Bryson DeChambeau walks the practice green during a practice round of the PGA Championship golf tournament at Oak Hill Country Club.Aaron Doster/USA TODAY Sports via Reuters
A couple of years ago, back when Bryson DeChambeau was the future of golf, disruption was a popular idea.
DeChambeau’s transformative idea was to get as big as possible (somewhere in the vicinity of 280 pounds) and hit the ball as hard as he could.
Like most uninspired breakthroughs, it was dressed up as genius. There was a lot of talk about DeChambeau having majored in physics and the fact that he carried a protractor on the course.
This was going to be the Malcolm-Gladwell-ization of the sport. Why knock the ball along the intended path, when you could go straight at the pin, regardless of what’s in the way? Fail fast and hit a bunch of trees.
Instead, DeChambeau mostly failed. He turned himself into bulletin-board material for the groundskeepers at Augusta National by saying he was approaching the course as a par-67. He finished tied for 34th at that Masters.
Very briefly, led by DeChambeau, having a big mouth was the cool new thing in golf. Everyone prepared themselves for a sport full of braying, artificially inflated jackasses squat-thrusting their way onto the driving range each morning. Golf was becoming wrestling.
Ahead of this weekend’s PGA Championship in Rochester, N.Y., we’re back to loose lips sinking sponsorship deals. All that great quote material reporters enjoyed for a while? It’s gone.
There are moments in history when new ideas are popular. This isn’t one of them. Since tech went off a cliff, nobody wants to hear about how you’re going to reimagine something that already works into something much better. Reliable is cool again. Even newspapers are making a comeback.
Golf is headed in the same direction. Once again, DeChambeau is a human billboard for the movement.
He looks different now. As fast as he gained all that muscle, he’s lost it. He’s also lost the bluster.
By the time DeChambeau defected to the Saudi-backed LIV tour, it wasn’t a headline. He was just another guy taking part in a legal bank heist. It said something about his decline as a Big Golf Thinker™ that none of his former PGA colleagues bothered to rip him personally. DeChambeau was no longer worth the hassle.
Here’s the new-old DeChambeau from this week: “On and off the golf course is where I’m focused on helping people whether it’s growing the game globally or if it’s behind the scenes. I need to be able to work for the good of the communities we’re in and the game.”
Does this sound like a man getting ready for east vs. west sports rumble? It sounds like a guy running for school board trustee.
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PGA vs. LIV will be the through line at every major championship this year. It’ll be pushed as a story until a LIV golfer wins one of these.
That was brilliance in LIV’s model. It isn’t an interesting league. It doesn’t play at the coolest spots with the most history. What it has is conflict. And as long there’s conflict, LIV will draw far more media attention than its scale or quality deserves.
What’s changed in the last little bit is the golfers. They don’t want to play ball any more.
Throughout the schism, Rory McIlroy has been the PGA’s primary rhetorical arsonist. After a bad run of play, he’s become a fireman instead.
Asked this week to “look into [his] crystal ball” and say where the game will be in three years, McIlroy deadpanned: “I don’t have a crystal ball.”
Asked if he’s going to stop talking about LIV, McIlroy said, “Yeah.”
It wasn’t the answers so much as the tone. All the thoughtfulness that McIlroy usually displays at a lectern was gone. Instead, he was clipped and annoyed. His obvious goal – dissuading journalists from ever again asking him searching, philosophical questions. Let’s get back to talking shot selection on the 14th fairway.
In their own separate ways, McIlroy and DeChambeau have come around to the same realization – standing out doesn’t help.
A couple of corollaries to that proposition: banging on about sportswashing does not excite the sales team at NetJets; committing to the fight for social justice doesn’t improve your swing.
It’s no longer sexy to talk about Tiger Woods as a thought leader, but you can see the couple of generations who followed him falling into his patterns now.
For all his groundbreaking, Woods approached the game within the game like a traditionalist. À la Arnold Palmer, he was bright and chirpy, but never revealing. Like Jack Nicklaus, he may have had ideas about things aside from golf, but if so he didn’t talk about them. Until it all came apart, Woods was a brandable cipher. He would become whatever you were selling.
After a brief flirtation with personality, we’re back to genial, boring types. Imagine Scottie Scheffler or Jon Rahm saying something wildly interesting or cutting or risqué. It’s difficult.
Try to imagine what Cameron Young looks like. He’s finished top 10 in three of the past four majors, but you can’t do it can you? That is the perfect golfer of right now.
Brooks Koepka used to have a lip on him. Then he took a year-long performance nosedive. Now he’s playing well again and he’s got some fascinating insights like, “Feeling healthy,” and “Feeling better,” and “Feeling good.”
LIV’s arrival made everyone richer. Though nobody is watching that tour, that doesn’t seem to bother its backers. After a lot of exciting chaos off the jump, golf has re-established its equilibrium. Instead of one big happy family, it’ll be an occasionally blended one. The only thing they want to talk about is that third shot at 17. The only reason they’re talking at all is to jack up the time-spent-on-screen metric for their hat and shirt sponsors.
Golf has a new idea. It’s to be as much as possible like the old golf, but with a zero or two added to everyone’s paycheque.
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