That Bryson DeChambeau won the U.S. Open is not a definitive shocker like Frances Ouimet (an amateur), Jack Fleck (an unknown) or Orville Moody (previously winless on tour) doing the same.
It's just that Hollywood is unlikely to make another "Follow the Sun" in his honor. In that one, Glenn Ford played Ben Hogan and asked wife Valerie, played by Anne Baxter, why everyone considered him a grouch. Hogan, it is said, practiced social distancing before and after his near-fatal car wreck.
People who kept watching a U.S. Open after Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson checked out can't be too surprised at the outcome. Anyone who wins the same tournaments (NCAA and U.S. Amateur) as Woods and Jack Nicklaus didn't wander onto the course. Previous Open champions at Winged Foot include Bobby Jones, Billy Casper and Fuzzy Zoeller, so Bryson is in good company.
It's just that he won with a game with which most are unfamiliar, rephrasing Jones' famous quote about Nicklaus after the latter tore apart Augusta National in the Masters.
From the first hole, DeChambeau played like a quarter horse breaking from the gate, someone who had to get there and find out quickly. He went for broke, hitting driver off many tees, a club that many players keep on a high shelf in a major tournament. Not always straight -- far from it, missing 33 of 56 fairways -- but not in a goal-line defense as often seen in this particular event.
DeChambeau, in short, won with power over precision and, it must be noted, with a thinking man's game. He told golf's older heads what he would do and then went out and did it. He blinded them with science. Joe Namath did something similar before the only Super Bowl he played. We know how that turned out.
All Bryson did was win by six strokes at 6 under par, the only player in red numbers for 72 holes. Consider that Hale Irwin was 7 over when he won his first of three Opens at Winged Foot in 1974. Irwin played football at Colorado. DeChambeau, from SMU, played with their minds.
They said it couldn't be done, attacking a course thought as secure as the Maginot Line before World War II. Charles Lindbergh, too, was thought daft before he flew the Atlantic -- and you can only imagine what guff Christopher Columbus received.
"I would have said no way," said Zach Johnson, a Masters and British Open winner, of Bryson charging the light brigade. "No chance."
This from Rory McElroy, who needs a Masters title to complete a career grand slam of the majors: "I sort of said, 'OK, wait until he gets to a proper golf course. He'll have to rein it in back in.' (Winged Foot) is as proper as they come, and look what's happened. He's got full belief in what he's doing, and it's pretty impressive. It's kind of hard to really wrap my head around it."
This is not the triumph of the uncluttered mind. Said the Open champion: "So many times I relied on science, and it worked every single time."
If it can be done at a U.S. Open, imagine what he might do at Augusta National, where one can play driver on certain holes with absolute abandon. Then again, the same was said about John Daly after he jumped out of a phone book to win the PGA Championship. Daly (fighting cancer, and to whom prayers are offered) was no flash in the pan, later winning a British Open, but did not exactly take a cerebral approach to the game.
DeChambeau resolved after last season that he would bulk up and cut loose. He won on the course that, in the 2006 Open, Mickelson played driver off the tee at the 18th with a one-stroke lead and airmailed a package accepted gladly by Geoff Ogilvy. "I am such an idiot," Phil said after finishing second yet again, to which ESPN's Gene Wojciechowski penned this postmortem: "There should be a chalk outline around Mickelson's Open scorecard and yellow police tape around the 18th at Winged Foot."
Frenchman Jean Van de Velde once played the 18th hole of a British Open like actors Jean Gabin or Bill Murray. Instead of receiving the Claret Jug (that went to Paul Lowrie), Van de Velde became a punchline.
Arnold Palmer played with the same flair but got by with it because he was, well, Arnold Palmer. Shirttail out and smoking cigarettes on the course, Palmer shot a final-round 65 for his only U.S. Open title, rebuffing Hogan and Nicklaus. He gave away an Open (to Billy Casper) in a playoff when he focused more on breaking Hogan's tournament record for 72 holes than playing caretaker on the back nine with a big lead.
Unlike any great player you can think of, DeChambeau is always checking his yardage, writing something in a notebook, trying to solve an algebra problem and learn that, indeed, against all odds, X equals Y.
"It's a lot of validation through science, just making sure that the numbers are what they are and the result is accurate," Bryson said. "I know I've done everything I can in my brain to make my perception reality."
No egghead is he. Taking a blowtorch to the book of conventional wisdom, he went where no would-be U.S. Open champion goes and made the golf world take notice. In some way, it was better than watching Tiger and Phil duel down the stretch.