DECHAMBEAU IS THE KIND OF FELLA YOU CAN GET BEHIND
Best players in the game just thankful for a chance to play for the green jacket
The average golfer should find a lot to like about Bryson DeChambeau.
The U.S. Open champion and Masters favourite has become a thing of wonder this season due to the way he packed on muscle and added 40 yards to his drives, but there is also something else. He didn't just put on muscle, he put on weight.
DeChambeau is golf's offensive lineman, strong as an ox now but also unashamedly husky, with all of that extra beef on hand to help generate more whip and more clubhead speed and more ridiculous distance.
We should all kind of admire that DeChambeau has discovered new value in pudge. For the weekend golfer, it's a lot easier to emulate than the path provided by the typical PGA Tour pro, who is six-foot-three, weighs
195 pounds, has a 28-inch waist and had a beer that one time but didn't care for it. DeChambeau is the kind of fella you can get behind.
The guy's daily intake is the stuff of legends: Bacon and eggs to start, PB & J at lunch and a steak-and-potatoes dinner, all supplemented by frequent snacks and six or seven protein shakes. That seems like maybe five or six protein shakes too many, but it's tough to dispute the results. Lord Bryson overwhelmed Winged Foot for that U.S. Open title, adding all that distance to his game while still hitting the ball reliably straight.
And yet, as DeChambeau plots to tear apart Augusta National this week, the trepidation among golf fans is understandable. I think it comes down to this: No one wants to see someone break yet another sport. DeChambeau's transformation, while quite obviously a story of physical changes, is also about math and brainpower.
He has analyzed the factors that lead to success in golf and is trying to maximize the way he takes advantage of them. If one way to improve scoring is to simply be closer to the hole after every tee shot, then the trick is figure out how to increase distance off the tee, above all else. What DeChambeau has essentially asked is, what if I dedicate my life to increased distance? What if I don't care if my shirts and pants stop fitting and my face becomes square and I look like a crazed man when I take an ungodly lash at the golf ball? What happens then?
And what he has found, so far, is that it works.
It may break with long-standing tradition about how to play the games, but statistics-driven changes in sports such as basketball and baseball are about following mathematical probabilities to the extreme. That's DeChambeau's move, too: increased distances mean increased probability of a lower score. He leads the
PGA Tour in strokes gained off the tee and strokes gained tee to green, both measures of a player's performance relative to the rest of the field. He has turned one of golf's oldest maxims — drive for show and putt for dough — on its ear. It turns out that if you can put on that much of a show with the driver, the putting becomes less crucial. Or rather, the putting
becomes relatively easier because DeChambeau can leave himself simpler putts when he plays a long par-5 with a driver and a wedge.
But where analytics revolutions in team sports have over time seen just about everyone mimic the approach of the pioneers, DeChambeau could be an outlier in golf for a while. When Tiger Woods came along and showed that physical fitness could be a major asset for a golfer, it only made sense that the generation of players that followed him would look nothing like Craig Stadler. (With the notable exception of Kevin Stadler.) But are DeChambeau's fellow pros going to try
to replicate his methods in the same way? As my colleague Jon McCarthy noted on Wednesday, tour pros respect and appreciate what he has done, talking about the “cheat code” DeChambeau has found, but none of them sound quite ready to embark on the 10,000-calorie daily diet. It's one thing for an athlete to decide to work on his three-point shot, or to give his baseball swing more of an uppercut path, but it's something else to add 40 pounds of girth in pursuit of a longer ball flight, and to swing so hard that it looks like you might fall off the tee block.
It's also early days for the
Bryson Diet. He's on a hot streak, but many a pro has gone through stretches where they seem invincible before cooling off into something distinctly mortal. DeChambeau may yet discover that the desire to pound a golf ball into dust raises the risk of injury. He might simply miss too many putts. The ridiculous greens at Augusta National don't care how many protein shakes you consumed. Whatever happens at the Masters, DeChambeau's quest to break golf will continue. I'm curious to see if the sport can resist.
Let's be honest, we're all pretty sick of the couch.
We've reached the point in this never-ending year when the sun seems to set just after lunch, and we finished everything on Netflix sometime around May.
But this week is different. It's Masters Week.
Sure, it's seven months late, but it's the one week each year that the couch is more than a couch. It's a magical golf cart that takes us to a lush green land both familiar yet mysterious. We're five years old and our parents dropped a giant cardboard box in the middle of the living room. And we know exactly where our couch will take us this week. To Augusta National Golf Club. In this most imperfect year, we're more than ready to spend four days in a perfect place.
But will the Masters be perfect this year? No. Not even close. There will be no spectators, no roars, no azaleas, no par-3 contest, no Sunday trophy ceremony on the 18th green.
The list goes on. It's a tradition unlike any other, minus the traditions.
And the forecast is calling for rain. Lots of it. Also lightning, especially during Thursday's opening round.
Three-time champion Phil Mickelson was asked what he'll miss most this week.
“Nothing, in the sense that this is the Masters and doesn't matter,” he said. “It doesn't matter if it rains. It doesn't matter if it shines. We get to compete for a green jacket. As a player, that's all we care about. I'm just thankful that we have that chance this year because it's been very challenging and a lot of extra work to put this tournament on.”
That's the common sentiment among players this week. Lots of questions have been asked about what's missing, about the course playing softer, about the greens being a touch slower. None of it matters.
“It's not the same as what it is in April because it can't be,” Rory McIlroy said. “I mean, you guys can do a lot of things here at Augusta, but I don't think you're magicians. ... I think everyone is just so grateful that there is a Masters this year and we're playing it.”
In a way, that's how we've felt about the entire sport of golf during the pandemic. Just as we finished up all of Netflix in May, most golf courses started opening their doors. Until then, the most interesting sport around seemed to be neighbourhood beard-growing contests. After months of cooped up solitude, golf made it suddenly possible to go outdoors, to socialize with friends, to share a drink, all while playing a game and getting some exercise. It was like a cheat code to getting your life back.
Was the golf normal? Of course not. There were strict rules once you arrived at the course, there were masks, you couldn't share a golf cart, there were even contraptions stopping the ball from dropping into the hole, which last I checked, is the main goal of playing golf.
It didn't matter.
Golfers quickly adapted, realizing after hitting their tee shots that social distancing is easy when nobody in your group hits the fairway. All that mattered was you were outside, getting some semblance of normalcy back.
“A lot of things that people love have been taken away, and that's got to be brutal,” Mickelson said of the pandemic. “It's even hard for me to fully empathize with that because I've been able to continue doing what I love, which is play golf, even if it wasn't in tournaments. Just being able to play.”
During this difficult year, many of us have learned to appreciate the small gifts. Golf has reminded us that fresh air, camaraderie, and recreation are as much a part of the sport as birdies, bogeys, and obsession.
“I think it's been a refuge for a lot of people,” McIlroy said. “You look at rounds of golf played, it's way up this year. The golf equipment business is booming. ... Hopefully it's not just something that people pick up in the middle of a pandemic and then they set it aside. Hopefully people continue to play golf and realize what a wonderful game it is.”
With golf season over, many of us will be heading back indoors. We have all winter to dream of a vaccine and look toward to another Masters in April, just five months away. But this weekend, no matter our age, we'll be reminded what it was like to have a cardboard box to transport you anywhere.
All we need is a couch.
I'm just thankful that we have that chance this year because it's been very challenging and a lot of extra work to put this tournament on.