After a taut, tremendous afternoon of championship golf wrapped up in the North Carolina Sandhills, one man was giddy, and another man was gutted.
Bryson DeChambeau had a silver trophy and a gold medal and felt as a tall as a towering pine. When his work was done—and his par save on the 72nd hole from a bunker was hard golf labor indeed, because no one all week had saved par from there—he was a two-time U.S. Open champion, a victor at Winged Foot in 2020 and Sunday at Pinehurst No. 2, two classy places to be on top. There was much to celebrate.
Rory McIlroy signed his scorecard, saw that he had lost and drove away, mute about the mess he made over the last hour of the championship, a spill that had provided DeChambeau a huge opening of hope and opportunity.
DeChambeau’s one-stroke victory over McIlroy will reside in the record books forever, the 55-yard sand shot to four feet and subsequent putt to seal the deal exclamation points on the skill and grit this out-of-the-box golfer possesses.
McIlroy’s loss will live elsewhere, in a neighborhood where a golfer doesn’t want to lay his head down, and long linger in conversations about big ones that got away.
This was a lunker largemouth slipping off the hook as it was being lifted into a boat, then swimming away into the depths. McIlroy had this one, until he didn’t.
There was irony in how this collapse went down. McIlroy’s life—the professional and the personal—has been the definition of complicated in recent months. He was caught up in tour politics. He filed for, then called off, a divorce. But amid the pressure of the closing stretch at Pinehurst, it was the most ostensibly simple part of the game that sabotaged his aspirations.
McIlroy missed a putt of 30 inches of the 16th hole and a putt of 45 inches on the 18th hole. It was no win, no playoff and no comment after those blunders.
Before you say there was more to his losing than the pair of tiddlers he couldn’t sink, of course there was.
McIlroy was victimized by the dastardly if not whacky fifth green, which his ball visited on what appeared to be a fine second shot to the par 5 before rolling and rolling into a poor lie in the native area. What looked like it might be a birdie morphed into a bogey.
On the par-3 15th hole, where McIlroy arrived leading by two strokes, he hit his tee shot where he least couldn’t afford it to go—over the domed green into wiregrass. He did well, in fact, to secure a two-putt bogey from that predicament.
At the finishing hole, if McIlroy hadn’t missed his drive left which kept him from reaching the green in regulation, he wouldn’t have been faced with having to try to manufacture a crucial, last-ditch par.
The putter turning on him, fangs sharpened, as it did late in the round didn’t seem like it would be part of his plot in this major championship.
At St. Andrews in the 2022 Open Championship, McIlroy had been North Sea-cold on the greens on Sunday, when he allowed Cameron Smith to capitalize on his putting mediocrity. In last year’s U.S. Open at Los Angeles Country Club, McIlroy again had little putting luck to go with excellent ball striking.
Sunday at Pinehurst, though, was much different, much of the round. McIlroy started out with a 21-foot birdie on the first hole. There was a 15-footer at No. 9, a 27-footer on the No. 10, a 22-footer on No. 12. An important five-footer on the 13th hole, and a handy save on No. 14.
Then, from less than a yardstick away for par on the 16th, McIlroy couldn’t convert. He had been a perfect 496 of 496 inside three feet in 2024 on the PGA Tour and hadn’t missed a putt of that length since the third round of the BMW Championship last August. McIlroy did make one from just inside four feet on the par-3 17th to stay tied with DeChambeau. But from a tricky, left-to-right, 3 feet, 9 inches on the final hole, he missed again.
McIlroy’s length major-championship drought, now a decade long, continues. His short failures join others in golf history: Sam Snead in the 1947 U.S. Open; Doug Sanders in the 1970 Open; Ed Sneed in the 1979 Masters; Scott Hoch in the 1989 Masters. And yes, Jack Nicklaus, that almost universally clutch Jack Nicklaus, on the 71st hole at Turnberry in the 1977 Open, a miss that draws cover from the many that he made in his career.
McIlroy has had other tough major losses, but this one, occurring because of three bogeys in the final four holes—those two short misses among the debris—feels different. Shaking it off to add to his 26 PGA Tour victories is one thing; using the disappointment to fuel his fifth major triumph quite another. Seve Ballesteros, Byron Nelson, Arnold Palmer and Tom Watson, to name a cadre of Hall of Famers, were younger than the 35-year-old McIlroy when they stopped winning the events that matter most. The hands on golf’s clock, like McIlroy’s lousy finish to a major that he could taste and should have won, don’t always make sense.
I was rooting for Rory, among many others (though not the idiots yelling USA, USA, as if this were the Ryder Cup) and feel for him. A brutal finish to a great tournament. deChambeau deserved it, though, despite his wayward 380 yard drives. He was so lucky in the native rough but made so many great up and downs. He seems like a decent enough guy and the crowd loved him, but I'm so anti-LIV it was hard for me to celebrate. Rory will win another, deChambeau a bunch more. Thanks for the nice piece.
Bill-
Good catch on Jack missing a 3-footer on the 71st hole at Turnberry in 1977. That miss is rarely, if ever, talked about.
You can also throw in Hubert Green missing a 4-footer on the 72nd green in the 1978 Masters paving the way for Gary Player to claim his third green jacket.