DeChambeau muscles in on PGA major titles
Bry of the storm: Change of body shape works wonders on Tour
Golfers like to say they win when it’s their week, when a swing adjustment suddenly clicks or because they are driving the ball and putting it just a little better than everyone else. Bryson DeChambeau has a different take: He thinks every week belongs to him.
Over the course of four days, DeChambeau unnerved the folks who run the US Open and carved up Winged Foot’s unyielding reputation one divot-sized slice at a time. By the end, he was the only player to beat par, which also happened to be enough to beat his closest pursuer, Matthew Wolff, by a whopping six shots.
In the bargain, DeChambeau turned one of the golf’s foundation myths — the game is about how many, not how — inside out.
“I don’t really know what to say because that’s just the complete opposite of what you think a US Open champion does,” said Rory McIlroy, who counts the 2011 US Open among his four major championship wins. “Look, he’s found a way to do it. Whether that’s good or bad for the game, I don’t know, but it’s just not the way I saw this golf course being played or this tournament being played.”
The big debate in golf at the moment is about the merits of distance v accuracy. Most weeks, a younger, fitter generation of players inspired by Tiger Woods tries to drive the ball as far from the tee as possible, figuring a second shot with a wedge — even from the rough — is easier than, say, a 6-iron from the middle of the fairway. It’s called the “bomb and gouge” strategy and DeChambeau has become both its loudest and most successful advocate.
He’s already tinkered with every other facet of the game, from equipment (single-length irons) to how he reads putts (factoring in the rotation of the planet). Last October, with five PGA Tour wins already under his belt, DeChambeau doubled down on the distance side of the argument, announcing he would pack on 18kg muscle in a bid to hit the ball even farther. He vowed to come back a different person.
Yet even at the start of the week, few people believed he resembled a US Open champion. No golf tournament places a higher premium on par, or rewards accuracy while punishing wayward shots, with rough several times gnarlier than anything encountered at a routine tour event. But when the US Golf Association set up Winged Foot, it’s risk-reward calculations ended yards behind where many of DeChambeau’s tee shots landed.
None of that would matter, however, if he couldn’t putt, or if DeChambeau didn’t have a work ethic that saw him back out on the practice range for several hours after he’d completed his round on Saturday, pounding drive after drive.
There’s no way to know how long DeChambeau will have that same advantage or whether he will hold up over the long run.
But either way, the powers-thatbe in golf are going to have to decide how much distance is too much, and whether to throttle back the ball, sooner than they planned.
“I don’t know what they can do really, because he’s hitting it so far,” said Louis Oosthuizen, who finished third.