Why Bryson DeChambeau says your public course is sneaky hard

PORTRUSH, Northern Ireland — It’s links golf season, which means the best golfers in the world are thinking obsessively about course conditions. And very few golfers think harder than Bryson DeChambeau.

“This is going to be wild, but imagine a scenario where you’ve got a 400-yard tent, and you can just hit any type of shot with any wind with all the fans,” DeChambeau said on Tuesday in his pre-tournament Open Championship press conference. “That’s what I imagine, like in a hangar or something like that in a big stadium. That would be cool to test.”

He was talking about better understanding the wind: how to play it, how to test it. DeChambeau is a guy who likes to control variables; gusts of wind present a particularly fickle challenge. That’s partly why he’s struggled more at this major than at the others — his wind tests and his links golf are works in progress.

One thing DeChambeau has been trying is curving the ball against the wind rather than riding it.

“If you’re going to try to ride the wind one time, how do I control and make sure it doesn’t go into a crazy place?” he said. “Because once the ball goes into that wind, it’s sayonara. That thing can go forever offline.”

In the press room — notably wind- and rain-free — it all sounds relatively simple.

“Hitting it far, hitting it straight as I can, and learning how to putt better on these greens in windy conditions and rain and all that. It’s just figuring it out,” DeChambeau said. “It’s just going to take time and something that I never really experienced growing up in California.”

His hangar hypothetical raised another hypothetical. What would pros shoot if they just played in a literal dome? Par-72, no wind, no rain, no trouble?

“Let’s see, I think you’d have guys shooting close to 60,” DeChambeau said. “You look at Palm Springs, right? That’s pretty much like a dome sometimes in the mornings, so they play really well at La Quinta and whatnot. That would be kind of the same, I think. You’d have guys shooting close to 60 every day, a few of them, and there would be some 72s and 73s, but if you’re playing well, you could shoot 65 or less pretty easily.”

That led to perhaps DeChambeau’s most interesting revelation, something that he learned as a kid playing public golf courses but also more recently in his side gig as content creator, where he visits public courses chasing scoring records — and often falls short. We typically think of Tour-level courses as more challenging than public courses because they’re longer, the rough is higher, the greens are faster. That’s all true. But there’s an unpredictability to your local muni that may not exist in the big show.

“There’s some golf courses that are almost more difficult because the greens are not as good,” DeChambeau said. “There’s more factors too as well. If they’re perfect greens, my gosh, we can shoot close to 60 [in that hypothetical] if it’s a Tour-caliber golf course. If it’s not as conditioned, it becomes difficult for us to roll it in the hole just because of luck. So there’s numerous factors that play into it for the conditions, but from an execution perspective, give us a normal Tour course in those conditions, we’re shooting under 65 quite a bit.”

“In my public golf course series, there’s times where I literally shoot one- or two-under par because I just get some bad breaks and bad bounces and I’m not putting well. It’s nice to humble myself a little bit.”

The beauty of golf is, of course, that it’s not in a hangar nor a dome nor — with apologies to TGL — in a simulator. Most golf fans will root for proper Open weather this week, a dash of wind and rain, so we get a proper Open test. Given Royal Portrush is considered among the toughest links tests in the world, we should get that test. But they can at least expect smooth greens.