Bryson DeChambeau hangs on to win his second US Open championship as Rory McIlroy wilts

Four years and 40 pounds ago, our fathers brought forth on this continent a beast that bludgeoned Winged Foot Golf Club into submission. That was big, bully Bryson then.

This Bryson is older, slimmer, wiser. Maker of his own clubs, fiddler of his own physique, forsaker of golf’s old guard, Bryson DeChambeau, head Crusher of LIV, grabbed Pinehurst No. 2 by its pinecones and in the process delivered heartbreak on a platter to the second most popular man on the property, Rory McIlroy, beating the Northern Irishman by a single shot. Boring it was not.

This was a very different DeChambeau than the one who gouged huge clumps of sod out of Winged Foot’s traditional U.S. Open rough in 2020. Embraced by the North Carolina galleries as if he was Richard the Lionheart home from the Crusades, DeChambeau missed no opportunity to wear the mantle of a man of the people, applauding them very nearly as much as they applauded him.

If the galleries were raucous and real and profoundly pro Bryson, the ghosts of two men were walking the grounds with him. Open Sunday always falls on Father’s Day and this one was particularly poignant for DeChambeau. His father lived to see him win in the COVID-subdued scene at Winged Foot but after battling diabetes and suffering kidney failure, Jon DeChambeau passed away in November 2022 at the age of 63. “Unfortunately my dad passed away a couple years ago,” said DeChambeau, “and this one is for him.”

And, of course, there’s Payne Stewart. The 1999 U.S. Open champion who died in a plane crash that same year, hovers over Pinehurst like the tranquil tolling bells of the Village Chapel’s carillon. Both Stewart and DeChambeau attended Southern Methodist University, making Mustangs of fully one-half of the winners of Pinehurst’s men’s U.S. Opens. DeChambeau even had a Stewart-style flat cap attached to the side of his golf bag and a pin of Stewart’s immortal pose affixed to the back of his own cap as tributes.

Twenty-five years ago, Stewart won the first U.S. Open at Pinehurst’s No. 2 course with a classic USGA par, driving it in the rough, laying up short of the cross bunker, wedging the ball to 20 feet and making the putt that turned into the statue that lives behind the 18th green day in and day out. But No. 2 is different now. Gone is that Bermuda rough, ripped out in favor of all manner of gruesome vegetation.

It was left to DeChambeau to invent a new kind of USGA/Pinehurst par for the 21st century. After McIlroy suffered his second power lip-out in three holes to fall a shot behind, DeChambeau drove it left into the wilderness, the place he battled from virtually all day.

For those who are keeping track at home, DeChambeau hit it in the nasty native stuff on holes 2, 5, 8, 10, 11, 12, 14 and 18. On the left of the 18th fairway, instead of the customary clumps of wire grass and other nasty bits, his ball was sitting down beside a root, stuck in soft sand, surrounded with pine needles and fallen leaves. He asked a USGA official for relief but it was denied. And, just to make it interesting, his swing was restricted by the low hanging limbs of a magnolia.

DeChambeau slashed it out, advancing it to the very bunker Stewart had laid up short of a quarter century before him. He followed that with a magnificent 55-yard explosion that finished 3 feet and 11 inches short of the cup, then holed it to nip McIlroy by a shot with a 6-under-par total of 274.

“Man, I can’t believe that up-and-down on the last,” he said. “That was probably the best shot of my life. I still can’t believe it.”

DeChambeau began the day with a three-shot cushion that slowly and steadily eroded. McIlroy, whose major championship aspirations have been on hold for a decade, played the front nine one-under par to DeChambeau’s one-over, a stretch that could have been worse for the eventual champion after, for example, hitting it left of the 8th green into John Daly double-digit territory.

He managed to get up and down but the fist pumps were an indication of how hard won that par four was.

McIlroy turned up the temperature when he birdied four of five holes from the 9th through the 13th. Coupled with DeChambeau’s bogey on the 12th, McIlroy briefly held a two-shot lead. DeChambeau knew he had to birdie the drivable 13th — just as McIlroy had done — and he reached the green with his 3-wood and two-putted. McIlroy stumbled home with bogeys on the 15th, 16th and 18th holes that featured his two lip-outs, from three feet and four feet respectively. DeChambeau spun one out himself on the 15th.

Patrick Cantlay, playing alongside McIlroy, remained in the hunt all day until a bogey at the 16th dropped him two back. He tied for third with Tony Finau, equaling the best finish in a major championship for both.

This was a championship won from the places you don’t want to go more than the ones you do.

“I go back to being a kid,” said DeChambeau. “I used to throw golf balls in the worst lies outside of the fairway and just learned to hit out of the worst situations to see what I could do. That sparked a lot of my creativity.

“But then I’d go back and work on the mechanics really hard. I had this unique childhood experience in golf of working on really quirky, weird things, then also working super hard on the mechanics, trying to be as machinelike as possible. In certain situations where I have no control over what’s going to happen, you got to just figure out how to will it and get it done. That creativity gets sparked.”

The spark of genius.