Golf uncomfortable with the rise of great disruptor Bryson DeChambeau

You might have wanted to turn away when Bryson DeChambeau stepped onto the first tee at the Ryder Cup and assumed the self-appointed role of cheerleader. His jingoistic prancing to whip up an atmosphere seemed as much directed at encouraging the gallery to be anti-European as much as pro-American.

It didn’t matter if that take was even accurate or not. People would have read it as they saw it because it was DeChambeau doing it. The flexed guns, the “I can’t hear you” gesture of cupping his ears. Harmless fun, or another jerk moment from a gormless golfer.

There was also baggage following DeChambeau to Whistling Straits. The relitigation goes that he refused to take the Covid-19 vaccine and then stupidly explained why. "The vaccine doesn't necessarily prevent it from happening," he told reporters.

But it does. He then missed the Olympic Games after contracting the disease.

Portmarnock members knew time was up for men-only policy

---

Walk tall, golfers, and tell Leo that golf is not the enemy at the gate

---

Behaviour is the glue that keeps golf together – Patrick Reed makes it come unstuck

---

Johnny Watterson: One step forward, two steps back for women’s sport

---

“I didn’t feel anything because I wasn’t playing in it,” he told Golf Channel. “It didn’t matter.”

That busy mind had already left Tokyo and gone elsewhere, the physics of his swing plane perhaps. But as always it was one foot in Mensa, the other in the school of douchebaggery.

Tour players had also called out the 28-year-old for not shouting “fore” at the WGC-FedEx St Jude Invitational. Playing the 18th hole, DeChambeau blocked his drive right, finding the spectators lining the fairway. Silence, as his brainy thoughts again wandered.

DeChambeau has snapped back at fans over the “Brooksy” sledges that now follow him around, “Brooksy” being Brooks Koepka, whose bitchy bromance with DeChambeau has become one of the running sub-narratives in golf.

If you blended a laboratory boffin with a pumped-up fratboy DeChambeau might just be it. He has the gym look and entitled demeanour.

But who would you like to watch playing golf? Justin Thomas or DeChambeau, Xander Schauffele or DeChambeau, Patrick Cantlay or De Chambeau?

None but one stepped onto the first Ryder Cup tee on Sunday and hit the bejaysus out of their golf ball, flying it over the entire stretch of hazard onto the green for a 354-yard carry.

Greg Norman once said: “Happiness is a long walk with a putter”. DeChambeau, chumming the water for his partisans, his long putter high in the air, then marched down the fairway to drain a 41-foot eagle putt.

A disruptor

He had forecast that earlier when he hit a 417-yard drive in Friday’s fourballs that left him with 72 yards to the pin at the Par 5 fifth hole. In comparison, world number one Jon Rahm was left with a 253-yard second shot after a 336-yard drive.

In DeChambeau golf has a draw like no other outside of Tiger Woods. Yet the sport has a way of closing off characters that rub against the grain, or, realign what are believed to be fixed points of the game.

His irons are all 37½ inches long, the length of a standard six iron and set at 72-degree lie angles that are 10 degrees more upright than standard. To achieve a consistent swing weight, all the heads weigh 278 grams.

He worked out the COR, the “coefficient of restitution of the flagstick,” when a rule change allowed flags to stay in for putting. In US Opens, he takes out the flag, and at every other Tour event, when it’s fiberglass, leaves it in.

He added 50 pounds to his physique. He’s right-handed but can sign autographs backwards left-handed. His clubs have physics formulae stamped on them and in putting he computes the break and read of the green. He calls it vector putting.

But golf doesn’t like him because DeChambeau is a disruptor. He causes discomfort to the system. When he tore up the classic Winged Foot with his distance to win a US Open the unloving headline in Golf Digest ran: “Foot has fallen victim to bomb-and-gouge, raising a difficult and uncomfortable truth”.

DeChambeau offended the souls of the golf purists. Courses that spent millions creating ponds and nests of bunkers were instantly defanged as he put balls in alternative orbits.

His tee shot on the second at Winged Foot found the eighth fairway, and his tee ball on the eighth nearly reached the second. His buy-in dependency on distance has become an affront to established traditions of what the sport is about.

He is a golf brutalist who has rendered classic course architecture obsolete. He’s a reductionist who bulldozed away a century of precision golf and shot-making.

But what a spectacle. A drive and wedge to a par five. What a mockery. The crowd love it. They love the drives that make it and they love the ones that don’t. And they love to hate him too.

John Daly, barefoot at a fundraiser in Myrtle Beach and driving off a beer can before chugging down a few mouthfuls, was another disruptive influence, who hit the ball long and was not liked by establishment. Like DeChambeau, he was one of the most keenly watched.

Maybe golf needs to stop clutching its pearls, recognise what consumers consume. Filter-free DeChambeau, still in his 20s, will continue to rain Titleist balls onto courtesy cars at the back of the practice range. His is an antidote to measured, error-free, regulation play. If the sport does not want to grasp that, what does it tell us about golf?