PORTRUSH, Northern Ireland — Eighteen minutes before high tide arrived to Royal Portrush for the final time on Open Championship Sunday, a tsunami warning swept over the golf course.
Thankfully, the 50,000 or so people dotting the 153rd Open Championship’s many blue tents and grandstands were in no real danger. The “tsunami” was metaphorical, and the man delivering the warning had every reason for theatrics: His name was Bryson DeChambeau, and he was talking about the Ryder Cup.
“I hope I can bring a lot of energy…” DeChambeau said, his lip quivering to keep from a million-watt grin. “And a tsunami of a crowd that’s going to be rooting for Team USA.”
For those without a degree in DeChambeaunomics, the words might have sounded like hyperbole. The truth is that they were hyperbole, the kind of the exact variety that DeChambeau employs willingly in pursuit of the headlines that will encircle the golf world for at least the next 24 hours. Bryson has a gift for media literacy, and in settings like Sunday’s final round presser at the Open Championship and about topics like the Ryder Cup, he employs that gift liberally.
“This year’s no joke,” he said Sunday in a tone too serious to be sincere. “We’re tired of it. We’re tired of losing.”
In most ways, Bryson is a dream fit for American golf. He displays enough stereotypes to fill the contents of a British tabloid thesaurus — his persona a breathtaking mix of loud, boisterous, theatrical, hyperbolic, hypermasculine and unabashedly commercializing. He is the kind of character who makes golf’s biennial team event fun, but unlike many of the other characters who have made the Ryder Cup fun over its near-century in existence, DeChambeau seems to be aware of this fact, winking at the camera during each of his many gleeful fourth-wall breaks.
The tricky thing with Bryson is what happens when we start painting with a broad brush. DeChambeau is the oafish goofball who occasions our televisions with oversaturated thumbnails and (what appear to be) pre-scripted quotes, but he’s also the guy who provides a staggering amount of thoughtful, introspective commentary about the sport he plays and his own role within it. Take Sunday’s presser at Portrush for example: Just seconds before delivering his “tsunami” line, Bryson responded to an innocuous question with one of the answers of the week, providing an intriguing glimpse into his role on the American side, and a hint into an advantage for the U.S. that could play a much bigger role than the crowd come late September’s visit to Farmingdale.
“It’s been so much fun playing with Paul, Anirban, and Charles,” DeChambeau said, referencing his teammates on LIV’s Crushers, in response to a question about his growth as a teammate over the course of a career that has seen him transition from dorky outcast to folk hero. “The way I’ve personally led my team is, I’ve let them be their individual self, their best individual self. However I can get Paul to be his best, Charles to be his best, and ‘Ban to be his best. [That’s] what has led us to be the most successful out there.”
It’s hard to know how seriously to take the success of DeChambeau’s Crushers, but it is not difficult to see the effect that team life has had on their captain. Bryson seems at his most comfortable while contributing to a shared goal, which is why characters like caddie Greg Bodine and manager Connor Olson have played such vital roles in his victory speeches, and why his most viral YouTube franchise (Breaking 50) is a scramble competition that places he and his guests on the same team.
DeChambeau’s struggles in his early Ryder and Presidents Cup appearances cast doubt upon this fact, reinforcing a stereotype of Bryson as a strident loner. But as the two-time major champ spoke from the podium on Sunday at the Open, he suggested those experiences were more about a failure of team-building.
“[What] I’ve learned from team golf is to let the individual be the best individual they can possibly be to add to the team,” DeChambeau said. “That’s it. Don’t try to put someone in a bubble and say you need to do this, you need to do that. What I learned best from my college coach, Josh Gregory, was just that: Let me be me. That’s why I did so well in college.”
Indeed, Bryson’s collegiate career as a member of the SMU golf team was the stuff of legend — U.S. Amateur champion status, an NCAA Individual Championship, and one of the most successful team runs in program history. In adulthood, DeChambeau has found success with a similar approach, and, he suggested Sunday, failure with the kind of pod system that has cycled in and out of usage on American Ryder Cup teams since the 1990s.
DeChambeau figures to play a pivotal role in American captain Keegan Bradley’s new era of American Ryder Cup leadership. This weekend, he received a memento from Bradley celebrating that new era.
The memento — a photo of Justin Leonard’s 1999 Ryder Cup-winning putt — will be one of many touchpoints between the American side and its most viral superstar ahead of the festivities in Bethpage in late September. So far at least, the message seems simple … and familiar.
“That’s how I’ve led the Crushers, it’s the same exact thing, I’ve let them be them,” Bryson said Sunday. “That’s the way I’ll move forward in team competition.”
On Sunday at the Open Championship, DeChambeau sent a tsunami warning rippling through the property, but it was hard to shake the sense that Bryson’s growth into his truest self might be the key to an American tidal wave in Bethpage.
And if that “truest self” is responsible for a few more headlines like the tsunami warning circling Portrush on Sunday evening?
Well, we’ll know the approach is working.
