Bryson DeChambeau — esteemed golfing scientist, YouTube magnate and part-time superhero — can do things with a golf ball that no one else on the planet can match. Those skills have made him wildly successful at his craft. Fun to watch, too. He won the U.S. Amateur and NCAA individual in the same year. He won a U.S. Open, and then another, which count among his nine PGA Tour titles. In six of his last 10 major starts, he has finished 6th or better. On the LIV tour, which he joined in 2022, he has won three times and is the league’s undisputed best and most marketable talent, an accolade that presumably will earn him another nine-figure deal in the likely event that he re-ups with the deep-pocketed circuit.
Thing is, DeChambeau (we’re fairly certain) isn’t Superman, and even if he is, even Superman wasn’t invincible. DeChambeau’s kryptonite? It comes around every July in the form of baked-out fairways, pot bunkers and salty sea breezes that wreak havoc on ballooning irons. The setting: the Open Championship. In seven Open starts, DeChambeau has just one top-10 finish (2022, St. Andrews); in those remaining six appearances he only once finished better than 51st and missed three cuts, including at last year’s Open at Royal Troon.
DeChambeau’s bugaboo surfaced this week on a conference call with Golf Channel’s excellent “Live From” crew: Rich Lerner, Brandel Chamblee and Paul McGinley. When a reporter asked the analysts whether they’d seen anything in DeChambeau’s game that made them think that next week’s Open at Royal Portrush might better suit DeChambeau, Chamblee, speaking first, said:
“I would say no, not as it relates to the Open. His only top 10 came at St. Andrews, which is understandable — the fairways are 150 yards wide. He missed the cut here in 2019. He was a different player. That was pre-Covid. Since he’s come out of Covid, he’s certainly transformed his game, but it’s just so important to have control on the fairway at Portrush.”
DeChambeau can, of course, still put golf courses in chokeholds. But in recent years he has employed less of the hammer-and-hack approach that won him the 2020 U.S. Open at Winged Foot. Or, at least, he said he has. “I’m a little more strategic more often than not,” he said several days before he won the 2024 U.S. Open at Pinehurst. “I’m not such a risk-taker. I do take risks. I love taking being risks. But there are times for it. I feel like as time has gone on, I realize when that time is and when essentially not to go for it, when it doesn’t make any sense.”
That’s a difficult claim to fact check. DeChambeau still murders the ball; his LIV-leading average driving distance this season is 331 yards, and he also led the category in 2023 and ’24. So it’s not like he’s now hitting 4-irons off of every tee. But if DeChambeau says he’s playing a more conservative brand of golf, who are we to doubt him?
Chamblee continued on the particular challenges that links golf pose to DeChambeau’s game: “You don’t see him working his ball flight down as much. I don’t see him hitting as many left-to-right shots when there’s hard right-to-left wind. If you can’t fight the crosswind, you’re very limited on what you can do coming into the green, especially if there’s a hole location on the windward side. It just requires a lot of nuance and savoir-faire, just playing an Open Championship under windy conditions, and especially so, I would argue, at Portrush.”
Savoir-faire, as in know-how, as in knowing how to flight your ball, a skill that, when the wind blows at the Open, isn’t a nice-to-have but a necessity.
That’s not just Chamblee preaching from on high. DeChambeau echoed a similar sentiment about his own game before last year’s Open. Speaking of his iron play, DeChambeau said: “For me it’s going to be about controlling that height through just length of backstroke for me this week. It’s going to be tough. It’s always tough, right to left into the wind, left to right into the wind, and down. It’s very diabolical, and just trying to keep it low underneath the wind is key for me this week.”
DeChambeau also cited the rollout on his titanic drives as a “difficult challenge” on fairways that could double as runways. “I wouldn’t say it’s a problem; it’s a challenge.”
DeChambeau shot 76-75 and missed the cut by three.
Back on the call, the topic of DeChambeau’s iron play had piqued Lerner’s attention. Morphing into host mode, he asked Chamblee and McGinley a provocative question: Does DeChambeau need to “figure out how to be a more nuanced and polished iron player before you would consider him a truly great all-around player?”
“Yeah, definitely,” Chamblee said. “If he has any chance of being the player he wants to be, he’s got to improve his iron play. That is certainly a weakness of his. It is the weakest aspect of his game, and it is part of the game that matters the most.”
LIV statistics are limited so it’s hard to know exactly how DeChambeau’s iron play stacks up against his peers. But he has hit 70.78% of his greens in reg this season (7th best on LIV), which more or less matches his greens-in-reg percentage in each of his previous two LIV seasons. Also, for what it’s worth, in each of his last three U.S. Open and PGA Championship starts, DeChambeau has picked up strokes on the field in SG: Approach the Green. Yes, we’re dealing with a small sample set here, but it’s still evidence that if DeChambeau’s iron play isn’t elite, it’s still sound.
Then McGinley weighed in.
“I would echo what Brandel said,” he began. “I think the high ball flight doesn’t play into his strengths. He struggles to knock the ball down and play three-quarter shots. Again, that’s not a strength. He struggles to hit the ball left to right with his irons, that’s not a strength.” McGinley added, “Certainly with the strong crosswinds last year at Royal Troon, Bryson was left wanting.”
But, McGinley allowed, the forecast looks good for next week, and Portrush isn’t the brute that some other Open sites can be. And, yes, Bryson is still Bryson.
“A lot of us have been wrong over how consistently he’s competed in these major championships, especially considering he’s not flying at full power in terms of his limitations with his iron play and finds himself in contention four of the last six major championships,” McGinley said. “With benign weather conditions in terms of wind and not the heavy crosswinds you had last year at Royal Troon, maybe this is an exam that will suit Bryson better.”
The test begins Thursday.
