Sometimes, even golf can’t get in its own way. On a major championship Sunday at North Carolina’s Pinehurst No. 2, nothing mattered besides what was going on between the ropes: not the fractious contest of wills between the PGA Tour and LIV Golf; not the sport’s nonstop rumor mill regarding private lives and personal rivalries; not even the USGA’s usual penchant for creating sadistically unplayable courses. No, for the final nine holes at the 2024 U.S. Open, the full focus was on Bryson DeChambeau and Rory McIlroy’s back-and-forth battle, which ended when DeChambeau secured his second career major victory on the 72nd hole.
For Bryson, the win capped a remarkable week in what has been an astonishing summer for the 30-year-old, self-styled mad genius of golf. Last month at the PGA Championship, his runner-up finish was notable for both the likability of his on-course comportment and the excellence of his play. An early LIV defector and a deeply polarizing figure during his years on the PGA Tour, DeChambeau was previously seen as off-putting by some fans and fellow competitors. There was his much-publicized fetish for making his clubs the same length, which cut against long-held orthodoxies and made him seem like an incorrigible smarty-pants. There was the deliberate 50-pound weight gain in 2020, which coincided with his previous U.S. Open triumph at Winged Foot but ultimately felt like a bit of body modification more suited to Robert De Niro in full character actor mode than a professional athlete. DeChambeau is known for his exceedingly slow pace of play—he was warned about it this week by rules officials—which is only one of the reasons that Brooks Koepka seemed for a time like he really wanted to kick Bryson’s ass.
At DeChambeau’s most derided, the heckling he received from fans became genuinely newsworthy. In 2021, before both Koepka and DeChambeau jumped to LIV, the PGA Tour had to issue an official edict that fans yelling “Brooksie” at DeChambeau would be ejected from events. What a difference three years make.
You could tell at Valhalla, and even more so this week, that the once maximally awkward DeChambeau now seems palpably more comfortable in his skin—and with his game. Continuing the trend that began in Louisville, this week, Bryson behaved—as my editor observed—like he was running for president. He strutted and preened when he hit the fairway; he mugged for the cameras and made nice with the galleries. By the end of his Saturday round, he had astonishingly assembled something of his own version of Arnie’s Army—what would we call them? Bryson’s Buddies? DeChambeau’s Disciples?
As his hot putter saved shot after shot, the fans went positively berserk. And they were loud until the end, when his brilliant and decisive sand save set up a putt to win the tournament. Clearly, and finally, the alpha male Bryson raised his finger to his lips to silence the cheering crowd as he lined up for his 4-footer. Irrevocably, the power dynamic had turned, and the champion relished every moment. I’m at pains to think of an athlete who has gone so quickly from surly oddity to beloved everyman. George Foreman, maybe? With DeChambeau’s white-hot game and newly warm and sensitive disposition—his teary-eyed trophy acceptance speech was another step in his apparent evolution—I’d buy a grill from him anytime.
Bryson is a well-deserved U.S. Open champion, but he owes plenty of thanks to another golfer for this triumph, and it’s not the late Payne Stewart. For fans of Rory McIlroy, of which I am one, it’s getting only more and more difficult to contend with his baggage in big moments. It’s now been a decade since he last won a major, and it’s not like he hasn’t been circling a victory. Since his last major triumph in 2014, McIlroy has had 23 top-20 finishes in majors and 10 top fives. He finished second at the 2022 Masters, a painful third at the 2022 Open Championship in St. Andrews, second in the U.S. Open at the Los Angeles Country Club last year, and now second again at Pinehurst. Yet somehow, in a stacked category, this was the cruelest finish of them all.
McIlroy led by two strokes after his 13th hole and seemed uniquely locked in. He had driven the ball beautifully all day, scrambled well, and made long putts. He was surging, while Bryson was spraying his driver around like unregulated fireworks and the just-holding-on Patrick Cantlay had started to fade. And then, he missed short on a pair of 3-foot par putts at nos. 16 and 18, and it all crumbled around him. Neither of the putts that doomed Rory looked that hard. They were reasonable asks in the grand scheme of the tournament. But before that final putt, something in his body language seemed to subtly change. He froze up. He lingered. His face contained 10 million emotions. And just like that, the dream was dead. I immediately put on a Joy Division album. Waiting on his inevitable fate in the scorer’s room, Rory stoically scarfed down an energy bar. How can one so gifted be so unlucky? Why must we be collateral damage to this horror?
I assume where Rory goes from here is where he always goes. He will work harder and smarter, contend in every tournament he doesn’t win, and wait for his number to come up again. You always hear this, or some version of it, from the players who’ve won a lot of majors: Eventually, your day comes. And it’s true—we saw it last month with Xander Schauffele at Valhalla. We saw it at Augusta with Jack Nicklaus in ’86, Nick Faldo in ’96, and Tiger Woods in 2019.
Rory is 35 years old and at the peak of his powers. There is no point on the horizon at which he couldn’t conceivably win one or more of the next 40 majors. But at the same time, it’s hard not to argue that Sunday seemed like the night. Golf is a ruthless game of record books. By hook or by crook, DeChambeau was determined to use this occasion to permanently remake his reputation and burnish a bright, new future as America’s pleasantly beefy hero. Meanwhile, by the painstaking distance of 6 feet of putts, Rory has very slightly diminished his future legacy. We can only hope that there’s another major win in his future—but with each passing tournament and near-miss loss, it becomes harder and harder to conceive of when his day will come.
