NEWTOWN SQUARE, Pa. — Since winning the 2024 U.S. Open, Bryson DeChambeau has played in six major championships. He’s registered three top 10s and three missed cuts.
For as great as DeChambeau can play when everything is going right, his game can be equally disastrous when it gets off track.
Unfortunately, it appears the streak will continue, as he is staring down another missed cut after a 6-over 76 in Thursday’s first round at Aronimink Golf Club, which had him T120 when he signed his card, ahead of only eight players in the field.
It’ll be easy to pin DeChambeau’s shortcomings on the distractions of LIV Golf’s current uncertainty. Many will posit that the sudden upheaval, which puts his future plans in doubt, is affecting his performance. While that could certainly be the case, the more concerning reality seems to be that DeChambeau is just a player who’s a bit lost at the moment, one struggling to find answers.
His woeful first-round performance followed an all-too-familiar script for the two-time U.S. Open champion. Bryson bombed away off the tee, but poor distance control with irons and wedges, catastrophic chipping and bunker play and a putter that couldn’t pick him up caused him to steadily drop down the leaderboard.
None of that is new for DeChambeau. The putter has often run hot and cold. His short game was the chief culprit in his missed cut at the Masters, as two disastrous visits to bunkers led to five shots out of the sand and a triple and double bogey that was the difference in making and missing the weekend.
Distance control has been a consistent issue in each of his recent major missed cuts — and even in his failure to convert top 10s into wins — particularly when playing in the wind, where he’s long struggled with how to factor the relative uncertainty of ever-changing conditions into his exacting pre-shot calculus.
In Wednesday’s practice round, with winds blowing over 20 mph, he dropped four balls from the same yardage on the then-downwind 16th — two in the fairway and two in the rough — and hit them in four different places with the same club. None of them ended up on the green, with both from the fairway coming up short, one left and one right, and both from the rough jumping long and bounding over the green. DeChambeau stood there afterwards, befuddled, gesturing to caddie Greg Bodine and wondering why the ball wasn’t reacting the way he wanted.
A Wednesday evening range session didn’t result in the solution to that problem he sought, and he spent much of Thursday making those same frustrated gestures at, well, everything — Bodine, the ground, his clubs, the sky.
DeChambeau has never been one to hide his emotions on the course. When it’s going well, he rides that wave of positivity to astounding heights, feeding off crowds that he actively works into frenzies. However, on days like Thursday, he seems to spiral as things go wrong, digging himself deeper and deeper into a pit of despair.
There’s perhaps no worse event to have that tendency than a PGA Championship, where rounds drag on close to 5.5 hours, and you’re forced to sit with your thoughts regularly between shots. After his fifth bogey of the day on the 7th hole (his 16th after starting on No. 10), DeChambeau was forced to endure a 10-minute wait for the green to clear on the 241-yard par 3.
While Ludvig Åberg, Rickie Fowler and their caddies chatted and snacked, trying to pass the time, DeChambeau stewed off to the side, chomping away on a beef stick before grabbing a club to rehearse some swings, desperate to find something before his round ended.
Once it was finally his turn, DeChambeau blew another long iron short and right. As the ball fluttered weakly in the air, getting knocked ever shorter and further right by the wind, he berated himself over whether it was possible to miss right any more often.
Still steaming, DeChambeau hammered his chip shot over the green, bounding into the rough on the other side. More muttering. More gesturing at the ground. He hurried across the green, seemingly desperate for this nightmare to end, and proceeded to fluff a chip that came up short and rolled back down towards his feet.
DeChambeau eventually got up and down for double bogey, gesturing again in frustration towards where he flubbed a chip. As his playing partners finished up, he hustled through the tunnel off the 8th green, which precedes a lengthy and awkward walk to the 9th tee at Aronimink.
As bizarre as the setup is from No. 8 to No. 9, cutting across the 11th and 17th tees to get to the new back tee, it’s a walk he made at least once in his practice rounds. But mind still racing, a discombobulated DeChambeau quickly emerged back through the tunnel to the adjacent 10th green, asking if he had gone the wrong way as some of us cut across to the 9th fairway.
It was almost too on the nose that DeChambeau, who spent his day figuratively lost on the course, would end it getting quite literally lost while trying to find his final tee box.
Once he got there, he finally put together a complete hole, hitting the fairway off the tee, launching a 3 wood onto the 609-yard par 5 in two and then making a stress-free two-putt for his first birdie of the round. It was a solid end to an otherwise disastrous day, and after a quick stop at the scoring tent, DeChambeau made a beeline to the range.
The first club he pulled was the same iron he hit on the 8th tee, and he began hammering away, explaining to his coach that he felt he was pulling out and to the left, causing him to be late with the club and miss to the right.
Bodine wandered off and returned with snacks, settling in for the long haul as DeChambeau’s search for answers begins anew.