Bryson DeChambeau celebrates after winning the U.S. Open in Pinehurst, N.C., on Jun 16.Jim Dedmon/Reuters
The best formulas for an iconic sporting result are a triumph against the odds or a collapse that will haunt the loser forever.
By those measures, Sunday’s final round at the 2024 U.S. Open Championship hit the daily double. Bryson DeChambeau won a tournament he looked like coughing up, while Rory McIlroy did the opposite.
McIlroy’s three bogeys in the final four holes – including two missed putts inside five feet – will be running on a ‘Remember this disaster?’ reel for years.
The last of his gaffes came on the 18th green. As the ball slid along the edge of the hole and out, the crowd could not summon a proper gasp. That’s how little they could believe what they’d just seen.
McIlroy got a look, one that people who watch a lot of golf are familiar with. That here-we-go-again look. Despite his four major titles, McIlroy is now in real danger of unseating Greg Norman as the sport’s greatest choking legend.
On the other side of the ledger, there was DeChambeau’s day. He started with a three-shot advantage – the sort of lead where chokes begin. He didn’t birdie a hole on the front nine. Every time the cameras swung back to him, he was hacking through Pinehurst’s wire grass. Sometimes he looked more like he was hacking his way to the Mississippi than golfing.
But in the end, with McIlroy fading like a sunset, all DeChambeau had to do was hit fairways and greens. His tee shot on the 18th nearly knocked out a couple of spectators. His recovery shot dug its way into the front-side bunker. But his recovery from the recovery shot was an all-timer – “probably the best shot of my life,” DeChambeau said afterward.
As he hit the putt that won him his second U.S. Open, cameras in the scorer’s tent caught McIlroy leaned over a table, showing no emotion. Once the ball dropped, he appeared to say, “Yeah,” as though he’d known how it would turn out all along, and wheeled away.
Aside from the agony and the ecstasy, something else happened on Sunday – DeChambeau’s arrival at the pinnacle of golf.
That’s a weird thing to say about a guy who’s been very famous for several years. But for most of that time, DeChambeau was somewhere between disliked and despised. He was a preening, beefed-up golf-splainer in too-tight pants. The sort of guy who talked about carrying a protractor around, and confused holding a university degree with winning a Nobel prize.
While other golfers left for the Saudi golf league, DeChambeau escaped there. He was already a pariah. Why not get monstrously rich out of it?
But something happened on the way to Riyadh. DeChambeau found humility – or a PR-friendly facsimile of such. He no longer gives lectures. He has conversations. He smiles more. He laughs at himself. His public-persona renovation really began to pay dividends this weekend.
When someone at this tournament asked about one of his eccentric academic tics – floating balls in Epsom salts to see which side is heavier – his answer began with, “Thanks for the salty balls question.” A scripted dad joke for Father’s Day? Maybe. But it works.
There are all sorts of athletic heroes, but none is loved more intensely than a black hat who turns to the light.
Andre Agassi is a good example – an odious jackanapes renowned for on-court meltdowns and a terrible wig. In the 1990s, Esquire columnist Mike Lupica named his annual awards for “obnoxiousness in sports” after him – the Andres.
But one year, Agassi got to the final of a tournament against Pete Sampras. Sampras was sick. Instead of taking the walkover, Agassi told officials that he’d wait for as long as it took for Sampras to recover.
Sampras got an extra hour, and went on to win the match. Shortly thereafter, Lupica changed the name of the awards, and Agassi became widely beloved.
The lesson – it’s little gestures that capture imaginations.
DeChambeau has become a student of those moments. The sort of guy who makes sure that a ball he threw to a kid in the crowd ends up with the kid. The sort of guy who throws balls into crowds.
After McIlroy birdied the 10th on Sunday – a big moment that tied him for the lead – he had to walk through a cordon of fans on his way to the next tee. A few stuck their hands out. As most golfers do mid-round, McIlroy ignored them.
A few minutes later, DeChambeau birdied the same hole. As he came through the same crowd, he made sure to touch every outstretched hand. He walked slowly enough to ensure no one who wanted a moment to talk about later would be missed.
The crowd responded as American golf crowds do toward a gym bro who’s got in touch his feelings. They chanted their national love song at him – “U-S-A. U-S-A. U-S-A.”
Ah, U-S-A, U-S-A, how I’ve missed you. Your jingoism. Your naive faith. It reminds me of a better, saner time. Like 2006.
DeChambeau is still trying to get the hang of this fan-favourite thing. In his remarks to the crowd, he wanted so badly to thank them that he went a little over the top. They were the “greatest crowd ever” and this was the “greatest moment of [my] life.”
He congratulated all the fathers in the crowd, and invited every single fan in attendance – 40,000 of them – to touch the winner’s trophy. Security must have loved that one.
But you could at least see DeChambeau doing something most pros would never stoop to any more – trying. There’s not a lot of trying in sports these days.
Meanwhile, McIlroy was leaving the scene of the robbery, a crime in which he was both victim and perpetrator. While DeChambeau was still celebrating, cameras caught the Northern Irishman slipping out the front door, getting into his car and taking off.
It’s now been nearly 10 years since McIlroy won a major. It must feel like a hundred. But as DeChambeau had just proved, reputations are designed to be redesigned.