Posted on by Shane Bacon

The Bryson Experience is working

1573227688278I’d never seen Brad Faxon so rattled.

Faxon — one of the calmest and most consistent humans you’ll ever meet — was beside himself. Bryson DeChambeau, not even a year into his professional career, was standing in front of one of the best putters to ever pick up a flat stick and explaining to him how putting works.

Can you imagine the audacity that requires? Explaining putting to BRAD FAXON! It would be like explaining the guitar to Eric Clapton, or the saxophone to John Coltrane.

The entire room had the exact same reaction I did. “Is this guy fucking serious?”

It was December of 2016, the conclusion of a whirlwind 18 months of golf that saw DeChambeau win the NCAA individual title and add his name on the Havemayer Trophy as the latest phenom to snag that elusive U.S. Amateur victory. Only Jack Nicklaus, Phil Mickelson, Tiger Woods and Ryan Moore had previously pulled off the NCAA-U.S. Am double-dip in the same season. Then, to back it up, Bryson had contended for 35 holes at the Masters with a small “a” next to his name until a triple-bogey on his final hole on Friday plummeted him down the leaderboard. His credentials were impeccable. He’d already established himself as the best amateur we’d seen in a decade. But Faxon’s reaction — and everyone else listening to a kid talk to one of the best to ever perfect this part of golf’s craft — was rightfully justified.

Who on earth did this kid think he was?

DeChambeau had arrived at Tiburon putting side-saddle. He insisted when joining my podcast, The Clubhouse with Shane Bacon, that the correct term was “face on,” not side-saddle. No matter what term he used, the fact that he was doing so in a tournament while paired with Lexi Thompson in the final day of a silly season event, was the talk of the tournament. Despite the fact that they were well out of contention.

I can still remember Faxon’s face as DeChambeau walked out of the room. A man with eight PGA Tour wins, a man considered a virtuoso at his craft, was speechless. Even if everything went well for DeChambeau, I thought, he’d be fortunate to have the kind of career Faxon had. The sheer brazenness of this whole encounter reminded of one of my favorite golf quotes, uttered decades ago by Craig Stadler after he’d listened to a fresh professional golfer bragging about his amateur accolades. 

“You see the guy next to you? And the guy next to him?” Stadler said. “Every one of them, All-Americans.  There’s an NCAA Champion, a U.S. Amateur champion, a British Open champion — hell, some of these caddies were All-Americans. So just so you know, nobody here gives a damn if you’re an All-American, or if you even went to college at all.  All anybody here wants to know … can you play stick?”

Four years later, we’ve learned something; not only can Bryson play stick, but he does it his own way, and he isn’t a single iota afraid of what people mutter about his approach as they stand around him.

DeChambeau’s been nicknamed The Mad Scientist, but even that suggests that his approach might be “mad.” It isn’t. His approach, unique as it is, works. And it’s working at a clip that we aren’t used to seeing in the modern game. 

Think for a second about what we’ve seen from Bryson since that moment in 2016 when he was paired with Jordan Spieth at Augusta National, hoping to break golf as Bobby Jones 2.0. He had a bag of irons all the same length. We know now it works. We’ve seen a putter that looks like it’s got more technology than the 2022 Tesla. Works. We’ve watched a skinny kid with respectable power (45th on the PGA Tour in driving distance in 2017) transform his entire body, now looking like a bouncer who quit drinking, knowing the jokes and memes would come as he continued to grow horizontally, teasing the world with social videos of 400-yard drives, none of us realizing this was the new reality. 

That’s, of course, worked. The whole time we were laughing, he was tinkering. And it just keeps working.

If this week is any indication, DeChambeau might be tiptoeing into the Mark McGwire territory, a controversial colossus who surges in popularity simply because of his power. McGwire — and a half dozen ballplayers turned bodybuilders like him — broke baseball in the late ‘90s with their ability to transform the game from the fundamentals (singles! hit and run! sacrifice fly!) to raw, unapproachable power. The Cardinals sold-out games not because they were winning (they weren’t), but because they had a guy on their roster that could hit any pitch as far as anyone could see, on a regular basis. It was a spectacle.

Bryson is doing the same thing. (And at the risk of being naïve, unlike McGwire, I believe he’s doing it without pumping an entire pharmacy into his body.)

Look at this tweet. Just look at that damn thing! Because of the character count restriction, it had to stop at 344 yards. If it continued you’d see drive after drive in the 305-330 range, and more often than not, those drives were ending up in the fairway (the first three rounds in Detroit, Bryson was hitting 64 percent of his fairways before a looser Sunday that saw the 26-year-old in the short stuff just six of 14 times). 

And while we marvel at the distance — and we should because it was a singular focus of this guy to get bigger, get stronger, and hit the ball a kilometer — it’s probably just as important to see something else that Bryson broke this week, from my pal Justin Ray at the 15th Club. 

 

It isn’t just the driving. He’s hitting it a mile, sure, but he’s making everything and doing it with that wild-looking putter. It’s the first time since the beginning of ShotLink that a tournament winner has led the field in both strokes gained off the tee and strokes gained putting. Suddenly the fat grip on his putter and the crazy lines on his golf ball look more innovative that weird. Somehow he hasn’t lost his touch despite all those pounds he’s packed on. 

This isn’t how golf is supposed to be approached. How many times, growing up, did you hear someone tell you that it’s just about fairways and greens? I lived for years hitting 2-iron off tees because I was so determined to find fairways, knowing — in theory — I would have an easier shot to the green. 

Bryson doesn’t really care about what history has to say about what he’s doing. If you’ve been anywhere near a cell phone this week you’ve seen what DeChambeau said before the Rocket Mortgage even started, apologizing to Donald Ross for what he planned to do to the late designer’s golf course. 

“I think there’s a lot of bunkers that are around like 290 (yards), so hopefully I’ll be able to clear those and take those out of play. So, sorry, Mr. Ross, but, you know, it is what it is.”

And with that final line, I think I finally started to get Bryson. He’s flawed, but he’s entirely his own man. It is what it is, and the apologies, from now on especially, will be minimal.

There will be complications that accompany his certainty of self. We’ve seen it already in his approach to a lot of different people inside and outside of the ropes. This is a guy that berates a cameraperson on Saturday for simply doing their job. Do you know how many times Tiger Woods has had a camera on him when he’s nanoseconds away from a complete and total meltdown? That’s part of the game, kid, and complaining that the attention of an event is on you sure isn’t it. If you start doing that, you’re going to quickly become more of a villain than you want to be. 

But what that whole 2016 experience has taught me over the years about DeChambeau is, he believes all the ridiculousness that comes out of his mouth. He believes in spritzing his golf ball on a range. He believes that bringing a planter box out to the practice green is the perfect putting tool. He believes, while sitting in front of Faxon and others that spent decades grinding on a game that never seems to care how much time you put into it, his approach to putting is the way. 

It’s working. It’s all working. Who knows how long it’ll last and what’s next for him? I suspect he will continue to say stuff that will make many of us roll our eyes, but what we have to understand and accept at this point about DeChambeau is this: He isn’t rolling his eyes. He’s all-in. The Bryson Golf Experience is working because Bryson is the only one that has to truly buy-in. 

It might be time to stop laughing at some of his quirks and start emulating them instead.