Before anything else, I would like to say three positive things:
1. The children love Bryson. In the time I spent following Bryson DeChambeau in his third round at the Open, just one child was guilty of punk-ish predilections, and I only heard about the kid secondhand – apparently, the precocious little snot-nosed guttersnipe shouted “watch your step!” as Bryson walked past the range. I can confirm that this was an anomaly. The rest of the kids were clamouring for autographs, and selfies, and high-fives, and he granted as many as he could. The engine of this affection was clear enough from the kid who asked him if he was going to “break 50” that day, referring to an ongoing series on his YouTube channel. The Internet charm offensive has worked.
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2. The adults at Royal Birkdale mostly liked Bryson too…other than Rory McIlroy. After the bizarre scene Friday night when he was assessed a two-stroke penalty and seemed to flirt with the idea of withdrawing completely, they greeted him throughout his front nine by shouting his name or some variation thereof – “De-Beau” was popular – and even in the rare moments when they dogged him in their lilting Scouse accents, it was pretty tame stuff.
(And on that note, it was a very good day for everyone pushing the narrative that British and Irish fans are better and more respectful than their American counterparts. If this had happened on Long Island, Bryson would have been hog-tied and roasting over a spit with a big red apple in his mouth by the fifth hole.)
ADRIAN DENNIS
3. Bryson himself showed great resilience, I thought. Every time the perceived injustice seemed like it might light a rage fuse, like his bogey on two or the moment on the fifth hole when the scoreboard showed him four shots off the lead just a few hours after it seemed like he was ascendent, or when his playing partner Sam Burns took the lead or when he got a rotten lie in a pot bunker, he kept it together and recovered. He’d lost the initiative from Friday, but he didn’t collapse. In fact, he survived, and then thrived. That felt admirable.
But, wait.
What if the reason he didn’t melt down in a fit of pique is because actually, he exists mostly as a one-man content machine, and he’d already grasped the thing he coveted the most: Becoming the centre of attention? One writer I spoke with who had witnessed the late-night scenes on the driving range Friday recalled a moment when Bryson turned to his team, gestured at the onlooking reporters, and said, “Are you seeing this?” His tone wasn’t incredulous or annoyed, the writer said – it seemed like he was in awe, like he couldn’t believe his luck.
ANDY BUCHANAN
I wasn’t there, but it passed the gut test. On Saturday, I watched him from the moment he arrived on the putting green to the moment he walked off the ninth green – three hours and change – and it struck me that even when he waves to the fans, or tips his cap, it looks like something he’s practiced 1,000 times in the mirror. To my eye, there is this constant nagging sense of inauthenticity. I say the word “sense” on purpose, because this all comes down to impressions – who can prove that anyone else is inauthentic? – but it made me think of the words of Eamon Lynch, who wrote this past week that when DeChambeau’s environment isn’t fully curated, when he ceases to be either on his YouTube channel or in the friendly confines of LIV Golf, there’s the constant risk that whatever is “real” about him spills out, and perhaps leads us inexorably back to his pre-LIV days, when crowds relentlessly (and cruelly) taunted him for everything that made him different.
Now, to prevent a relapse when he’s out among the wild public, we get just two versions of DeChambeau at these major championships. On one hand, it’s the happy-go-lucky performance, which feels entirely contrived to some of us but works for kids and adults who are either credulous or agenda-driven (as in, we like him because the TourBots don’t!!). On the other, it’s the anger, the petulance, the shortness, the stiff-arming of the media, the feeling that he’s not exactly where he wants to be, and doesn’t quite know how to get there.
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He made his way to the putting green around 2:20pm BST, 70 minutes before his tee time, on a day when the British sun had finally decided to behave in a British manner, hiding just often enough to justify the word “overcast.” The wind made only a token effort to riffle the blue flags surrounding us. Little flashes of white appeared everywhere – the small plane droning overhead in the sky, the knee-high picket fence surrounding the green (the English love an out-of-place picket fence), the sweater that Bryson took off the minute he walked inside that fence, folding it with meticulous care before handing it off to his assistant. Behind him, his agent Brett Falkoff hovered, dressed all in blue, less like a shadow and more like an extension, having himself featured in many Friday night stories. (Even Saturday, on the range, Falkoff was still litigating the circumstances of the stomped grass.)
