generation adopts DeChambeau’s playing remains to be seen. He’s still only 27, and we might expect even more self-reinventions from this confident and special soul. What’s veritably certain is that Bryson DeChambeau will become a significant figure in the game’s history. For that reason, having his name forever connected to Winged Foot Golf Club serves both right.

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