Ask yourself something: Do you like tricky approach shots, tough scoring conditions, and diabolically fast turtle-backed greens? If the answer is yes, then welcome to the U.S. Open, traditionally the year’s toughest major championship. A robust field of 156 competitors, ranging from amateurs to qualifiers to superstars to legends, will tee it up at the storied Pinehurst No. 2 on Thursday. There will be LIV players and PGA Tour loyalists and the strange background hum of the ongoing, go-nowhere negotiations between the Saudi-backed PIF and the PGA, which have become a fixture at men’s majors as the sport continues its bizarre self-cannibalization. Will a top-tier contender pull a short stint in jail? A month ago, I would have said that’s impossible, but we’ve all learned to expand our imaginations since then. Regardless, the circumstances will be nerve-jangling, and the stakes are nothing less than the right to call yourself America’s champion golfer for the next calendar year. USA! USA!
Along with my great playing partners Megan Schuster and Matt Dollinger, we’ve got everything you need to prepare for professional golf’s annual summer torture chamber. Take a deep breath—things are about to get hairy. —Elizabeth Nelson
What should we expect from Pinehurst No. 2?
Nelson: Located in central North Carolina and featuring a classic Donald Ross design, Pinehurst No. 2 is neither ridiculously long nor particularly booby-trapped. Unlike at certain U.S. Open venues, the rough is tricky but not ridiculously penal, and water is no factor at all. The fairways are so wide that it is said to be nearly impossible for players to lose their golf balls. And yet. In the three previous times the championship has been played here, a grand total of four players have broken par for the week. After L.A. Country Club turned out to be a relatively benign track last year, look for this course to bare its teeth.
By far the biggest challenge is Pinehurst’s notorious turtle-backed greens (you’ll be hearing that phrase a lot on the broadcast), which are exactly what they sound like: steep, strategically placed mounds that will accept only the most precise of approach shots; even good efforts will frequently roll back onto the fairway. With dry conditions and fiery speeds expected this week, scrambling around the greens will prove both paramount and extraordinarily perilous. Do you like it when the world’s best players absolutely lose their shit? Get your popcorn. We’re going to see some four-putts.
As a par-70 course that features 12 sturdy par-4s and two massive par-5s, Pinehurst No. 2 is distinct from other major tracks in that it provides no layups or strategically obvious scoring opportunities. Birdies will come at a steep risk-reward premium, and the potential for big numbers abounds. The 387-yard third hole exemplifies the specific challenges facing players. It’s the shortest par-4 on the course and could even be drivable one day this week, but the consequences for trying and failing include landing in a canyon-deep bunker in front of the green or making a profoundly undesirable trip to a barely playable waste area. The 536-yard par-4 16th is even wilder. Two good shots will leave you in the center of the green with a challenging two-putt for par. And shooting directly at the pin for your approach is likely to end in tears. Someone can always get white hot here and go low, as Martin Kaymer did in 2014, but it’s every bit as likely that your trophy winner on Sunday will be on the wrong side of even par.
Is Scottie Scheffler having the best season ever?
Megan Schuster: Here are the undisputed facts: Last week, Scheffler won his fifth tournament of the year and fifth in his last eight appearances; his victories have come at the likes of the Players Championship, the Masters, and the Memorial; and he’s set a new single-season PGA Tour record for earnings just a little over halfway through the season. He’s come in second or third place in three additional tournaments, and, as Rory McIlroy said this week, he very likely could have won the PGA Championship in May if he hadn’t been arrested ahead of his Friday tee time. (He still shot 66 that day and finished T8 in the tournament—what the hell.)
But here is where I throw just a dash of cold water on this absolute heater of a season: Scheffler is still a far cry from setting the single-season PGA Tour wins record. In fact, the record is 18 wins, set by Byron Nelson in 1945, and there have been 16 seasons when a player has finished with eight or more wins. Even if we look at just the past 25 years, there have been four instances when a player’s had eight-plus wins: Tiger Woods in 1999, 2000, and 2006 and Vijay Singh in 2004. Now, if Scottie had been able to finish things out at the Waste Management, the Houston Open, and the Charles Schwab Challenge, then he’d be right up there with that company. And as I said earlier, he’s still got almost half a season to go.
