
Shinnecock Hills is an old soul among golf courses, in many ways the American equivalent of St. Andrews. It's not just its age, being the second-oldest course in the US (1891; the oldest is Exeter Country Club in New Hampshire, 1889), but the fact that it is still able to host a modern major without any of the shortcomings other older courses have -- it can handle the modern infrastructure of the PGA Tour while still holding its own against the power hitters -- makes it and St. Andrews kindred spirits.
So why has the weather changed our view of DJ? The weather has refused to follow the weather bureau's dictates -- not just because it gave us unexpected rain on Wednesday and Thursday but, as Jim Furyk put it on Friday:
When we were getting up this morning there was a zero percent chance of rain. I think when we got here I heard someone say it jumped to 15 percent. And then it rained for two hours.Instead of dry and sunny, Friday started off rainy and gray -- and DJ played in the worst part of the draw both days, in Thursday's wind and Friday's cold rain. And yet -- AND YET -- DJ calmly shot 69-67 in the worst of it while many big names missed the cut playing the best side of the draw.
This isn't what was expected of DJ. I picked him to win in my "5 to Watch" post, but even I wouldn't have predicted this. DJ's domination to this point, in the week following a dominating win, wouldn't be expected of any player. (Bear in mind that no one has ever won a US Open after winning the week before... not even Tiger.)
Speaking of my "5 to Watch," I appear to have done much better than normal this week, despite not knowing how the USGA would set up Shinnecock.
- Dustin Johnson has, of course, a four-stroke lead at -4.
- Justin Rose is T4 at -1.
- Brooks Koepka is also T4 at -1.
- Phil is back in the pack, T35 at +6. But after hitting 26 of 28 fairways, it's hard to believe he could be that far back!
He [Tiger] definitely didn't have it, but, really, he didn't play that poorly.A lot of the top players didn't fare any better than Tiger -- Jordan Spieth and Rory McIlroy come to mind -- so it's hard to disagree with Thomas.
However, that's all water under the bridge. Now we head into the weekend, and the weather -- if the predictions are finally correct -- should be very good and we should see some lower scores. But the tall lanky figure of Dustin Johnson is casting a huge shadow across this major, and the field is going to need some help if they want to catch him.
- Will DJ stumble at some point this weekend? Probably.
- Will any of the players be able to mount a charge? Again, probably. There are ten players between even and +2, and DJ's four-stroke lead could vanish with one bad shot. Doubles, triples and worse have been quite common at Shinnecock this week.
https://twitter.com/the_fried_egg/status/1007824351935258624
ReplyDelete