SOUTHAMPTON, N.Y. — A reputation is earned in drops and lost in buckets.
Shinnecock Hills knows this. They have spent more than a century — 135 painstaking years — slowly accruing the social, political and golf capital that brought them to here: A place that is roundly considered one of the best and most prestigious private golf clubs anywhere in the world.
Wyndham Clark knows it, too. Perhaps not at the start of this U.S. Open week, but certainly after Sunday afternoon, when he endured several hours of abuse at the hands of a particularly nasty Long Island crowd en route to his second U.S. Open Championship.
I do not claim to know much about Clark. I have seen what was reported about his behavior at the U.S. Open last year at Oakmont, when he destroyed a sacred locker room after a lousy round of golf and later seemed disinterested in expressing remorse. I have seen his bad swings result in temper tantrums, including once accidentally narrowly avoiding striking a volunteer (those expressions of remorse were more sincere). And I have certainly seen the rehabilitation efforts he has undergone in recent months to shed the stigma that he is a hothead, or worse, a Bad Guy.
But after watching him on Sunday at Shinnecock, I do know this: Wyndham Clark has some serious backbone.
In case you weren’t already aware, it is very hard to win a major championship. It might be said that it is hardest to win a U.S. Open. A national championship victory is an experience tantamount to waterboarding — except here the drowning is not simulated. You do not win an Open. You endure through one, flailing wildly through a vast ocean of failure and disaster to eventually emerge with a score lower than your competitors. Very often, it takes every last ounce of you.
This is because the U.S. Open is the ultimate test of yourself. It reveals things that you wouldn’t dare say out loud. It presses you where you are weakest. It shows you who you really are.
To win a major championship the way that Clark did on Sunday at Shinnecock — in which he was competing not only against himself but against all of Shinnecock — was a reflection of Clark’s innermost self that not even he could paper over.
So how’d he do it?
He did it laughing.
“I was kind of making jokes about it with [caddie] Dave [Pelekoudas],” Clark said. “If we heard someone cheer for me, I’d go, oh, there’s one person that likes me. So we would kind of make jokes and make it maybe a little light-hearted.”
The laughter must have been good medicine for Clark on Sunday afternoon, because he badly needed it by the time he turned for the home stretch. A day that had started with a six-shot lead had dropped down to two, and Sam Burns was charging. Meanwhile, the crowd had gotten so out of hand that they had even coopted the clubhouse at Shinnecock, where throngs of people sat out on the veranda to watch as Clark hit his tee shot on the 13th.
“GET IN THE BUNKER!” screamed one fan in the grandstand next to the tee box, a catcall that resulted in thunderous laughter inside the clubhouse.
From directly outside the clubhouse, one volunteer looked on unsparingly.
“I feel bad for the guy,” he said. “But he brought this upon himself.”
Clark has brought it upon himself — but it’s unclear if he (or anyone) had earned exactly what he received on Sunday afternoon. Sure, Wyndham had acted no better than the jeering crowds when he eviscerated the locker room at Oakmont, but there is an old saying about two wrongs. There was also another, much simpler reason why the galleries on U.S. Open Sunday would have been wise to practice better judgment: The man they were hoping to rattle was irrepressible.
The fans thought they could get under his skin, but they were wrong. Wyndham Clark had backbone.
“It sucks being the underdog or getting rooted against, but I can pull through,” he said Sunday with a grin. “There’s nothing like winning kind of an away game, if you will.”
That might not be enough to earn back the affection of the crowds by the time he makes his final major championship start of the year in Royal Birkdale. Hell, it might not be enough to earn back their adulation … ever.
“I hope I don’t become the heel of the PGA,” Clark said. “I guess if I am, any press is good press, right?”
On Sunday at Shinnecock, Wyndham Clark did not change his reputation.
But he added a few drops in the right direction … and a few pounds of silverware.
