In 1983, Larry Nelson beat Tom Watson in a playoff at Oakmont Country Club to win the U.S. Open. Nelson, then a 35-year-old Vietnam veteran who had only been playing golf about a dozen years at the time, wasn’t supposed to beat the best players in the world even though he had already won a major a couple of years earlier at the PGA Championship at the Atlanta Athletic Club.
Dan Jenkins in Sports Illustrated called the ‘83 Open the “Layup Open” because of how Oakmont’s brutal rough forced players to hit 3-woods and 4-woods off the tee at many of the par-4s. Watson, who was the defending champion after winning the 1982 U.S. Open, was with Seve Ballesteros, the two players who were supposed to win golf’s hardest championship. But the U.S. Open has never cared about the name on your golf bag. At the ‘55 U.S. Open, Ben Hogan learned this lesson the hard way when he lost an 18-hole playoff to Jack Fleck, a 33-year-old journeyman from Iowa.
The 2025 U.S. Open has after 36 holes a smattering of players at the top of the leaderboard who didn’t begin the week as favorites, but like Nelson, many of them are proven winners. It’s no surprise to see Sam Burns, J.J. Spaun, Adam Scott, Viktor Hovland, Ben Griffin, Russell Henley and Brooks Koepka around the top of the leaderboard. With two wins, a second and an eighth at the PGA Championship in his last six starts, Griffin is arguably the hottest player in the game right now. Burns is coming off a playoff defeat last week in the RBC Canadian Open.
Koepka, who has five major victories including back-to-back U.S. Opens in 2017 and 2018, has built his whole career around the majors. At 44 years old, Adam Scott could be past his best competitive years, but here he is still making appearances on leaderboards with that beautiful golf swing. But now comes the moment of reckoning for all of these players and the ones not on the first page of the leaderboard, but have played well enough to survive the 7-over-par cut.
However, it’s not all up to the players and their will to win. Oakmont, softened by rain Saturday morning after playing hard and fast the first couple of days, could yield lower scores and bring a slew of big names back into the championship like Jon Rahm and Scottie Scheffler. Any one of these players could have the kind of weekend that Nelson had in 1983 when he began his third round seven strokes behind the leader. On the weekend, Nelson shot 10 under par over his last 36 holes to beat Watson by a shot, still the lowest 36-hole total to finish in the U.S. Open.
I don’t expect a player to shoot 10 under over the weekend at Oakmont, but I do think the championship will yield a spotlight on Sunday evening for a player like Nelson, who despite his PGA Championship and 9–0 record up to that point in Ryder Cup play, loomed in the shadows of bigger names on that leaderboard like Watson and Ballesteros. There are several players in this field with that Nelson factor—often as good as the great ones but unburdened by great and outsized expectations. They are the everyman pros who become multi-millionaires but don’t become international celebrities. No one remembers that they blew off a reporter or didn’t sign a kid’s hat. They are the kind of guys like Nelson, who after suffering the indignity of never being chosen to be a U.S. Ryder Cup captain despite his 9–3–1 Ryder Cup record in three appearances and three major victories, once called majors very important to a career if you’re expected to win them and not as much if you’re not supposed to win them. They win majors but mostly what many remember are the failures of the players that they beat.
Who will benefit from a kind of Nelson factor this weekend at Oakmont and win the U.S. Open? My three favorites are Hovland, Spaun and Griffin.
At the top of my list is Hovland, the 27-year-old Norwegian who begins his third round two shots behind the leader, Sam Burns, after rounds of 71 and 68. Hovland, who won earlier this year at the Valspar Championship, is among the elite on the PGA Tour. He has two top 3s in the PGA Championship and top 10s in the Masters and the British Open and seven career wins and a U.S. Amateur win in 2018. But he has a way of taming expectations about how good he can be.
“You have an ability that you can almost sometimes take for granted,” he said in March at the Valspar Championship. “You just wake up every day and you stand over the ball, and you just expect the ball to start in that direction and go in that direction and end up somewhere close to the hole. When it starts to not do that, it’s pretty frustrating. You start thinking things you’ve never thought before. And this game becomes infinitely more challenging—and it’s already really challenging.”
This week he sounds more assured about his golf swing. “For some reason I’ve just been in a really nice mental state this week,” he said on Friday. “It’s like, both my rounds have been very up and down. I feel like a couple times if it would have happened at another tournament, for example, I could have potentially lost my mind there a little bit.”
Spaun doesn’t have Hovland’s pedigree, but he’s a gifted player who has proven that he belongs on the PGA Tour. In March at the Players, he lost in a playoff to Rory McIlroy. In January, he finished in a tie for third in the Sony Open and has just one tour victory, the 2022 Valero Texas Open. He’s a tough journeyman with Type 1 diabetes. On Thursday, he shot a bogey-free 4-under-par 66 to take the first-round lead. On Friday during a 2-over par 72, he showed some maturity and patience that could help him this weekend.
“I was just trying to let the course come to me and stick to hitting fairways and greens and just taking what the course gives you because that's all U.S. Opens are,” he said Friday. “You kind of get what you get.”
Griffin knows a lot about getting the most out of his game. Here’s a guy who almost went into his family’s real estate business after struggling to make it on the PGA Tour. Now he’s the 15th-ranked player in the world with a chance to win the U.S. Open. Like all good underdogs, the 29-year-old North Carolina native knows his place in the lipstick contest but it matters little to how he approaches his game.
“I wish my swing looked like Rory McIlroy’s or Adam Scott’s, but I swing my swing and I own it and I think every golfer out here on Tour, at least top players, all own their swings,” he said Friday. “Whether or not my swing might look different to some people or not, it feels good to me, and there’s definitely some improvements I want to make as I continue on my progression in professional golf. But I’d say I’m in a really good place. Obviously if I can win on the PGA Tour and contend in majors I’m doing something right.”
At the start of the week, these three players may not have been on anybody’s list of top contenders at Oakmont, but here they are ready to insert themselves in history in a place where the best player is supposed to rise to the top. Maybe it matters less that they will be the greatest of all time or even Hall of Famers, but that one of them was the best on this golf course for four days in June.
This article was originally published on www.si.com as This U.S. Open Weekend Might Be Ruled by Players Ready to Seize History.