Scottie is in prime form right now. He hasn’t finished outside the top 10 in a tournament since January, he’s the overwhelming favorite to win the U.S. Open, and he’s got that New Dad Boost that could help him out significantly in the final round on Father’s Day. So no, this is not currently the best season ever. But it has a very good chance of winding up on golf’s Mount Rushmore.
Why is the U.S. Open so difficult? Can’t it just be a normal golf tournament?
Nelson: The short answer is no. The reason, as golf obsessives are aware, is the USGA. The USGA is a member-based organization that was founded in 1894 and—alongside its British-based counterpart and affiliate, the R&A—was tasked with writing and interpreting the spectacularly byzantine golf rule book. Most of the time, the USGA’s leadership is content to comb through the mind-bending minutiae of where and when you can take a penalty drop or move a twig, but they also organize and host several tournaments per year, including the U.S. Women’s Open, the U.S. Senior Open, and of course the U.S. Open. And they like to make these tournaments hard. So hard, in fact, that they frequently cross the Rubicon into what might reasonably be called “completely unfair” and “borderline unwatchable.”
There are many, many instances of this phenomenon throughout the century-plus that these nettlesome sticklers have been putting on tournaments, the most recent being the U.S. Women’s Open two weeks ago at Lancaster Country Club, wherein a combination of course setup and dried-out greens meant that more than 50 of the world’s greatest players could not break 12 over par in the first two days. Superstar Nelly Korda—who had won six of her previous seven tournaments—made a septuple-bogey on her third hole of play on Thursday and missed the cut. Rising supernova Rose Zhang shot 79 that same day and missed the cut, too. This is the kind of thing the USGA takes pride in. While it has never been exactly clear why it has such a fetish for humiliating the greatest practitioners of the game it administers, it has become an article of faith that once a year, this is what we do in golf. Imagine the NBA making the hoop 13 feet high or MLB moving all the fences back to 600 feet for a playoff series. Depending on your mileage for this kind of thing, you might find it either entertaining or obnoxious. Hopefully it will be both this week at Pinehurst, and not simply the latter.
Xander Schauffele shook off the dreaded mantle of Best Player Never to Win a Major. Who’s next?
Matt Dollinger: Here’s my very official, updated ranking of the Best Players Never to Win a Major. My criteria for these rankings include current résumés, career potential, close calls, the Shots Gained per Thingamajig, and secret biases that I will never disclose.
1. Talor Gooch: Will we even still call them majors if Gooch* doesn’t win one soon?
2. Viktor Hovland: The player who’s most likely to carry this burden for a decade. He’s incredible, but is he a closer? His third-place finish at the 2024 PGA Championship was an outlier in what’s been something of a transition season.
3. Max Homa: Four wins since 2021 tie him for the most of any majorless player. His short game breeds confidence that he’ll eventually steal one.
4. Ludvig Aberg: He’s played in all of two majors, finishing second in one and missing the cut in the other. This is an aggressive ranking for him. But he feels inevitable, and the sportsbooks agree. He has the eighth-best odds to win this week.
5. Patrick Cantlay: The ultimate grinder, but he’s 0-for-27 in majors and has finished in the top five just once, five years ago.
6. Tommy Fleetwood: He’s finished in the top 10 in five of the past nine majors! He’s perpetually “in it.” But up to this point, no one else on the leaderboards has been sweating about him.
7. Will Zalatoris: Has finished as runner-up at the Masters, PGA, and U.S. Open. He’s a putting stroke away from winning multiple titles.
8. Tony Finau: Not someone you expect to win, but it also wouldn’t surprise you if he did. He just needs a red-hot putting week.
9. Rickie Fowler: He’s come painfully close so many times. He might have too much scar tissue to win one at this point.
10. Cameron Young: Zero PGA Tour wins (solid argument by you), but he’s finished in the top three in a major twice. What’s that? Yeah, this probably should have been a top nine list.
(Yada yada yada, Ludvig Aberg has next.)
Has Rory McIlroy dethroned Tiger Woods for golf’s most interesting soap opera?
Schuster: Definitely not. As this recent Scottie Scheffler–related tweet reminded me, we will never see a golf-adjacent scandal that captures more national attention than Tiger Woods’s Thanksgiving in 2009—and also what he’s gone through in the many years since.
