There’s a shot that wins at Shinnecock, and it’s not the one you’d expect.
You could see it in 1995. On the first tee Corey Pavin, slapped a high, soft, and looping cut down the right side. Commentator Johnny Miller had another word for it.
“Now that was a slice,” he said. “But it looked like an intentional slice.”
You could see it in 2004, too. I think of Retief Goosen’s tee-shot into the par-3 11th. A high, floaty approach that was one of the best on the hole all day. You could pick any number of shots from Brooks Koepka’s win in 2018 to see the same thing.
And it was all over the place during Wyndham Clark’s win in 2026.
When most of us envision winning the US Open as kids, we picture perfection. The best player in the field, mightily holding off everybody else. Bombed drives, lasered irons; putts with sumptuous speed dropping into the middle of the hole.
The reality is something different.
“I played some ugly golf today,” Clark said in his winner’s interview. “I was little too cutty today, but I had to play it.”
You don’t win US Opens, you survive US Opens. And that means knowing how to bail out. To play ugly – but predictable – golf. And at Shinnecock, a big, bunty, loopy slice-cut seems to be a strangely good fit. Players land on it as an ugly-but-works solution because it ticks a bunch of important boxes, like:
• It’s easy to hit • They have relative control over it • They know mishits are going to pop up then fall down, not run away • They know which direction it’s going • They know it’ll give them lots of spin • They know it’ll fly high and land soft
Few people dream of carving big slices down iconic holes en route to winning the US Open. But if you really want to win one, putting that dream aside and plugging into reality is what it takes.
Photo: Cliff Hawkins
1. A minimalist approach can lead to sloppiness
It’s interesting that Wyndham Clark and runner-up Sam Burns have moved in opposite directions with their golf swings, generally speaking.
Clark won his first US Open without a coach, espousing a minimalist philosophy of clubface control above all else. In the next two years his swing got out of balance. Too long, too much cup in his left wrist, too much lag and shaft lean, too much slide away from the target. The clubface is king, but when you don’t focus on anything else, it all starts to fall apart.
Wyndham figured that out, which led to him joining up with his new coach Pat Coyner.
“I was hitting balls one day and just asked him, like, ‘Hey, what do you think?’ He goes, ‘Honestly, I look at a few things that how you’re swinging in ’23 and ’22, and you’re way longer, you’re kind of cupped, your wrist isn’t flat, X, Y and Z,'” Clark says.
Now Clark’s the guy doing the most intricate drills around.
And then, we have Burns…
2. But things get worse when you get too picky
On the other end of the spectrum was Sam Burns. Burns had ranked outside the top 120 in Strokes Gained: Approach in two of his previous three years heading into this PGA Tour season.
This season, he’s in the top third on tour. Whereas Clark’s ball-striking resurgence is the product of becoming more hands-on with his golf swing, Burns’ comes courtesy of being more hands-off.
“In the past couple of years I had gotten really picky about stuff. Watching swings all the time; thinking of how I used to swing it. I got to the point where I went to my coach and said, ‘Let’s make this as simple as possible,'” Burns says. “Now, I just try to keep it in the rails and if it gets off a little bit I don’t panic.”
While the specifics of Clark and Burns’ stories are different – opposite, in fact – the story itself is the same. The lesson is that a balanced approach to your golf swing is the best one.
The middle road, so often, is the one that takes you to better golf
3. Sway gap matters, and you need it early
Sway gap is a new-age metric invented by Sportsbox AI and its team of teacher consultants. It’s pretty important for every kind of golfer, and the good news is that it’s pretty easy to understand. It measures the difference between the middle of your chest and the middle of your hips. The more your hips are in front of your chest, the bigger your sway gap.
Draw players, like Rory McIlroy, tend to have a bigger sway gap, while faders like Scottie tend to have a smaller one – and each type of player can get screwed up if they’re more like the other. But it’s when you create that sway gap that’s important and something I learned this week.
Photo: Cliff Hawkins
The goal is to create it early in your downswing, when you have time, rather than in the milliseconds before impact. This is true for both types of players, as Jeff Smith, coach to Davis Riley, Max Greyserman and others, explained to me on the US Open range.
“You want to create a bigger sway gap early in your downswing,” Smith explained. “A lot of amateurs don’t create enough sway gap early, then try to create it late. The earlier you create it, the more you can rotate later in your swing. How well you can rotate in side bend is the mark of a good player.”
4. Keep your head level
Speaking of bends and turns in your golf swing, Michael Thorbjornsen is one of my favourite up-and-coming players in golf. He wasn’t at the US Open, but his new coach, Sean Foley, was.
