There’s Something Suspect About Golf’s Great New Redemption Story (2024)

Minutes after Bryson DeChambeau won his second U.S. Open on Sunday, the golfer gave his win a dramatic flourish. The tournament site was Pinehurst, North Carolina, the same place where DeChambeau’s fellow Southern Methodist University alumnus, Payne Stewart, won the tournament in 1999. A few months later, Stewart died in a horrifying airplane accident. DeChambeau, like Stewart, used to wear a soft Ascot cap during rounds. “To Payne Stewart,” Dechambeau said during his award ceremony. “He’s the reason I went to SMU. He was the reason why I wore the cap.” But in a 2022 Q&A on his YouTube channel that’s since been made private, he told a different story. At the time, the blog Essentially Sports transcribed the remarks, and in them DeChambeau reportedly said he wore the cap because he admired Ben Hogan—the legendary golfer who also liked that headwear style in the 1940s and ’50s—and because he “wanted to be different” from everyone else wearing the same cap. In 2015, he told fans and a newspaper reporter that he’d seen the cap in a pro shop and wore it as a nod to “the gentlemen of the game.” DeChambeau probably wasn’t making up the Stewart thing out of whole cloth for the moment. He’d talked about Stewart’s influence on the hat in 2021, too. Some have said that DeChambeau was lying this week. I think he was, uh, supplementing—or rounding out his story a bit.

The player wanting to juice the sentimentality around his win made sense. DeChambeau was speaking to a crowd of thousands of adoring fans who had backed him all weekend. There is nothing he could’ve said that they wouldn’t have eaten up, so why not shoot for the stars? His caliber of play in outlasting Rory McIlroy was sublime, and the Pinehurst galleries roared for him throughout. After the win, Golf Digest dubbed DeChambeau “golf’s most exciting man and new people’s champ,” and at least for one weekend, he was. There wasn’t an autograph he didn’t sign or a selfie he didn’t pose for, oftentimes right in the middle of his rounds.

It was all quite a departure from three years ago. Back then, DeChambeau was the most loathed player on the PGA Tour—a low bar in a sport where fans root for everyone, but an indisputable title nonetheless. He was in a one-sided feud with the more popular Brooks Koepka, who egged on fans who pestered DeChambeau on the course. In a playoff loss on the PGA Tour in August 2021, fans rooted hard against DeChambeau, favoring the milquetoast Patrick Cantlay. ESPN reported that DeChambeau briefly started walking toward (and cussing out) one fan after he lost. He soon left for LIV Golf, the Saudi Arabian government’s influence project and golf tour. He had rarely been heard from since. But this year he has contended in all three majors and won a U.S. Open for the ages.

The central tension of DeChambeau’s brilliant win is between the real and the contrived. The golf was unquestionably real. DeChambeau delivered the performance of a lifetime, and when McIlroy wilted on the 18^th green—missing his second short putt in less than an hour to bogey the hole—DeChambeau responded in the pressure cooker with a scrambling par that won him the trophy. Was DeChambeau’s emergence as the people’s champion real?

Maybe, maybe not. He remains a managed brand, with an agent who threatens media access over coverage he doesn’t like and with his own propensity to ham up a story for the cameras. A day before the final round, Bryson looked back on his past few years. “I tried to show everybody who I was,” he said. “I didn’t do it the right way and could have done a lot of things better.” These days, his golf is better. His branding is better. He may also be a wholesale different person now worthy of being “the people’s champion.” But those bequeathing that title can’t possibly be sure of how real this transformation is. In the meantime, it would be best to leave analyses of DeChambeau to what we do know.

