No longer the Incredible Bulk, Bryson DeChambeau content and contending at the 2023 PGA
PITTSFORD, N.Y. – The happiest man at Oak Hill Country Club on Thursday was Bryson DeChambeau.
He missed this.
All of this.
The lead at a major championship. The fans shouting his name. The media members swarming his interviews. The irons dancing by the flag and the driver being pummeled into a clear blue sky — straight and pure and holy-s–t! far.
“It looked like Bryson to me,” Keegan Bradley said. “He hit the ball great, putted great, drove it really nice. He was smashing drives again, and he played pretty much flawless golf. Happy for him.”
It’s clear now, three humbling years later, that DeChambeau’s smashmouth victory at Winged Foot didn’t spark the revolution he’d originally intended.
But it did lead to his own internal revolt.
Fueled by a long-drive fascination, DeChambeau guzzled a half-dozen protein shakes a day (and 5,000 calories in all) in hopes of becoming a big, bulky, brawny bully on the course. And for a while, sure, he succeeded: He won three times in 2020-21, including his first major at the 2020 U.S. Open, and top-tenned in roughly half (18 of 39) of his starts while becoming the PGA Tour’s star attraction.
But he was also pushing his body dangerously close to the breaking point. He didn’t have the energy to support his marathon range sessions. He couldn’t recover between rounds. His joints were inflamed, his hand ached, his stomach roiled.
For a few years he experienced minor bouts of vertigo. He underwent surgery to remove a cyst in one of his sinuses. He broke a bone in his left hand after wearing down during intense speed-training sessions.
Full-field scores from the PGA Championship
Was it a mistake, going down that path?
“I’ll say this until the day I die: Everything I do is not a regret or a mistake,” he said Thursday. “It’s just a learning process.”
But he learned – harshly – that those choices were curtailing his career. With his future prospects uncertain, he bolted for LIV Golf last summer and began the drastic process of breaking down what he’d spent years building up.
Blood tests revealed that he was allergic to corn, wheat, gluten and dairy – pretty much everything he liked to eat – and so his chef whipped up dishes that slashed his caloric intake to about 2,900 a day. He lost 18 pounds in 24 days. Aided by LIV’s longer offseason, his bloated body slimmed down. He stopped crashing midway through the day. And yet he found that he had retained all of the speed and strength and power from his training the previous few years, his fast-twitch muscles still firing.
“I built that,” he said. “Engrained that in.”
The DeChambeau that stands before us here at Oak Hill is about 35 pounds lighter than the one who mauled Winged Foot at the 2020 U.S. Open. That week he averaged 327 yards off the tee, bombing it all over the lot but possessing the brute strength to muscle wedge shots out of ankle-high rough. But even in the cooler conditions Thursday, a leaner DeChambeau posted a 347-yard average on the two measured holes and consistently cruised in the mid-180s in ball speed.
“He’s got the speed, and he can still move it, but he’s chipping it,” said caddie Greg Bodine. “He’s combining his feels to when his swing felt the best and the most repeatable, and he can still dial it back and swing his driver 10 mph faster than he did five or six years ago. It’s fun to see those two converge.”
Indeed, DeChambeau isn’t trying to return to the glory days of 2020. His goal is actually to recapture the feels of 2018, when he won three times, missed the fewest cuts of his career and peaked at No. 4 in the world ranking. That year he wasn’t some freak show off the tee; he ranked 25th in distance, at 305 yards a pop, and relied on pinpoint iron play. It’s a reminder that, even amid all of his bluster and bombast, DeChambeau has always been an exceptional golfer. It didn’t matter whether he was skinny or hefty, whether he was the game’s biggest bomber or merely average.
“I just want to be stable now,” he said. “I’m tired of changing, trying different things. Could I hit it farther? Could I try and get a little stronger? Sure. But I’m not going to go full force.
“It was a fun experiment, but I definitely want to play some good golf now.”
DeChambeau’s opening 66 here at the PGA Championship certainly qualifies. He made six birdies and paced the field in ball-striking on a challenging day in which all but one of the top 10 players in the world shot over par.
“You can’t wipe that smile off your face,” one of the TV interviewers told him.
“It’s been a while,” DeChambeau grinned.
Standing away from the media crush was his caddie of just two weeks, Bodine, who previously spent six years alongside another extravagantly talented big hitter, Tony Finau. Bodine had been out of the game for two years, running a new indoor golf club in Seattle, before he got a call from DeChambeau’s team that he was looking for a new looper. Over the years they’d been friendly but hardly close; they battled a few Sundays and spent time together on the U.S. cup teams. But DeChambeau thought their mathematical approaches would mesh well, and they hooked up for the first time last week at the LIV Tulsa event. DeChambeau posted the best finish (seventh) of his LIV career there and carried that momentum into the year’s second major championship.
All of a sudden, it felt like old times – for both of them.
DeChambeau pounded driver off the tee and fired missiles into the greens, much to the delight of the crowd, while Bodine watched his in-depth preparation pay off with a smart game plan that accentuated DeChambeau’s rediscovered gifts.
“We’ve talked a lot about his journey the last few years, and that’s what’s intrigued me, too,” Bodine said. “He was ‘struggling’ in his mind, and he was still winning events.
“It’s going to be a lot of fun going forward.”