Dustin Johnson’s ball snaked left, then right, then left again, hugging the hidden contours of Olympia Fields’ 18th green with serpentine certainty. It was August 30 at the BMW Championship, and Johnson needed to sink the 43-foot putt to force a playoff with Jon Rahm. When—somehow—he did, even the rarely demonstrative Johnson couldn’t help but raise his fist and chuckle. “That’s about the most reaction you’ll see out of DJ,” remarked NBC’s Dan Hicks. Had there been a gallery around the green, its chorus would have been at full crescendo.
Just like that putt of his, the 36-year-old Johnson’s career has traced several can’t-look-away arcs of its own. With the wrists of Paul Bunyan, the height of an NBA guard, and “the incurious stride of a man who has seen a real boat party in his day,” Johnson always has been one of golf’s premier long-drive artists. But he’s recently been paying more attention to the precision details of his short game, cataloguing his wedges and improving his touch rather than relying only on power. Sinking that shot demonstrated what he is capable of when playing his best. It was also a reminder of what can happen in spite of that.
No professional golfer has been better than Johnson over the past couple of months. (Or, depending on how you measure it, years: The 13 consecutive seasons in which he’s won tournaments puts him in an echelon with Tiger Woods, Jack Nicklaus, and Arnold Palmer.) Since the PGA Tour season resumed in June, he’s won three tournaments—including, most recently, the Tour Championship, which earned him the FedEx Cup trophy and $15 million. (“I’m playing probably some of the best golf I’ve ever played,” he said afterward.) Earlier this week, Johnson was voted the PGA’s Player of the Year by his peers. And going into this weekend’s U.S. Open, at the challenging Winged Foot course in New York, he has been given the top odds to win the tournament.
Such a win would give Johnson a second career major and cement his legacy as one of golf’s top talents. It would also help him move past a tendency that has dogged him throughout his career, all the way up to and including that cool putt at the BMW Championship. That stroke showcased his dazzling potential, but it also fell into a darkly familiar pattern: After Johnson made his putt to force the playoff, Rahm responded by making a 66-footer to effectively win it. Once again a big DJ highlight, while thrilling in the moment, was overshadowed by someone else’s victory.
A few weeks before the BMW, Johnson was sitting atop the PGA Championship standings when the guy on his heels—his former workout (and sparring?) partner, Brooks Koepka—invoked him during a press conference. “There’s a few guys around you with one major,” a reporter said to Koepka, who trailed Johnson by two strokes at the time. “You’ve obviously got more. Was the second one harder to win?” Koepka, the two-time defending PGA champion known for his provocative, jaded candor, grinned.
“Well, if you look at the top of the leaderboard, I’d say yes,” he said.
Johnson indeed earned that one major; he won the U.S. Open by three strokes in 2016. But he’s also achieved something more fascinating and unusual and unwanted: the runner-up Grand Slam. Johnson has come close to winning all four major PGA tournaments: In 2011, he recorded a hole-in-one at the British Open en route to tying Phil Mickelson for second. In 2015, his implosion at Chambers Bay was the stuff of a horror film wrapped inside an anxiety dream, what with that course’s flaming steampunk landscapes and the looming presence of his noted-champion future father-in-law, Wayne Gretzky. Last year, Johnson tied for no. 2 at the Masters, behind Tiger Woods, then finished two strokes back of Koepka at the PGA Championship.
And this list of well, almost doesn’t even include the time Johnson screwed himself with a rules violation in 2010, or squandered a four-stroke lead midway through the 2018 U.S. Open at Shinnecock and finished third. Nor does it encompass another third-place finish—that same PGA Tournament at which Koepka pointed out Johnson’s lack of major W’s.
To golf analyst Brandel Chamblee, Koepka’s comment was a worthy line of discourse: “I think it gets to [Johnson] that Brooks Koepka has won four and he hasn’t,” Chamblee said. “Brooks plays like he’s got the Jim Valvano speech going on in a loop in his head and Dustin sometimes looks like he has the AM radio going on in his head, and that’s the difference.” But at least one pro golfer was annoyed enough on Johnson’s behalf to speak up. “Sort of hard to knock a guy that’s got 21 wins on the PGA Tour,” Rory McIlroy said of Johnson at the time, “which is three times what Brooks has.” McIlroy also questioned the efficacy of needling Johnson, a man who named his boat Just Chillin. “If he’s trying to play mind games, he’s trying to do it to the wrong person. I don’t think DJ really gives much of a concern about that.”