That said, Rory McIlroy’s personal life has become a point of obsession for golf fans—partially because of past self-inflicted wounds (remember the engagement to Caroline Wozniacki that ended via a three-minute phone call?) and partially because … we’re all too bored and online? I can’t really think of another reason the conversation around his recent divorce filing, and now the news that the couple have resolved their differences, has reached such a fever pitch. Like, we’ve had people out here inventing a relationship between him and a golf media member because they joke around in interviews and hugged once? It’s wild! (FWIW, said relationship rumor was quickly shot down.)
Maybe this increased attention stems from the public-facing turn he took in the PGA Tour–LIV Golf battle. Maybe the world of golf WAGS is starting to take off, à la those in soccer and Formula 1. Or maybe all sports fans—even fans of the most hallowed and pristine of games—are messy and love drama. Yeah, that’s probably it.
Is Brooks Koepka about to Brooks Koepka?
Dollinger: Outside of geeking out over the Florida Panthers or getting really sad over March Madness bets, there’s really only one thing you think of when you hear “Brooks Koepka”: majors. He’s won the PGA Championship three times and he became the first person in nearly three decades to win back-to-back U.S. Open titles in 2017 and 2018. Now, at Pinehurst No. 2, he’s back in his element. He’s played in nine U.S. Opens overall, making the cut in eight, finishing in the top 25 in seven and the top five in four. This is the type of golf he lives to play: Grinding as hard as possible for 72 holes, refusing to blink, executing the hardest shots imaginable. Real alpha stuff.
We sort of thought Koepka’s major-winning days might be over after Netflix streamed his existential crisis and he took the Saudi bag to go to LIV. But Koepka became the first LIV golfer to win a major when he took the 2023 PGA Championship title at Oak Hill. He hasn’t made much noise in the biggest tournaments of 2024 (T-45 at the Masters and T-26 at the PGA), but he feels like as big of a threat as any golfer not named Scottie Scheffler this week. Plus, he’s starred Scheffler down before, including at the 2023 PGA. We know he’s not scared of the course or of any contender.
There’s buzz that Pinehurst is going to play impossibly hard this week. That sets up beautifully for Koepka, who is the last golfer to win the U.S. Open with a final score over par (+1 in 2018). He also shot 16-under in 2017 to win, so, you know, he can do that, too. He’s one of the best iron players in the world, which will help him access Pinehurst’s brutal pins. If he can get the speed right on the greens, he could nab his sixth career major, tying him with the likes of Phil Mickelson, Nick Faldo, and Lee Trevino.
Is Jon Rahm OK?
Nelson: It’s been a pretty weird 14 months for the swarthy Spaniard, the two-time major winner and 2022 U.S. Open champion. He won the Masters in April of last year, and then shortly after reversed his previous loyalty pledge to the PGA Tour and accepted an offer somewhere north of half a billion dollars to join LIV. He seemed bashful about it when defending his title at Augusta National this April, and he finished an ambivalent T-45 in the tournament. And things didn’t go any better for him at last month’s PGA Championship, where he mostly played poorly and dispassionately and missed the cut.
Now Rahm, the 29-year-old who at his best is one of the few players able to go toe-to-toe with the juggernaut that is Scottie Scheffler, has … hurt his toe. A painful infection in between two toes forced him to withdraw from last week’s LIV event, and now he’s a late scratch at Pinehurst, as well. I like Rahm—he has a hugely entertaining style of play and at times can wear his emotions on his sleeve to a nearly operatic extent. So it has been difficult to watch how poor play at the majors, and now poor health, are at least temporarily derailing a career trajectory which two years ago seemed destined for stratospheric heights. The lesson here is obvious: The next time someone makes you a job offer for $600,000,000, consider the downside. There might be one!
Who will win?
Nelson: Cameron Smith. I think it’s Cam Smith time. Just as was the case during his Open Championship triumph at St. Andrews in 2022, this tournament is going to be all about who can putt the ball into the hole under adverse circumstances. That’s the one thing the Australian does better than just about anybody.
Schuster: Scottie Scheffler. I hate to go chalk. I hate to be this boring! But unless Scottie has another run in with the law soon, I don’t anticipate picking against him for the foreseeable future.
Dollinger: Scottie Scheffler. It feels downright negligent to pick anyone else. But Bryson DeChambeau is the golfer I can’t wait to watch this week. I’ve never been so excited to see someone hit a 5-iron.
