DETROIT _ Bryson DeChambeau hadn't even played a full 18 holes yet at the venerable Detroit Golf Club this week, but already he felt like he owed an apology to Donald Ross, the famed architect who designed the course more than a century ago.
"I think there's a lot of bunkers that are around like 290 (yards from the tee), so hopefully I'll be able to clear those and take those out of play," said DeChambeau, one of the top players entered in this week's Rocket Mortgage Classic in Detroit. "So, sorry, Mr. Ross, but, you know, it is what it is."
And what DeChambeau has become in relatively short order is one of the biggest draws on the PGA Tour _ with an emphasis on "biggest." It starts with DeChambeau's muscle-mass appeal: a hulking 6-foot-1, 240-pound figure routinely uncorking drives of 350 yards or more. But it certainly doesn't end there, as the 26-year-old California native has only enhanced his reputation as a mad scientist since joining the tour in 2016, a year after winning NCAA and U.S. Amateur titles.
A physics major at Southern Methodist University, DeChambeau was known to soak golf balls in Epsom salts to find their center of gravity, a la Ben Hogan. He regularly used a protractor during competitions to calculate "true" pin locations until the tour banned the practice a couple years ago. And whether it's his unconventional swing or unique club designs _ the shafts for his irons are all the same length to aid his single-plane swing _ or the bulked-up physique that packed on 20 more pounds during the tour's three-month COVID shutdown, it's impossible not to notice DeChambeau in his tam o' shanter cap on the course.
You can look at him and say, 'Oh, that's crazy, I would never do that,' " said Viktor Hovland, one of PGA Tour's newest young stars. "But the fact is that it works."
Quite well, lately. DeChambeau ranks sixth on the tour's official money list this year, with more than $3 million in earnings, thanks to a string of six consecutive top-10 finishes dating back to February. And while he is one of only two golfers in the top 10 on the money list _ Xander Schauffele is the other _ who has yet to record a win in 2020, "I'm not even worried about that," DeChambeau says. "That's one of those things that when everything lines up and comes into play, that'll take care of itself."
