The room expected a more aggressive energy field from Bryson DeChambeau in his first interview after arriving on Irish soil.
His rivalry with Rory McIlroy has refused to die and recently he said he’d love nothing more than to beat him “especially in front of his own crowd”.
McIlroy mused this week on creativity versus power as the best way to get the ball around the links course at Royal Portrush, with those looking into McIlroy’s mind reading it as DeChambeau’s muscular game perhaps relying too heavily on science rather than the more nuanced “artistry” required to win.
While McIlroy won The Open in 2014 at Royal Liverpool, DeChambeau’s best effort to win the oldest championship in the world was a T8 in 2022 at St Andrews.
READ MORE
Either way, for those hoping for a taste of golf as a blood sport two days before the first players tee off, DeChambeau was a let-down with his willing Californian smile and an open, shoot-the-breeze kind of charm. “Great question,” he even quipped to one inquiry.
“Just have fun this week and be strategic. I’m trying to ride the wind,” he said. “A heavy wind is a great way to describe it. It’s thick.”
There were no snide remarks or concealed digs, no reprisals or escalation of the rivalry. The drama of Portrush was what grabbed him. The LIV Tour player, one of 19 in The Open field, is not used to playing links golf and has been troubled by trying to develop a game that suits a punishing course where it is expected to blow.
[ No flies on us as we look forward to new views of the OpenOpens in new window ]
Yesterday it was modest at 21km/h, although Met Office warned of potential disruption around the local area between 11am and 5pm. Play was halted twice due to a threat of lightning on Monday.
“You’re feeling the wind, how much it’s coming into you and if it’s off the left or right a lot more than normal,” said DeChambeau. “Okay, how do I feel? How do I turn this into the wind? If you’re going to try to ride the wind one time, how do I control and make sure it doesn’t go into a crazy place? Because once the ball goes into that wind, it’s sayonara. That thing can go forever offline. It will turn east sometimes.
“You know, it’s one of those situations where you’re in the environment and you go, all right, this feels like a 15-mile-an-hour wind, and all of a sudden it plays like a 30-mile-an-hour wind, and you’re like, what the heck?”
DeChambeau will open his championship with England’s Justin Rose and Scotland’s Bob MacIntyre.
It is a fact of life on the LIV tour that the players do not have the opportunity to play on links courses and was an issue Joh Rahm brought up last year, bemoaning the fact that without playing on the coastal courses, their chances of winning an Open significantly decline.
The 31-year-old also arrived at Portrush with a personality makeover since his last visit in 2019, when he missed the cut. His venture into “fun” YouTube events and behind-the-scenes footage have softened the image to his 1.5 million subscribers of the beefcake who simply beats the bejaysus out of a golf ball.
“I think people see a different side of me on YouTube, where I can have fun, I can enjoy, I try to relate to others as much as I possibly can has been fun to show,” he said.
“For me, I always go back to what footprint can I leave now? I’m not going to be here forever. I’m not going to win every tournament.
“Yeah, am I going to get frustrated playing bad golf? Yeah. Am I going to want to still sign autographs? Yeah, because I care about the game.”
But the golfer, who plays for a LIV team called Crushers, is far from retiring the hot-blooded image. Has no intention of going soft.
“I’ll walk through the fire rather than run away from it,” he said. “I’m still the fiery, want to go, competitive go-getter that I’ve always been.”