Or does he? Two weeks after Johnson’s third-place finish at the PGA, he tore through the Northern Trust, winning by 11 strokes at 30 under par. The following week he came thisclose at the BMW, and with a 10-stroke head start in hand, he won the FedEx Cup on September 7. Lately his wedges have been firing as he wants them to, his two children have given him perspective, and he seems on the cusp of putting it all together. Koepka, meanwhile, fell to 29th at the PGA, missed a cut a week later, and hasn’t played since. (He withdrew from the U.S. Open last week, citing various injuries.)
Johnson is part of a generation of golfers with increasingly distinct personalities and opinions, though his particular vibe tends to be rooted in the lack thereof. (DJ, last May, on whether Tiger was the guy to beat that week: “I mean, whoever plays well is the guy to beat.” DJ on nutrition: “I’ve never counted calories. If I’m hungry, I eat until I’m not hungry anymore and then I stop.” DJ on having his brother, Austin, as his caddie: “It’s not rocket science.”)
His cohort includes the controversial Patrick Reed, the increasingly frustrated Jordan Spieth, the shit-stirring Koepka, and the forthright Justin Thomas, who told reporters during Johnson’s run to the FedEx title that when he played with him at the Memorial, “I’ve never seen him as lost, anywhere remotely close to that lost. He was grinding his ass off. He was putting so bad and playing so bad.” Johnson shot 80 in back-to-back rounds during that tournament and missed the cut. That was just a few months ago, back in June.
And that’s part of what makes Johnson so compelling: In a sport increasingly beset by (alluring!) personal drama, his battles mostly play out between himself and himself, right there on the golf course, for all to see. Sometimes nobody wins, but sometimes, increasingly, everybody does.
After Johnson won the FedEx Cup and its $15 million prize two weeks ago, a reporter asked whether he could remember a time when a whole lot less money felt a whole lot more life-changing. He could: “When I went through all three stages of Q School and got my Tour card, I think they gave me, like, a $25,000 check,” he said. “I thought I was rich because I didn’t have but a couple hundred bucks in my bank account, probably.”
It was an intriguing answer not just for its detail—sometimes that ol’ AM radio comes in pretty clearly!—but as a faraway reminder that Johnson used to enjoy a type of anonymity that he never will again. In a February podcast appearance with a representative from one of his sponsors, TaylorMade, Johnson was asked to spill something that people didn’t already know about him. The question was met with silence.
“Unfortunately, obviously, you know, I kind of live in the public eye,” said Johnson, who has seen everything from his marriage to Paulina Gretzky to his hiatus from the game dissected by fans and media as if they were picking apart golf swings. “There’s not really many things.”
The same is true on the course. Every time Johnson takes out a putter, his track record follows him like a shadow. Every time he steps to the tee box, his movements are tracked like wild game. (Literally: Golf Digest described his stride as a “patented panther strut.”) In the TaylorMade interview, when asked the uncomfortable question, “Who influenced you to walk with swag?” Johnson answered with his trademark blend of confusion and confidence. “Well, let’s say it’s just the way I walk,” he said. “I tried to walk different. I can’t. Like, it’s just me.”
Johnson will be one of very few people walking Winged Foot this weekend, as the crowds that typically help trample the tall rough won’t be in attendance. In a press conference ahead of the tournament, Johnson talked about changing up his short-game philosophy, choosing to line up his putts in a more rigorous way rather than his old preference of going by feel. He compared the course to Oakmont, where he won his first and, as of now, only major. (“It’s very similar, I think, you know, golf course-wise,” he said. “The only difference is off the tees at Oakmont there’s no trees in your way.”)
He also revealed his blueprint for winning. “For me,” Johnson said, “it’s just pick whatever club I can get it in the fairway with, and go with that, and then go find it and hit it again.” He was talking about his golf game, but the same sentiment has seemed to follow his career, too.
