Bryson DeChambeau’s potential Sunday tribute to Payne Stewart literally within his reach

The real and most pressing question facing Bryson DeChambeau has nothing to do with his three-shot lead, or the hip injury that required treatment in the woods in the middle of his round Saturday.

It is this: As he attempts to follow in Payne Stewart’s footsteps 25 years later, will he wear the jaunty little Payne Stewart cap?

It has been hanging from the side of DeChambeau’s bag in tribute all week, bearing the pirate-inspired logo of his LIV Golf team, the Crushers. It’s there. It’s available. It’s ready. And like the memory of the late Stewart, a hero of his, it’s never far from DeChambeau.

“It’s with me and makes me think of him every time I’m walking on these grounds,” DeChambeau said.

He’ll never have a better chance to emulate Stewart’s famous victory at Pinehurst No. 2 than this, taking a three-shot lead over Patrick Cantlay, Rory McIlroy and Mathieu Pavon into Sunday’s final round at 7-under par, one of only eight players under par for the tournament.

And if DeChambeau is going to claim victory of his own here, why not do it in classic Stewart style?

DeChambeau used to wear that kind of flat cap all the time, when he was merely the know-it-all engineer whose antics prompted Brooks Koepka’s famous eye-roll at Kiawah in 2021, not the showman who saluted the crowd on the 18th green Saturday.

The cap was a tribute to Stewart and Ben Hogan, each of whom was a lodestar in his career in that chosen headgear. Hogan was an idol to DeChambeau, as the legend was to countless young Texans. And when a teenaged DeChambeau found out Stewart went to Southern Methodist, that cemented DeChambeau’s commitment then and there.

“When I went to SMU, in the athletic department on the wall I saw a mural of him,” DeChambeau said earlier this week. “And I’m like, ‘Oh, my gosh, he went to SMU?’ They’re like, ‘Yeah, didn’t you know?’ I was like, ‘No, I didn’t know he went here.’ That was probably the moment I decided to go to SMU, when I saw that mural on the wall.”

Coming out of college and onto the tour, DeChambeau acted like he had all the answers, with his same-length irons and calculated gyrations. He was, in a word, insufferable. When he jumped to the Saudi-backed LIV tour, no tears were shed.

Even Saturday night, he talked about checking the balance of his golf balls by floating them in an Epsom-salt bath, checking for outliers. But in his post-round news conference, he acknowledged the obvious humor of the absurdity of the question, where he might once have bristled.

Amid all that, and it was a lot, the cap often seemed like one affectation too many. It’s almost a symbol of this new — dare we say it? — more likable DeChambeau, humbler and more affable, that he wears a standard-issue baseball hat.

“Just thinking back three years ago, the landscape was a lot different,” DeChambeau said. “I tried to show everybody who I was. I didn’t do it the right way and could have done a lot of things better.”

Regardless of haberdashery, DeChambeau will be easy to spot in the final pairing Sunday along with Cantlay, having used his strong performance at the PGA Championship last month as a trampoline to the best 54 holes of anyone in Pinehurst. After battling a hard, dry, breezy course to six birdies, one bogey and one double, one shot off the best round of the day, DeChambeau will be a prohibitive favorite to close this out.

In this heat, DeChambeau is unlikely to feel the need to cut the sleeves off of a windbreaker to make an impromptu vest. But the ultimate tribute to one of his heroes, at the site of his greatest triumph, is both literally and figuratively within reach.