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Long before Bryson DeChambeau started messing with the trees, I was feeling sorry for him. Improbable though this might sound, it was all down to his clubbing over the practice days. Focussing on the par-5s, he had taken a driver and a 7-iron at the 575-yard second hole; a driver and a 6-iron at the 570-yard eighth; a driver and pitching wedge at the 510-yard 13th, and a driver and an 8-iron at the 530-yard 15th.
With a little less in the way of encouragement from his fellow players, he might have desisted from listing his long-hitting feats, not to mention that comment about 67 being par for him. As it was, a series of great names had congratulated him in their news conferences on the guts he was showing in doing things his way – and never mind if they had a very good idea of what might happen next.
My main Bryson concern had to do with how long it was since the poor fellow had experienced that simple pleasure known to more regular golfers. Namely, that of looking ahead to the next par-5 and musing on how this might just be the day for getting somewhere close to reaching the green with a couple of full shots.
Yet it goes without saying that everyone who was caught up in all the pre-Masters hype would have been waiting with bated breath for the 13th, the first of the par-5s DeChambeau was playing for real last Thursday. Was he about to catch the putting surface with a drive and pitching wedge again?
A pitching wedge may well have been involved at some point but, in a result which would have had golfers the world over thinking twice about going for broke from the first tee on Saturday morning, he amassed a 7. (The English would have been spared that first-tee dilemma because no-one was allowed to play at all.)
By the time he was struggling to finish on the right side of the cut on Saturday, it seemed pretty obvious all round that a tree-girt Augusta wasn’t the perfect stage for DeChambeau any more than he would have made for an obvious candidate for Strictly Come Dancing. (UK’s equivalent of America’s Dancing with Stars and one which might even have robbed the Masters of a few viewers over the weekend.)
In closing, no mention can be made of those massive drives without saying something of the frenzied preliminaries – preliminaries with which Bryson went ahead in spite of spates of dizziness which saw him being tested – negatively as it turned out – for COVID-19 on Friday night. To cite what he said about them in his first news conference, “It’s like I’m in a batter’s box swinging as hard as I can trying to hit a home run. … I don’t know if there’s a better way to say it.”
Yes they may contribute to the end result, whatever that turns out to be but, in a field in which Sungjae Im was taking the club away at snail’s pace and so many others were swinging so smoothly, they appeared as crazed as they were clever.
By way of a parting shot, plenty would like to think that no matter where he finished Sunday, the US Open champion would have picked up a whole lot on what to do when next April comes around.
Mind you, whether or not the lessons learned will extend to keeping quiet about the latest developments in his yardage stats and scoring predictions is another matter.
E-MAIL LEWINE
Lewine Mair