JOHANNESBURG — Bryson DeChambeau hasn’t always been great at, to borrow an old phrase, bringing the hay down where the goats can get it.
It’s been over a decade now that golf fans have tried understanding the physics lessons DeChambeau offers every time he and his caddie have a conversation about club choice. (As someone who has witnessed it plenty, they speak a different language than us!) And throughout some of those years, DeChambeau has been more inclined to brush over the more complicated stuff — think Coefficient of Restitution — rather than dig into it, particularly in press conferences.
But when pushed for more, when there’s clear runway to dive into the details, it can be hard to get him to stop. As evidenced this week in South Africa, where DeChambeau teased out that he’s driving it great, hitting his irons well and putting solid. The last frontier for his game before the Masters is “dialing in” his wedges.
“Kinda like I did back in ’23 when I was just testing a bunch of drivers at the end of that year and then I found the driver I’m using today,” DeChambeau said.
And the driver he won the U.S. Open with.
What has become so incredibly clear is that dialing in equipment probably means more to DeChambeau than it does to the average Tour-level pro. It matters for everyone, but with DeChambeau the not-right fit can teeter on the edge of chaos. So what does “dialing in” wedges actually look like? I lobbed the question his way, laid out and, unsurprisingly, he spoke for the next three minutes.
“It’s a great question,” he began. “It’s a lot about strike point and how much turf is getting in between the face and the grass and mitigating that, managing that strike, and how you manage that strike is dependent upon how soft the turf is. If it presses into the ground a lot, if it doesn’t, if it bounces off the ground like in Australia, it was really firm ground so it bounced off quickly. So I could throw it behind the ball quite a bit and then hit low on the face. If it’s soft here, you hit just the same spot and it goes right under; you hit high on the face and it comes out with more spin and shorter and deader.”
Considering the absolute dumping of rain that Steyn City has received in the last 24 hours, DeChambeau is right about the softness of the turf. Long strips of turf will be flying through the sky in South Africa. And that almost surely won’t be the case in Augusta in a few weeks.
“So trying to find a bounce that works for me, number one, that plays like firm conditions because I’ve always played pretty well in firm conditions,” DeChambeau continued. “I’m learning from [my teammates]. I see how they strike it. I see what they do, and I’m learning a lot from my team, even though I’m not necessarily asking because they’re tired of me asking about wedges. They’re just like, go to shorter wedges and normal clubs, which I’ve tried, and I still suck with that.”
DeChambeau has played one-length irons and used longer wedge shafts than normal for years. It works for him … but it’s absolutely atypical. Those teammates sat next to him while he spoke and nodded their heads knowingly.
“But I’ll tell you that it’s nice seeing how they strike the ball, the forward shaft lean, and where they’re striking on the face is important,” he continued. “So I think leading edge height to bounce is very, very important, depending on how soft the turf is.
“I think the surface friction on the face is really important, how rough it can get. Funny enough, when the face gets rougher, it actually starts to spin less at a certain point, to the legal limit. Then, once you go past the legal limit, it starts spinning more and more. There’s like a bell curve with it. It’s kind of wild.
“Then you can get scenarios where it’s super slick face and then it’s wet and slides and doesn’t spin at all, and it has to spin.”
Let that be a window into what DeChambeau’s testing sessions ultimately look like. They go so far as to try to understand the weird bounds by which face friction starts to revert on its purpose of maximizing spin.
“I unfortunately mis-hit my wedges quite a bit just because maybe I don’t have the right bounce configuration,” he continued. No one was interested in stopping him. “Maybe the shape of the grind is a little different.
“I’m trying some new wedges. They’ve got almost a bubble on the bottom and it’s been helping quite a bit. It helped last week.”
Those new wedges are Bettinardi HLX 5.0 wedges. He’s 1-for-1 in converting victories with them in the bag. But it sounds like he might change them out for new ones at any point. There are apparently plenty of options in play.
“Got a little more head weight on the wedges. We’re cutting away things that have not worked for me, whether it be a softer shaft, shorter wedges, different type of torque in the head for contact, different types of grinds, lighter heads, no grooves to grooves to friction on the grooves. We’re just going through everything as much as possible and trying to isolate the biggest problems in my wedge game and cutting those out as much as possible so I can be — shoot, if I’m 5 more percent consistent, I have a better chance than what I did last year at the Masters.”
Ah, yes. The 2025 Masters, forever remembered for Rory McIlroy’s Grand Slam completion, and sneakily slept on that DeChambeau played in the final group and faded so quickly into the background because his iron play was not up to standard. Now he apparently has that mostly figured out, and the wedges are getting a proper moment under the magnifying glass.
“I took that last Masters as an opportunity to learn how to become a better iron play and a better wedger,” he said, coming to a close. “I feel like most of it was there. Just a couple fine-tuning moments and continue to ball strike it the way I have and hopefully I give myself a good chance.”
We’ll see what that looks like in a few weeks.