Bryson set up a gauntlet of tees, three by three, and putted through them for a bit before tooling around with a yardstick and a white box gizmo that fed him some sort of data as he executed that stiff, unaesthetic stroke. After 20 minutes, he retreated to his gaudy yellow bag (the words “Google Cloud” standing out just below his name), left for the short game range, signing autographs along the way, and spent the rest of the moments before his tee time launching picturesque shots into the sere-brown horizon. In his back pocket, the yardage book boldly proclaimed his initials to the onlookers: B.A.D.
Once more to the credit of the British fans, the banter starting at the first tee was unremarkable. I expected constant shouts about stomping on the grass, but in fact it was DeChambeau himself who made the first joke when found himself in a messy lie off the first tee and had to flick away some pinecones. “These are loose impediments,” he said to the crowd, earning a laugh. On two, when he launched his approach into the rough by the green, the crowd gave an ironic “oooooo” as he moved into position among the grass. On six, when he walked toward his ball in the fairway, he took a few exaggerated stomps, again getting a small laugh for his efforts. Aside from that, the vibe was neutral to supportive, and sometimes very supportive.
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We walked past and among the dunes, close to the sea in theory, but relying for proof of its existence on the herring gulls overhead. The landscape that seems so parched from afar, dominated by desiccated bentgrass and fescue, is more colorful up close, dotted by the darker greens of gorse and blackberry and bebb’s willow, with rare flashes of yellow ragwort, purple thistle, bluebells, and white yarrow. It’s gorgeous in the way this land is always gorgeous, and it’s easy to wonder if the beauty somewhat cut the inherent tension, eased off the accelerator that we call the human element. How else could it be that the Open churns 50,000 people through its gates on competition days, but it never seems very crowded or oppressive on these dunes?
Bryson walked the flatter paths, and after his lone bogey on the front and some rickety iron play, he atoned with a 35-foot birdie off a hillock on six, slightly against the run of play. He caught a miserable break in the bunker on 14 but still made par, birdied the par-3 16th, and finished the day at 6 under. You’d think his chances are iffy now, and certainly the outlook has dimmed since last night, but to reiterate a piece of praise, he never lost hope.
ANDY BUCHANAN
What he did instead, the night before, is to hint at lost hope, to hold the tournament hostage, and to direct every spotlight to himself. He even stayed late enough that nature’s spotlight was forced to set, ceding the stage to just one man. Whatever you think of the penalty – I think it was justified on the merits, and I also think it’s ridiculous that camera presence for the stars and leaders inevitably leads to uneven enforcement – he handled it as poorly as possible. Were his babyish antics the knee-jerk grievance of someone who thinks the establishment is against him? Was it the manipulation of a mind so content-rotten that it couldn’t help but grope at an opportunity? Either way: grotesque.
The last hole I watched on Saturday was the ninth. His playing partner Sam Burns, now with a one-shot lead, pulled his tee shot left. As Bryson stepped up to the tee, the fans began egging him on to take driver. He paused his conversation with his caddie, looked back and forth among the spectators to build anticipation, waited an extra beat until they grew silent, and then yanked the club with a flourish. Ghe cheer went up—some of them loved the pantomime. If anyone else had done this, I think I would have loved it too. With Bryson, it felt, for me, almost wearying to watch, performative in a way that had gone past fun, gone past authenticity, into something calculated and desperate and even lonely.
Then he stood over the ball, silence fell, anticipation rose, and you could sense the power about to be unleashed. When the explosive moment came and the ball rocketed off the face, it was all you could see and all you could feel, and every ounce of bullshit, briefly, disappeared.
