Major sporting events make for compelling theater: Super Bowls, World Series, Final Fours, Kentucky Derby’s, NBA Playoffs, Wimbledon, Olympics, and World Cups all combine superb athletes, spellbinding excitement, and notable sites and settings.
Big-Time Golf Tournaments, including our National Championship, are also part of that reckoning.
At the same time, many of those memorable events, tournaments, and players, etched forever in your mind and history, involve additional dynamics, undercurrents, and forces at work specific to the sport of golf and unique to intense battles between individual competitors.
Sunday’s final round, contested on Pinehurst’s No. 2 in South Carolina at the Cradle of Golf in America, fused together many of those criteria.
The weather was perfect, and the fans engaged; shots were executed, a crowded leaderboard with established stars and upcoming newcomers performing with aplomb, and ultimately, affixing the crucial highlight of any superlative contest, a classic back-nine duel between two former champions, the outcome of the contest hinging on the last few shots, putts, and opportune occurrences.
A defining measure of any golf tournament, especially Major Golf Championships, however, for better or worse, rests with the venue and how the golf course is received and accepted by the contestants, officials, patrons, and media alike.
It is only fitting, then, that the Architect, Donald Ross, who designed the masterpiece that is Pinehurst No. 2, and the Open Champion, Bryson DeChambeau, the player who conquered Ross’s work of art, are cut from the same mold and the same piece of cloth.
Both are quirky, idiosyncratic, do-it-my-way geniuses whose talents in golf course design, construction, playing, ball striking, visualization of shots, on-course plotting, and execution around the golf course meshed in perfect harmony to create a symphony of delight that was the 124th United States Open Championship contested in mid-June 2024.
We must remember that Donald Ross was a superb player before his award-winning course creation enterprise.
He grew up in Scotland and apprenticed under Old Tom Morris on the old course at Saint Andrew’s, well-versed in the vagaries of links-land golf.
Immigrating to the east coast of America, he won The Massachusetts Open twice, claimed the Prestigious North and South Open three times, and finished in the top ten at the US Open four times, placing fifth in 1903.
Having designed and constructed the Augusta Country Club, he famously turned down Bobby Jones’s handshake offer to build the Augusta National Golf Club. He rejected Bobby’s suggestions on how to build the club and insisted on doing it his way, eventually turning the construction over to Alastair McKenzie.
Bryson DeChambeau, like Donald Ross, is also an eccentric individualist.
A child prodigy who studied advanced mathematics and algebra at a young age and graduated in physics from Southern Methodist University while excelling at golf.
While in college, he embraced the geometrically oriented, linear force method and the twenty-four components advocated in Homer Kelley’s seminal masterpiece, The Golf Machine.
It was exceedingly difficult for him to use his obsessive persistence, mindfulness, perfectionism, and compulsive methodology to understand a complex, multivariable, and multidimensional game.
His meticulous approach often resulted in slow play, which attracted the ire of his rivals and sports fans in attendance at tournament sites.
But he continued to do it his way, using a single-plane swing, same-length golf clubs, fastidious diligence, and a firm belief in the absolute correctness of his approach to simplifying and minimalizing the golf swing.
In 2014, he led the United States to a World Amateur Team title and won the NCAA Championship and US Amateur in 2015, becoming the fifth golfer to win both in the same year, joining Jack Nicklaus (1961), Phil Mickelson (1990), Tiger Woods (1996), and Ryan Moore (2004).
Along the way, he won the 2020 US Open at Winged Foot Golf Club in New York while becoming the most despised man in professional golf.
Donal Ross, having been passed over by Bobby Jones at The National, concentrated all his efforts on making No. 2 the finest golf course in the south, and Bryson DeChambeau, on the death of his father in 2022, had a public reckoning over his behavior, personally and professionally.
Both of those insights and assessments merge to form an unforgettable classic of golf theater that will endure for ages amidst the rolling sand hills of the Cradle of Golf.
Pinehurst No. 2, Donald Ross’s masterpiece, will now become an anchor site for US Opens and host the national championship every six years.
Bryson DeChambeau, with a new perspective, appreciation, and joyful exuberance, embraced the crowds of spectators who returned his outgoingness and approachability and showered the former bad boy of professional golf with heartfelt warmth and affection.
This leads us to the convergence of these two eccentric virtuosos and the epiphany they shared at the 2024 United States Open Championship, which was contested on Pine Hurst No. 2.
The architect who birthed No. 2 and the player who conquered the exacting test tasted sweet redemption and validation for their obtuseness and resolve.
DeChambeau wins his second major and $4.3 million over Rory McIlroy, who took second for the second straight year and his fourth runner-up finish in a major.
DeChambeau joins Walter Hagen, Lee Trevino, and Brooks Koepka with two Open victories, establishing him as one of the best active players in the world.
Local favorites Tony Finau and Patric Cantlay finished tied for third. Mathew Pavon, the first golfer from France to try to win an Open, was fifth. Hideki Matsuyama was sixth, and Xander Schauffele and Russel Hendlley tied for seventh.
Ogden’s Zac Blair tied for twenty-sixth to finish strong and make the cut in both the PGA and US Open.
I had a chance to participate in Bryson’s Championship interview Sunday night in Pinehurst.
You may listen to the complete interview by clicking the button below.
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