After teeing off with the lead on the Open Championship’s 54th hole, and after hitting that tee ball so close to a fairway bunker that he needed to stand in it to hit, and after doing that exact same thing 17 holes earlier (what are the odds there?), and after bogeying the previous hole, and after a week of hearing the whispers of ‘who the heck is this dude,’ Dan Brown was smoking.
Smoking smoking. He’d lit up a cigarette. No, no, he wasn’t hot. Only the tobacco was.
Yeah, yeah, we’re not prudish here, though. It tells us little, right? Fair. How about this then?
After dropping the heater, amidst a small cloud of smoke, your leader after 53 Open Championship holes stopped for a pic with some lads to the right of Royal Troon’s 18th hole, seconds before perhaps the biggest shot of his 33-year-old life.
Said Dan Hicks on NBC’s broadcast of the smokey selfie: “Meanwhile, Brown comes up. He’s been smoking his way around Troon. And then he says, why not, how about a selfie before I take on this next stance? That’s being in the moment.”
Said analyst Luke Donald: “I thought Bryson [DeChambeau] was pro-crowd. I mean this is another level.”
Said Hicks: “Ain’t that something? He’s one of the people.”
Add a devil-may-care style then to what many of us have come to learn this week about the Englishman ranked 272nd in the world. Friday, via a lovely profile by GOLF’s Michael Bamberger (that you can read here), we also found out that Brown’s father is in the pig business, that his mom’s a mortgage advisor, that Ping reps are among Brown’s fans and that Brown has forever been an Open Championship devotee.
But do we know if he can win it?
What did we see Saturday? He bogeyed 1 after the unfortunate bunker bad break. But then, amidst wind and rain and Troon’s humps and bumps, Brown rebounded with a birdie on 3. And one on 6. And one on 7. That one was something. Brown pushed his ball right off the tee, toward the 8th green and near the head of pro Dean Burmester, before settling just past the putting surface. From there, Brown dropped his second shot to 4 feet — then apologized to Burmester and playing partner Billy Horschel. After that, he bogeyed three times and birdied twice, before a bogey stumble on 17 and the second bunker inconvenience of the day on 18 that led to a double bogey.
Added together, it gave Brown a two-over 73 and a three-under total, putting him in a six-way tie for second, with the sixsome one stroke back of Horschel heading into Sunday’s final round. But those late slip-ups, Brown swore, were born from Troon. From the course. From the conditions. So howling were the breezes, in fact, that he said he needed driver on 17 — which measured 238 yards.
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But could the difficulty have played in his favor? To where you’re so focused on what’s in front of you that you’re blinded to what’s around you, like the fans, like questions about your background, like thoughts of what a win would mean. Maybe. On the NBC broadcast, analyst and former Tour player Brad Faxon thought so. “For a guy who is young and has never been here before,” he said, “I think this is to his advantage today, when he doesn’t have to think about being near the lead — you’re just thinking about keeping your club dry and plodding through this.”
Afterward, Brown said as much too. But really, and he kept going back to it, he said he feels fine, claret jug be damned. Things like in-the-arena selfies were nothing.
Asked a reporter: “How comfortable have you felt in this situation the last three days? It’s a new experience for you playing in a major. How have the comfort levels been, sleeping at night and stuff like that?”
Answered Brown: “Yeah, very comfortable. Obviously it’s not a normal week, but I feel like mentally I’ve been in a place where I’ve treated it like a normal week on the DP World Tour. I’ve not made it feel any bigger than what it is, and it is a lot bigger, obviously.”
Asked a reporter: “How tough is it to deal with this position mentally?”
Answered Brown: “I felt OK. I suppose a lot of people probably thought I was going to be shaking this morning and really nervous, but I’ve been absolutely fine.”
Asked a reporter: “No one knows how you’re going to be until you’re in that situation.”
Answered Brown: “Yeah, I didn’t know. I didn’t know last night if I was going to wake up this morning, be nervous, sweaty, whatever it might be, but I think I felt all right.”
Asked a reporter: “Are you proud you’ve kept your nerves in check given what’s at stake?”
Answered Brown: “I am quite a calm, relaxed person anyway, but I think I’ve had enough experiences on the DP World Tour and sort of my journey through golf to know how to handle these situations. I’ve failed before, and I think that’s what’s stood me in good stead for being here.”
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But no way would he be that way Saturday night, right? That depends. Seems as if Brown’s crew are having themselves a time. The boys are sharing a house. They’re drinking beers. They’re hot-tubbing. They keeping him awake? “No, not quite,” he said.
OK, so he’s good. Real good. And he might just win. And the trophy folks will rejoice with his eight-letter-long, easy-to-spell name.
But really, deep down, pressure-oblivious Brown is a good lad, or at least he’s trying to be, and we’ll end things here with this exchange, just in case two folks close to Brown might have gotten disturbed over the start of this story.
Those cigarettes — are they for calming the nerves, a reporter wondered.
“No, that’s just a bit of a bad habit that I’ve got into,” Brown said. “Do you know what — I only really do it when I’m golfing, to be honest, so I suppose it could be a coping mechanism. I was trying to sneak.”
Why?
“I mean, my mom and dad are here,” he said. “There’s a lot of people watching. I don’t know how people are going to take it. Obviously, I’m sure a lot of people know …”
His parents didn’t know he smoked?
“They do know,” Brown said, “but I don’t do it in front of them, or I don’t want to do it in front of them, so I try and hide it.”
