NEWTOWN SQUARE, Pa. — Bryson DeChambeau stood with his arms crossed, staring out into the distance. His team stood around him, two phones ready to film different angles of his swing.
No one said a word.
It was late Wednesday night at Aronimink Golf Club, 15 hours before DeChambeau’s first round tee time at the PGA Championship, and the two-time U.S. Open champion was the only one left on the range as the skies darkened and rain threatened. Finally, DeChambeau took a deep breath and started to walk his team through his thoughts and what he was trying to find in the dirt outside of Philadelphia.
He gestured with his hands to mimic that they weren’t synced up with his body; they were seemingly late with irons and wedges, and he was getting too quick with them with his woods. He missed right and left. He hit a ball or two, sighed and looked at the ground. Then, he looked at the video. Then, he’d hit a few more. Then, switch clubs and do the same. No answer seemed to arrive.
That’s a bad place to be on the eve of a major championship, left to try and make your way around the championship course with smoke and mirrors until you can conjure up the feeling you have lost with no discernible timetable for its arrival.
Bryson DeChambeau didn’t find that feeling on Thursday at Aronimink as he scuffed and scraped his way around the Donald Ross design while the issues he was fighting on the range constantly reared their heads.
DeChambeau tried to flight his approach shot into his first hole, the par-4 10th, and came up well short en route to an opening par. Then came the 11th, a par-4 with a small green that demands players control their spin. DeChambeau flew this approach shot past the flag and couldn’t pull it back off the slope, leaving him a slippery downhill putt. He gave it a tap, and the ball raced past the hole and settled 57 feet away. He made bogey and then made another at No. 13 when he flew his approach shot over the back of the green. As he walked up to his ball, DeChambeau had a lengthy conversation with his caddie Greg Bodine, making the same hand gesture he had some 17 hours earlier on the range.
On the par-3 17th, DeChambeau flared his tee shot right near the grandstand. He slumped his shoulders and stared at the contact point while his ball sailed offline. His pitch didn’t make it to the green and he dropped another shot. The animated venting continued as he walked to the next tee. He made another bogey at 18 and turned in 4-over 39, the worst opening nine of his PGA Championship career. A string of pars came next, with DeChambeau trying to will himself back into contention. He missed makable birdie looks at five and six before a sloppy bogey at the seventh moved him to five over. After missing his par putt, DeChambeau tapped in for his five and then made a motion with his hands toward Bodine. He was mimicking the movement of the putt he had just missed, but he very well could’ve been saying, “no more.” DeChambeau didn’t tap out, but the knockout blow came on the next hole.
After a 20-minute wait on the par-3 8th tee box, DeChambeau once again hit a chunky, flare with his iron. His shot landed well short of the green in the thick rough. DeChambeau then blasted his second shot over the green. He chunked his first chip from the back collection area and sent his fourth past the flag. He made the putt coming back, but a double bogey left him at seven over through 17. He birdied the final hole to card a 76.
Then, Bryson DeChambeau found himself in the same place that he was 21 hours before, at a mostly empty range at the back of a golden-age property.
He grabbed three buckets of balls and moved through most of the clubs in his bag several times. Players came and went, found something or gave up, and DeChambeau kept trying to dig it out of the dirt.
After another hooking fairway metal, DeChambeau let out a big sigh and rubbed his eyes. He made a motion about flipping his wrists. “That’s just so bad,” he muttered to Bodine and his manager, Connor Olson. Olson filmed DeChambeau from behind and down the line. They went over video after video. Olson asked two separate camera crews not to film as DeChambeau sent shot after shot into the cool Pennsylvania air. “That’s just not what it should be … I just …,” DeChambeau said with a soft sigh after sending another mid-iron toward nothing.
Finally, 90 minutes, three buckets and seemingly no answers later, DeChambeau grabbed a Sharpie and headed toward the rope line to sign autographs.
When asked if he wanted to talk, DeChambeau looked up and offered a strained smile.
“No thanks,” he said. “I’m good.”
But all the evidence at Aronimink said that nothing was further from the truth
