Bryson DeChambeau posted a superb opening-round 67 on Thursday at The Open Championship.
DeChambeau’s round was a great response to Sir Nick Faldo, after the Englishman launched a scathing criticism of the LIV Golf star earlier in the week.
The 32-year-old American turned up and played some brilliant golf on day one of The Open, but the job is obviously far from done.
Bryson DeChambeau is sitting just two shots adrift of the leader after his opening-round 67 at The Open, and nobody expected him to perform so well, not least Sir Nick Faldo.
Earlier this week, Faldo criticized DeChambeau’s lack of thought when it comes to tackling links layouts.
“Unbelievable. That’s a whole part of the story how they’re superstars at LIV and then come over and can’t do it. That’s a whole other story, and then they go back to being superstars. I’d say it to his face, he has zero clue or strategy,” he said.
“He said it last year, ‘I’m going to go out and attack the links’. I was speechless. I’ve never attacked the links, you thread it. You feed it down the fairway. It’s really important. You look at humps and bumps. ‘If I send it over and feed it in, it nudges back into play’. You don’t think, ‘if I just bomb it down there, can’t see where I’m going, it’s 20 yards wide’. Yeah, good luck.“
Brandel Chamblee disagrees with Nick Faldo’s Bryson DeChambeau criticism
When speaking on The Golf Channel on Thursday, Brandel Chamblee highlighted how DeChambeau’s strategy could come back to bite him.
“Strokes gained data will tell you that he drove the ball beautifully, but I would say he is playing with fire as it relates to his driving off the tee,“ Chamblee suggested.
Paul McGinley then weighed in with his opinion on the matter.
“Yeah, you know, I would just go back to the comments of Nick Faldo about him not having strategy. He does have a strategy,“ the Irishman said.
“Nick comes from a different era. Nick was a massive strategist, and how he played was very coy, and it was threading himself through these bunkers.
“He’s a three-time Open champion. This guy knows how to play links golf.
“But you jump forward to this modern game, and at the very, very top of this modern game style of bombing the ball off the tee, you find Bryson DeChambeau.
“So it’s not apples with apples in how he sees the game compared to how Nick saw it in the day.
“So the strategy that he has is very much around wrestling this golf course to its knees by using the biggest armoury that he has, which is the driver, and that is a strategy in itself.
“And we saw that, the good effect, as well today on 10, when he almost drove the green. He’s the only guy who actually drove it kind of pin high and had a knock in birdie there.
“So his strategy is a lot more cavalier, but because the rough is down this week, and there’s not huge amounts of gorse out there, he can get away with that.
“We saw him win at Pinehurst in very firm conditions. So let’s not dismiss Bryson.
“Let’s put him as a very, very different player than, you know, the brilliance of Nick Faldo in his day.“
Chamblee then reacted to McGinley’s comments on DeChambeau.
“I think that is absolutely spot on point,“ Chamblee said.
“Just to underscore that point, before Bryson decided to take a sledgehammer to golf courses, before he decided to go into the gym and bulk up. He had played in 15 major championships, and his best finish was 15th.
“Now, since then, he’s played at 24 major championships. After COVID, he came out bulked up and bigger, and his club at speed was right around 130 miles an hour, not 117, like it was beforehand.
“Since then, he’s had ten top 10s in majors, seven top 5s, and two wins, and I couldn’t agree more.
“Power is a strategy. He is willing to accept a wider dispersion for shorter shots. That was unheard of in Nick Faldo’s day, and Nick wasn’t long enough, if he did hit it in the rough, to play great out of the rough, unlike Bryson.“
McGinley then shared a word of caution about DeChambeau.
“However, a word of caution, he could not have it any easier than he had at this morning. There was hardly a whimper of wind out there,“ he explained.
“So when he was coming from the rough, he was coming on to pretty soft greens relative to what they became a little bit more in the afternoon when the wind got up.
“So, the jury is still out. Can he navigate four days through this? Can he consistently get lucky by eight, nine times hitting it into the rough and still having shots onto the greens? Is he going to crash and burn at some stage with this strategy that he has? That’s the question.“
Brandel Chamblee and Paul McGinley are getting it all wrong
Chamblee and McGinley are both missing the point here.
Faldo never said that Bryson didn’t have a plan. He simply said that his plan will not work at Royal Birkdale, or any other links golf course for that matter.
The two Golf Channel analysts have simply taken Faldo’s words out of context. Obviously the Englishman knows that DeChambeau’s strategy is to bomb driver everywhere.
However, what the Englishman really meant was that the American’s strategy is not one that will succeed at The Open.
DeChambeau’s round of 67 at Birkdale on Thursday was a really impressive one. However, he hasn’t achieved anything yet.
The pressure will be on the LIV Golf star once again on Friday, as he looks to post another solid round and get into contention at Royal Birkdale heading into the weekend.
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