US Open 2020: Winged Foot’s first hole continues to produce the most amazingly wild shots

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During the opening round of the US Open, Zach Johnson made what might be the most ridiculous birdie putt imaginable on the first hole at Winged Foot Golf Club. There’s really no point in describing it, because anything we type won’t properly characterise its outrageousness. You just need to watch the video below and then pick your jaw up.

As you can see from Johnson’s fireworks, the green complex on the par 4 is particularly surreal, with all sorts of humps and bumps and undulations. It’s got so much hustle and flow, the USGA specifically tells players that its handling this green differently than the other 17th, maintaining it a slower speed so that the ridiculousness doesn’t become too sublime.

Given this, you can imagine that Johnson’s putt wasn’t the only wacky results we would get to see play out on the putting surface for the hole the club calls “Genesis”. We collected a few crazy shots from the second that demonstrate just how mad a scientist A.W. Tillinghast was.

We’ll start with this tasty bunker shot from Dustin Johnson:

Second-round leader Patrick Reed shows you can use that same “backboard” from all the way from out in the fairway:

Harris English wasn’t in the bunker, just the thick rough left of the green, and when you watch this you swear he actually hits the hosel rather than the clubface the way the ball spits out left. But, obviously, it was by design.

The best one, however, is here from Hideki Matsuyama, who found his second shot on the green but in no position to actually be able to use his putter. So instead, he takes his wedge on the green (making golf-course superintendents around the globe cringe) and, well, pulls a true Zach Johnson.