SOUTHAMPTON, N.Y. — Maybe all the energy in the New York City metropolitan area centered on the Knicks’ championship parade a couple hours to the west. Maybe everybody in the U.S. Open field at Shinnecock Hills was dreading the potential cyclone bearing down on them. Whatever the reason, the most emotional gallery reaction of the first half of Thursday’s opening round came as a result of … an overly curious fan.
Our scene: the fourth hole. Rory McIlroy — you’ve heard of him — was stuck in some of Shinnecock’s notable rough. He blasted his way through it, sending his ball dead right where it trickled up near a fan who clearly hadn’t been paying attention. She saw a golf ball at her feet and thought, that’s unusual, I must have it. The chorus of NOOOOOs that erupted around her was glorious and hilarious:
It’s a reminder: don’t pick up golf balls at golf tournaments. They’re not souvenirs. (Also, McIlroy was fine. He parred that hole and eagled the next.)
Curious Fan was one of the few real highlights of the morning wave, which ended up being a whole lot of dread for a whole lot of decent to pretty good golf.
Blame the weather. After three straight days of gale-force wind predictions, the Long Island Weather Gods hit Shinnecock Hills and the 156 players in the field with … fog. Smothering, touchable, thick-enough-for-a-two-hour-delay fog. When the fog did lift, the wind rolled in, but the USGA had set up the course anticipating a whole lot worse.
“Most of the greens have all been fine,” said Scottie Scheffler, who finished at +2 on the day. “I think there’s a couple greens where there’s so much pitch that you get the wind going down the slope, it can roll off pretty easily. I would say it was probably maybe a little softer than I thought. Just I had imagined it would be firm and slow, I guess.”
“Obviously it got quite windy, but you couldn’t have asked for a better setup,” Padraig Harrington (+7) said after his round. “There obviously was a couple of tough holes, but all the tees were up. The pins were as easy as can be. Greens were soft. So it was a tough test but very, very fair.”
Fair? Soft? This is the U.S. freaking Open! Players aren’t supposed to be happy with the setup! What in the name of Corey Pavin is going on here?
“Look, the greens are pretty slow and quite receptive,” Rory McIlroy (-1) said. “I think they need to be at this point. It’s a challenging golf course already, and you put 30-mile-an-hour winds on top of it, it tests the best players in the world pretty well. … Especially with starting with 156 the first two days, you just want to get everyone around without too much issue. They’ve set the course up for that, at least today.”
The first wave-plus of Thursday at the U.S. Open was the golf version of two boxers feeling each other out, testing for weak spots and plotting future attacks. On one hand, you had the players, finding advantages where they could in the gusting win. On the other, the course, testing those players with the usual array of challenging angles and deceptive slopes, seeing who had the fortitude to hang in, and who faltered in the moment.
If you were scoring this as a boxing match, then, you’d give this round to the players in a narrow victory. On a week where some predicted the final score would be over par, on a course that’s only allowed three under-par rounds in its entire U.S. Open history, six players in the opening wave finished under par, led by Sam Stevens at -2. Many more in the afternoon round dipped into the red numbers … which brings us to our second highlight.
Bryson DeChambeau has had a rough go of it lately, missing the cut in both majors this year and living in a world of instability as his entire golf tour got kneecapped. But for a few holes, at least, he earned the satisfaction that comes from hitting a ball really, really far, as he did on No. 12:
That tee shot went 427 yards, nearly a quarter of a mile. Yes, it got a friendly Tin Cup-esque kick from the asphalt of the road that crosses the course, but still … a 400-plus-yard drive! Come on! Dechambeau would go on to birdie the hole, which at the time gave him a share of the lead.
Because of the combination of the fog delay and the wind-forced backups, it’s unlikely the first round will finish Thursday. That means a packed schedule at Shinnecock Hills on Friday, and a course that’s likely to bite back hard.
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