Golf’s revolution on hold as DeChambeau flounders at Augusta

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Part of the beauty of golf is that it has never required a huge amount of either brawn or brains.

If you can’t drive the ball a mile, you can make up for that with an especially soft touch around the greens. And if you’re not that bright, they send a guy out to trail you around the course, schlepping your gear and telling you what to do.

So if golf is the sport of kings, we would do well to remember that kings, as a general rule, are inbred, pigeon-chested weirdos not renowned for their penetrating intelligence.

This week in Augusta, Bryson DeChambeau was supposed to change this general rule. He came in on a roll, is built like a dump truck and operates like a DIY mechanical engineer.

DeChambeau designs his own clubs. He has a degree in physics. He used to carry a protractor around with him to more accurately measure the hole placements in his yardage book, until officials told him to quit it.

If you read anything about the Masters before it started, DeChambeau came off as somewhere between Paul Bunyan and Richard Feynman. He and his enormous brain were going to rip everyone else’s tiny heads off their shoulders.

It certainly looks that way as DeChambeau enters the tee box. He does so with a series of jabbing stutter steps, as though he is about to take off running down the course and kill the first marshal he sees. His practice swings create cold fronts three states away. He is a fearsome practicer.

This is a man who earlier in the week said he looks at the par-72 Masters course “as a par-67 for me because I can reach all the par-fives in two, no problem.”

But problematically, a golf ball has a way of going wherever the hell it wants once you’ve hit it. No amount of power or science can change this basic rule, though there is a school of thought that a great deal of beer helps.

The first couple of days of this Masters have not gone to plan for the world’s smartest giant. For example, the third hole. At the third on Friday, DeChambeau hammered a ball so hard off the tee that it came in like a meteor and buried itself in the rough alongside the fairway.

This wasn’t a thicket of bushes or a hedgerow. This was just regular grass. But the ball was dug in there so deep, no one could find it in the time allotted by rule. That’s a penalty.

Looking as though he wanted to tie his driver into a bowtie around the nearest tree, DeChambeau accepted his punishment. Then he miserably shagged his way through the rest of the hole. After needlessly skying the green, he ended with a triple-bogey seven.

You can’t win a major in a single hole, but you can certainly lose one.

His day got worse from there. By the end, DeChambeau looked like an emo teenager whose parents had dragged him to Disney World on vacation. Hangdog doesn’t begin to capture it.

Play was suspended because of darkness around 5:30 p.m. ET. With six holes still to go in his second round, DeChambeau is currently one stroke shy of making the cut.

So, so much for Dustin Johnson 2.0.

However – and this is good news for golfers without advanced STEM degrees – Dustin Johnson 1.0 is doing all right.

Until pretty recently, Johnson was everyone’s idea of the perfect new-wave golfer. He is big, but not huge. Beach fit rather than gym grown.

Also, Johnson does not give off the impression of being a deep thinker. I very much doubt he has ever owned a protractor.

The term dumb jock has gone out of fashion in the past few years. Because jocks have feelings, even the very dumb ones.

But if the term were still in common usage, Johnson would probably typify the breed. He’s a never-too-high, never-too-low, multiple-syllables-aren’t-for-me sort of guy. A guy who once took himself out of contention at a winnable Masters going ass-over-teakettle down a flight of stairs in stockinged feet. A guy who’s been dinged not once, but twice for testing positive for cocaine. As if cocaine ever helped anyone be better at anything, never mind golf.

But halfway through this year’s Masters, Johnson’s steadiness and experience has him at the top of the leaderboard.

Arrayed around him were a collection of newbies, lifers and assorted golfing oddballs, very few of whom looked as though they had ever read The Character of Physical Law or can bench press the engine block of a VW.

The most charming among them is Cameron Smith, an Australian newcomer who looks like he lied about his age to get a job working the midnight-to-eight shift at a 7-Eleven. Smith isn’t DeChambeau’s “before" picture, so much as DeChambeau going through an awkward phase in his junior-high yearbook.

So if there is a golfing revolution coming, it’s still a few months off.

On an aesthetic level, this year’s Masters is a dud. The lack of fans gives proceedings a “week before everything starts” feel. There are three colours on display: green, brown and another, deeper shade of brown. The silence is broken by an unidentifiable background hum, like a malfunctioning HVAC system. You can hear the players bickering with their caddies, which is not as much fun as it sounds.

Like everything else during COVID, the strangeness of the thing does not make it seem special. Rather, it makes you pine harder for the return of normality which, for most of us, means people. I hate people. But I’ve started to miss them.

If there is anything good at all about this Masters, it is the (so far) Triumph of the Normals. Larry Mize (age 62) and Bernhard Langer (63) were early leaders and both still might make the cut. A lot of the familiar names in contention (and a lot of golfers are still in contention) are of the “not quite old, but definitely not young” variety.

As it turns out, you don’t win this thing in the gym, and you don’t need a protractor to do so once it starts. The magic of golf is still in fighting an unhelpful orb into places it does not want to go.

After he’d ended his round, someone asked Johnson what he needed to do to win.

“You’re going to have to shoot low,” he said.

Sounds smart to me.