Foley taught me something interesting: that Thorbjornsen’s head moves more than six inches down towards the ball on the downswing. That leads to him vaulting himself up and back on the downswing, which can create timing issues and turn his stock draw a little loopy.
“A lot of great players keep their head more level on the backswing, the up-and-down movement isn’t severe,” Foley explained. “It helps take pressure off their lower back in the long term… the more you go down, the more you have to come back up, and the more pressure that puts on your lumbar spine.”
5. Sometimes the best practice round is no practice round
Last Monday a lot of players – including Clark – didn’t play practice rounds. Why? Because the wind was moving in the opposite direction than it usually does. I found that interesting. Is it better to know the course inside and out, to be comfortable with anything? Or is it best to rest when you can and prepare specifically? I don’t know but from the moment I learned it, I’ve been thinking about it.
6. The goal is to test every club in your bag
Lou Riccio is a Columbia University professor and golf statistics expert who has done work for the USGA for decades. Back when he started, any data he analysed he had to collect himself. Some of that data involved asking pros what club they hit on every hole. A long-stated USGA goal has been to test players hitting every club in their bag.
“What do we endeavour to do? It’s about, yes, getting every club in the bag dirty. We want the players to examine every part of their game. We want them to get all 15 clubs in their bag dirty,” said chief championships officer John Bodenhamer. “The 14 that they’ll make a stroke with, and the one right here between their ears, the 15th club.”
It’s a fun way to think of it, and a difficult goal that stirs some debate, with rollback advocates saying it’s near impossible in the modern era of distance. Is it still possible? I think so, but clearly it was the task facing Jack Nicklaus during his 1980 US Open, as you can see below.
7. Ride the wind when the slope is against you
With the wind howling all week, do you ride the wind? Or do you try to hit a shot against it, and fight it?
“It’s so tough,” Burns explained after his first round. “For instance on the ninth hole [in my first round], I had 170 yards and the wind right-to-left. If I slice it up into the wind, I could hit it 150 yards. If I draw it, it could go 190.”
It seems like it ultimately comes down to one thing: what gives you your best chances of holding the green? A good rule here is that if the green slopes in the opposite direction than the wind is blowing, then you can ride the wind. If it’s not, then the ball won’t hold, so you have to fight it.
Even if that means taking on a little extra risk, as Emiliano Grillo explained after carding the lowest third round of the championship: “To me that’s hole dependent and distance dependent. If it’s a short club like a 9-iron or pitching wedge and you need to draw it to hit it close, then you’ll try it. But the shot I hit on 6 today felt suicidal, because I’m hitting a 4-iron with a left pin, and I tried to hit a draw a little bit just to hold the wind a little bit; it just happened to work out perfectly.”
8. There’s a ‘don’t-double’ side of every hole
Ahead of the final round, the team at Arccos sent me an interesting breakdown of how amateur golfers who were lucky enough to play Shinnecock fared. Turns out the par-3 seventh doesn’t discriminate. It was the fourth hardest hole for pros for the week, and it’s the most difficult for amateurs. According to Arccos, amateur golfers average almost a full stroke over par on this hole and double-bogey the hole almost 30 percent of the time.
After his third round, I decided to ask James Nicholas how he’d go about coaching an amateur to avoid a double there.
“Well, anywhere right, especially that bunker on the right, is an auto-double,” he said. “Just bail out left, try to chip it anywhere on the green, then you’re a two-putt away.”
I went out to look at that auto-double spot and I can confirm, it’s terrifying.
It was a good, basic reminder that there’s always a bail-out side to a hole. And your path to avoiding double-bogeys depends on being on the right side of it.
9. Open-ended questions lead to the best answers
Kevin Van Valkenburg of the Fried Egg is a mentor to many golf media members. He was nice to me the moment my career started, which he probably doesn’t even remember because that’s just how he is normally. But I remember, because in those early days in sports journalism, it felt anything but normal.
Walking back from the interview area on Friday, KVV shared some great advice about the art of asking “neutral, open-ended questions”.
A bad habit in journalism, and one I often fall into myself, is to lead your subjects into a kind of multiple choice answer:
Why do you do X? Is it for A or B reason? Or maybe C?
Having the confidence to leave the answer open, and let the question hang there, is a little scarier than it sounds. You have to fight the fear of striking out on getting an answer to the question. You also have to resist the human, social urge to make the person across from you feel comfortable. But that’s what asking a neutral, open-ended question entails.
A day later I found myself chatting with Viktor Hovland on the range. Chatting is the wrong word. In some ways it was less conversational than normal. There were more pauses to think between questions. But that’s what gleaning insight looks like. And I’m glad I did, because Hovland was dispensing some real wisdom from the empty range on Saturday afternoon.
Try it yourself. No matter who is in front of you, you’ll learn a lot more that way.
