Wwhen Bryson DeChambeau exploded through his tight-fitting shirt across Muirfield Village in Dublin, Ohio, he went from Bruce Banner to the incredible Hulk in 10 card demolition hits. The Californian of 17 stones was crushing the path under his feet when he fell to five, and outside the Jack Nicklaus memorial tournament.
DeChambeau took months to accumulate 40 pounds of muscle purchased in the gym and moments when the pumped levers broke away from his brain on Friday while his helicopter swing hooked the ball at almost 200 miles per hour in a stream on the 15th. His quintuple-bogey 10 was the worst score in his career. Jack said, “Cut!” and the boy was out of the movie.
The 26-year-old had turned himself into Dr. DeShambles, the crazy golf professor, with his red head threatening to detach from his shoulders and disappear into orbit. Two weeks ago in Detroit he had a similar outbreak when he argued extensively with a TV cameraman about … being a TV cameraman. On Friday his caddy tried to push the intrusive cameras away from his boss, but the crash was there for everyone.
On the first day, DeChambeau hit units of 407 and 423 yards, a phenomenal double. There are 63 players on the PGA Tour who average 300 yards from the tee on designated holes and even Phil Mickelson, who has just turned 50 and plays in corporate striped games, has swelled the distance and sneaks into the Hit List. of 44 with 302.9. But DeChambeau is the longest in the game (with an average of 323 yards) and stretches.
There is no denying that it is mesmeric to watch a man break his tee shot into a hole throwing wedge on a 470-yard par-four but when he violently swings his pilot on the back of a 1.6-ounce ball , we are looking at atomic golf without a disarmament clause. Golf enthusiasts now ask two questions when playing DeChambeau: how long can it hit and how long can it last?
Survivors in any sport become smart or self-destruct. Few are smarter than Andy Murray, who plays at 10 and whose commitment to tennis is as intense as DeChambeau’s for golf, but not so obsessed.
Four years have passed since Scot won 65 games out of 70 in an amazing sequence that included 24 straight wins to reach 12 of 13 finals. He had just won his third major, his second at Wimbledon, as well as a second Olympic gold medal. In November he was the number 1 player in the world, but he barely had time to enjoy the kingdom before his body screamed for mercy.
That June Novak Djokovic led Murray more than 9,000 points to the top of the table after beating him in the Madrid Open final and winning his first French Open. It seemed unstoppable. While he was breastfeeding a sore elbow while returning home to Monte Carlo just before Christmas in 2016, the Serbian was destroyed. So it was Murray. The sacrifices that the 29-year-old Scotsman made that summer affected him so much that his gunshot run stopped at three o’clock, had two hip surgeries and seriously thought about retiring.
Surprisingly, he now looks at Flushing Meadows in late August to see if he could squeeze another grand slam with his rebuilt hip, or perhaps at Roland Garros in September. How did it happen?
Matt Little, who has been his strength and conditioning coach for 13 years and has witnessed all his fights and close-ups, was delighted when 33-year-old Murray overtook his younger rivals Kyle Edmund and Dan Evans in a certain speed and movement statistics compiled by Catapult Sports during the recent Battle of the British in Roehampton.
“Andy tops the charts for high intensity movements,” said Little. “Although he did not reach the maximum speed of the week, he was certainly competitive in intensity and explosive efforts. His loading stats were also high compared to many other players, showing that he was involved in many physical battles, especially in his games against Kyle and James Ward. “
It is testimony to Murray’s stubbornness and love for tennis that continues. He acknowledges that there have been times in his career where he could have been in the red to the point of self-destruction – like DeChambeau – but experience is the supreme teacher.
“The first five years of working with Andy, with Jez Green at the helm, involved building his strength and endurance base,” says Little. “This improved considerably, which showed when he beat [Richard] Gasquet [in five sets] at Wimbledon in 2008. We focused on speed and sharpness in the middle of his career, and the last few years have focused on keeping his body balanced and free, ensuring that he has the right level of strength in the right muscle groups to help facing the needs of the game which, at the level in which it operates, is brutally physical.
“Obviously his successes on the field have been incredible, but the journey he has made in recent years has been impressive in a completely different way.”
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There are many ways to skin a cat, of course. When Rory McIlroy, a good friend of Murray’s, was looking for comforting words during a difficult race, he found a book called Digital Minimalism, a Cal Newport tome dedicated to downgrading our life from gadgets.
Especially for DeChambeau and other sporty Rambos, the author quotes Henry David Thoreau, the 19th-century American thinker who probably knew nothing about golf or its existence. “I think I cannot preserve my health and my mood, unless I spend at least four hours a day – and it is commonly more than this – wandering through the woods and over the hills and fields, absolutely free from all worldly commitments . “
If that’s not golf, professor, maybe you’re in the wrong game.
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