DeChambeau’s new war is with his clubs

Bryson DeChambeau is feuding with his golf clubs-- which unlike Brooks Koepka, with whom DeChambeau also has disagreements--don’t talk back.

But the guy with the company that makes those clubs certainly does.

They held the first round of the 149th British Open on Thursday, and as the 148 other times, it is being played on a links course, this one Royal St. George’s at Sandwich on the Channel.

It’s been a wet summer in England, although the weather for the opening round was sunny and clear, and the wild grass, fescue, grew so long and thick officials even decided to widen the fairways.

But they weren’t wide enough for DeChambeau, who seems to have developed into a one-man controversy in a sport famously historic for sportsmanship and fair play.

DeChambeau shot a one-over par 71 which, although that doesn’t seem too bad, left him seven shots behind the 64 of Louis Oosthuizen, tied for 74th place and blaming the driver, the one with grips on the shaft and not the driver unable to come to grips with his deficiencies.

“I’m living on the razor’s edge,” said DeChambeau, perhaps not aware that was the title of a 1944 novel by W. Somerset Maugham about a pilot traumatized by experiences in World War I.

DeChambeau had four birdies and five bogies, traumatizing enough for any pro in a major championship, especially one who has become famous and infamous for bulking up to resemble “The Incredible Hulk,” and pounding balls enormous distances.

Sometimes those balls go in the proper direction, as they did at Winged Foot when DeChambeau won the U.S. Open in 2020. Sometimes they don’t, as was the problem Day One at Royal St. George’s. Apparently, the course is not long enough, or do the woods and irons he employs have him baffled?

“It’s quite finicky for me,” said DeChambeau, who at age 27 sounds quite finicky himself, “because it’s a golf course that’s pretty short, and so when I hit a driver, and it doesn’t go in the fairway, it’s tough for me to get out onto the green and control it.’

So, hit in the fairway however you are able.

As Jack Nicklaus once told me, “If you can’t get on the fairway with a driver, use a 3-wood. If you can’t get on with a 3-wood use an iron. Of course, you can’t play when you keep going in the rough.”

DeChambeau is in full agreement.

“If I can hit it down the middle of the fairway, that’s great,” he said when asked if he still could contend in a tournament where he had been one of the betting favorites.

“But with the driver right now, the driver sucks. It’s not a good face for me (the face of the club although it appears the golfer might be attempting to save face; remember, a carpenter doesn’t blame his tools).

“And we’re still trying to make it good on miss-hits.”

The "we" to which he refers is Cobra, the firm which manufactures and fine-tunes the clubs to his specifications. As you might imagine the people at Cobra were not pleased with the report from someone getting paid big dollars to hit the club.

Digressing, it wasn’t all that long ago Phil Mickelson, who plays Callaway, pulled out a club from the golf bag of Tiger Woods, who had Nike clubs and said something like, “I can’t believe Tiger plays so well with these lousy clubs.”

DeChambeau hardly needs more enemies. He split with his caddy a couple weeks ago, and there’s that sniping between him and Koepka.

Ben Schomin is the tour operations manager for Cobra and one of the club designers. “He’s never been happy,” Schomin told Golfweek about DeChambeau. “Everybody’s bending over backward trying to get everything in the pipeline. It’s just really painful when he says something that stupid.”

Perfection comes at a price.