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MAMARONECK, NEW YORK | In a 2020 kind of way, it was fitting that when Bryson DeChambeau finished off his six-stroke U.S. Open victory by holing a slick, downhill par putt as the shadows stretched across Winged Foot’s 18th green Sunday afternoon, almost no one was there with him.
A handful of officials, some photographers and few others were tucked in around the edges behind the imposing stone clubhouse when DeChambeau bench-pressed the sky in celebration after truly separating himself from everyone else.
No one in golf may be more content standing alone than DeChambeau.
“I think I’m definitely changing the way people think about the game,” DeChambeau said early Sunday evening, the silver trophy sitting to his left.
“Now, whether you can do it, that’s a whole different situation.”
Conventional wisdom, based on a century or so of missed greens and grimaces, suggested U.S. Opens should be played with proper amounts of respect, precision and fear, not necessarily in that order.
But conventional wisdom didn’t suggest adding 40 pounds to an already solid frame would lead to winning the U.S. Open by six strokes.
Or that playing with fat-gripped, single-length irons and arm-lock putting would work.
Or that taking a damn-the-torpedoes strategy off the tee on a menacing major championship course could be as successful as it was counterintuitive.
The game has changed. Power trumps accuracy even when the rough is longer than a Russian novel and the fairways look as narrow as a celery stalk.
Winged Foot is everything a U.S. Open venue should be: Proud and difficult with a history of bending and breaking the game’s best.
Then DeChambeau gave a heavy-handed demonstration of modern golf, bludgeoning Winged Foot not by hitting fairways (he hit just 23) but by hitting it far enough that he minimized the cost of playing from the rough. It’s not how everyone tries to do it but DeChambeau’s ultimate advantage may be his cast-iron conviction.
As long as he believes in what he’s doing – and he has the equations and algorithms to support his approach – that’s what separates DeChambeau.
When he putts, Bryson DeChambeau looks like a man trying to slip sideways through a narrow door, his shoulders scrunched up and arms locked, like teenagers in their first awkward slow dance.
“I played with him at Colonial the first week back out,” Rory McIlroy said, “but I sort of said, ‘OK, wait until he gets to a proper golf course, he’ll have to rein it back in.’
“This is as proper as they come, and look what's happened.”
This was not a line-in-the-sand U.S. Open, the one that finally pushes the game’s leaders to find a way to combat the impact of distance at the highest level. What DeChambeau and Matthew Wolff did was validate what we already knew – power wins, especially when the fairways are so narrow even the most accurate drivers struggle to hit them.
DeChambeau just played better than everyone else.
Isn’t that the goal of the U.S. Open, to identify the best players?
It did that this time.
Critics can point to their inaccuracy off the tee – DeChambeau and Wolff hit a combined five fairways on Saturday – as evidence of how the game has gone wrong.
Has it gone wrong or has it just gone in a different direction?
“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 ... it’s just the way it is.”
Remember when Peter Dawson, the former chief executive of the R&A, said he didn’t want to see a generation of young players growing up using the belly putter, a statement that pushed the anchored putting ban forward?
What is the next generation seeing now?
“Given what he’s been given and given how he works and how he approaches his body and his equipment, it’s a way to play, and it’s not wrong at all,” said Zach Johnson. “It’s just very different but also very, very effective.”
If Winged Foot couldn’t blunt the onslaught of power over precision, maybe nothing can. This is golf as we know it. The question may not be: Can distance be pulled back? Perhaps the question is: Should it be?
“I don’t shudder, but if he can do it around here, and I’m thinking of Augusta and thinking of the way you sort of play there,” McIlroy said. “I stood up here a few days ago and said the game's moved on a lot in the last 14 years since the U.S. Open’s been played here, and you're seeing what the game has become, what he’s doing out there.”
DeChambeau is the most interesting player in the game, a perpetually inquisitive pseudo-scientist with muscles and a streak of self-confidence that a chain saw couldn’t cut. He believes there is a better way to play and he’s attracting believers.
Ask him a question and DeChambeau can come off like he’s trying to prove he’s the smartest guy in the room. When he offers to simplify what he believes is a complicated answer to a question, he can sound patronizing.
But just as quickly, he will laugh at himself and his peculiar ways, understanding that he’s an outlier.
It was touching to see him tear up when he saw his parents on a large television screen when he emerged from signing his scorecard.
“That was the sweetest thing,” DeChambeau said.
He’s calculating but he’s not cold.
For all the numbers and equations DeChambeau attaches to his golf, there’s still an element of artistry to how he plays. He might call it something else, taking a little off here, going a little harder there, but DeChambeau can do the little things as well as the powerful things.
If Adam Scott is elegant in how he swings a club, DeChambeau looks like a man playing home run derby, his feet practically gouging the turf loose. When he putts, DeChambeau looks like a man trying to slip sideways through a narrow door, his shoulders scrunched up and arms locked, like teenagers in their first awkward slow dance.
It all comes together in a unique, barrel-chested package.
The same guy who complained earlier this year about a cameraman constantly following him on the course, held up his champion’s press conference Sunday evening until a member of his team could locate a water bottle bearing a sponsor’s name so DeChambeau could place it beside him.
He put the green bottle on the table beside the trophy. Between them was a glass of chocolate milk.
“I’ll party but I won’t drink,” DeChambeau said. “That’s not me. But I’ll drink chocolate milk.”
In that case, raise a glass of chocolate milk to the new champion.
For DeChambeau, make it a double.
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