It was a huge weekend in the world of golf.
Among the biggest of the news, of course, was Antoine Rozner winning again on the European Tour and moving up to No. 63 in the Official World Golf Rankings.
Arlington Heights’ very own Doug Ghim made a huge weekend run at The Players Championship, only to fall victim to the perils of the Sawgrass Stadium Course. He will have better answers next time around.
And then there’s Justin Thomas remembering that he’s the best iron player in the world not named Tiger Woods. On Sunday, he played what may go down as the best round ever at TPC — hitting 17 greens and missing one by inches — as picked up a victory in what the players consider “the fifth major.”
But that wasn’t even the biggest headline.
After missing the cut with an unsightly 10-over par, Rory McIlroy made a startling admission. He began speed training last October because of Bryson DeChambeau and now there’s no part of his game that isn’t suffering because of it.
“Started getting sucked into that stuff. Swing got flat, long and too rotational,” McIlroy said. “I added some speed and I’m hitting the ball longer, but what that did to my swing wasn’t a good thing.
“I look back at Winged Foot (U.S. Open last September) and my swing there, and I would be pretty happy with that again.
“After Winged Foot, I had a few weeks before we went to the West Coast and I started to hit the ball harder, got a bit more speed and I felt like that was sort of the (beginning) of where these swing problems came from.
“It’s just a matter of trying to get back out of it.”
But then came the quote that will be remembered for a very long time.
“I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t anything to do with what Bryson did at the U.S. Open,” McIlroy said. “I think a lot of people saw that and were like, ‘Whoa, if this is the way they’re going to set golf courses up in the future, it helps (to be long).’
“I thought being able to get some more speed is a good thing, and to the detriment of my swing, I got there, but I just need to rein it back in.”
There it is.
In the same way that The Great Pharma Race of 1998 affected so many baseball players, DeChambeau’s romp at Winged Foot has forced many golfers to chase speed and distance.
But that was a mistake in course setup, though not one the USGA could have possibly foreseen. You’re not supposed to survive the bomb-and-gouge at a U.S. Open. The rough is supposed to punish severely at the National Championship and one can imagine all of golf’s governing bodies looking at major championships in a different way today.
Consider, however, the tournaments where DeChambeau has been a nonfactor in the last 12 months, since he began a massive weight gain during the shutdown and adding historical speeds and distance.
He was 22nd at the Concession, 34th at the Masters, 22nd at the Tour Championship, 30th in Memphis, missed the cut at the Memorial and was 50th (out of 70) at Olympia Fields (BMW Championship).
All courses where missed fairways and greens punish, or where distance is negated by sharp turns, sticky rough and penalizing green complexes.
Interesting also that Jon Rahm won both the Memorial and the BMW, the two most difficult tournaments of 2020. What they had in common was punishment for missing fairways and greens.
Rahm is plenty long (Top 20 in driving distance), but he wasn’t on the leaderboard in Chicago until he started hitting fairways on the weekend.
Olympia Fields was a very tough, but very fair test. Narrow fairways, long rough, firm greens and tough pin placements with the added benefit of Northern Illinois summer winds.
It’s not good for the game when rough doesn’t matter and what happened at the U.S. Open is not good for golf. With 23 fairways hit for DeChambeau over four days, it is the fewest by a U.S. Open winner since 1981, when the stat was first counted.
At Olympia Fields, DeChambeau was 64th out of 70 players in greens hit, 69th in driving accuracy and 58th in strokes-gained around the greens, while first in driving distance. He didn’t contend because the rough, the angles and the greens made it difficult to recover from errant tee shots.
And it was the best tournament of 2020 because of how it forced players to manage the course.
At the U.S. Open, DeChambeau was fifth in greens and scrambled very well despite all the missed fairways. His distance made the rough somewhat irrelevant. If that wasn’t a wake-up call for how the game is changing, nothing is.
It’s also why McIlroy went searching for more speed and distance. What’s crazy is McIlroy is almost certainly the best driver of the golf ball in the history of the game, and yet he went looking for more.
And now he is lost, like nearly every other player who has done the same since Woods burst on the scene 25 years ago. Jordan Spieth is just starting to find his game again after years of struggle and Rickie Fowler is wandering the desert, having lost his way.
This isn’t a swipe at DeChambeau, who is using science, advanced analytics and now brute force to claim an advantage. He is playing by the rules and it is working a good percentage of the time, though his poor shots on Sunday that cost him at TPC are a reminder that there is more to the game.
It doesn’t work for everyone and it has at least temporarily ruined McIlroy, who has fallen to No. 11 in the world, his first ranking outside the Top 10 in three years and one of only eight weeks outside the Top 10 in the last 10 years.
“The slightest change in your swing is going to feel uncomfortable for a while,” McIlroy said. “I want to get on the range right away and try to get through this. I’m pretty determined to get back to where I know I can be.”
Here’s wishing him luck with all that.