What we know is that this is a comeback story. In DeChambeau’s final few years on the PGA Tour, the peanut gallery did not like him. He was in some sense just a bullying victim; Koepka was the cool guy, DeChambeau was his target, and thousands of Barstool Sports–loving dudes piled on. The PGA Tour, at least without protest from DeChambeau, threatened to eject fans who harangued him, which only made him a more appealing target. Other constituencies disliked him for other reasons. He had a reputation for slow play. He tried to game the rulebook in ticky-tack fashion. He blamed his equipment for his shortcomings, prompting an unprecedented rebuke from his own manufacturer. He’s a loud-and-proud supporter and pal of Donald Trump, which is an asset or a neutral to most golf fans but anathema to the minority who lean left.

Now, golf fans seem smitten. DeChambeau has presented a softer edge since sometime in 2021. Maybe it started when he played a key role on a winning American Ryder Cup team that beat the European side that year. He’s since become one of the most accessible players, not just on the rope line at events but on the internet. He’s built a 700,000-subscriber-strong YouTube following and played something called “all sports golf” with popular YouTube sports-comedy group Dude Perfect at the home of the Masters. He used to be seen as insufferably self-serious, but has now dialed that way back, even as he’s maintained a scientific approach to golf. (When a reporter asked him last week about his habit of floating golf balls in Epsom salt to test their composition, DeChambeau thanked him for “the salty balls question.”) Most of all, DeChambeau has established a new kind of give-and-take with fans at events. He now asks for their noise rather than running from it, and they give it to him when he sinks big putts.

DeChambeau’s father died in 2022, and the player described it as the first traumatic experience in his life, part of a year in which a lot of “weird stuff” happened. He spoke of his struggles being too hard on himself and too demanding of others. He admitted, to himself and the world, that he’d made an unhealthy decision when he beefed up during the pandemic to look more like a WWE wrestler than a golfer. DeChambeau had never seemed like the introspective type. But here he was having a bit of a public reckoning over his own behavior. It all appears to have made him much easier to like.

DeChambeau has had natural reasons to change, both personal and professional. But he is not above the savvy branding exercises that any celebrity might get up to, nor is he above the sloppy mistakes they make when they use public relations as a stand-in for substance. DeChambeau’s outside-the-box approach to golf has always been at odds with his obnoxious incuriosity about the world beyond. Just a year ago, Sept. 11 victims’ families were dismayed about the PGA Tour’s newly announced alliance with DeChambeau’s Saudi-backed LIV Golf. Asked by a CNN host how he felt about the source of his paychecks, DeChambeau’s rambling reply included him saying of his new benefactors, “Nobody is perfect, but we’re all trying to improve in life.” Not offering an honest defense of his actions has gotten easier now that the PGA Tour itself has tried to get into bed with LIV.

Perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising that a guy who runs interference for a foreign government can still be the subject of “USA! USA!” chants at the U.S. Open. But part of DeChambeau’s appeal, unmistakable if you interact with his big online fanbase, is that both he and LIV have become coded as conservative alternatives to the PGA Tour. DeChambeau now plays professional events at Trump courses, owned by his old buddy and sponsor. LIV has selected Fox News as the site for some of its splashiest media appearances, including the announcement that it had signed star Jon Rahm away from the PGA Tour. Most golf fans have come around to DeChambeau because he’s offered a redemption story. Plenty more have wanted to find a redemption story in a player who comes from their political tribe.

DeChambeau is not the first player to benefit from the insatiable American appetite for a comeback—or, more importantly, from the desire for a comeback to be more than it is. Tiger Woods’ ascent from personal disarray to the 2019 Masters wasn’t just cool because the best player ever had returned to the mountaintop after 11 years away. It was cool because Woods’ family was there to celebrate, and a nation who still didn’t really know him could gaze not just upon his victory but on what a great family man the onetime serial adulterer had become. (Maybe Tiger really is a bastion of family values now. We don’t know.) Similarly, DeChambeau’s shift from pariah to the toast of the sport is a delightful chaser after the shot of his phenomenal play at Pinehurst. DeChambeau is great again, and his relationship with the public is great for the first time. It’s a little easier for everyone not to interrogate every inch of why.