Bryson DeChambeau: “The driver sucks”

Q. +1 for the opening round, but you only hit four fairways from 14. Despite that obviously not looking great, you must take a lot of heart that you’re still +1 and still in with a shout despite kind of wayward drives. If you straightened those up, you certainly must think you must be contending by …

Q. +1 for the opening round, but you only hit four fairways from 14. Despite that obviously not looking great, you must take a lot of heart that you’re still +1 and still in with a shout despite kind of wayward drives. If you straightened those up, you certainly must think you must be contending by the end of the week.

BRYSON DECHAMBEAU: Yeah, and that’s what I said yesterday or a couple days ago. If I can hit it down the middle of the fairway, that’s great, but with the driver right now, the driver sucks.

It’s not a good face for me and we’re still trying to figure out how to make it good on the mis-hits. I’m living on the razor’s edge like I’ve told people for a long time. When I did get it outside of the fairway, like in the first cut and whatnot, I catch jumpers out of there and I couldn’t control my wedges.

It’s quite finicky for me because it’s a golf course that’s pretty short, and so when I hit driver and it doesn’t go in the fairway, it’s first cut or whatever, or it’s in the hay, it’s tough for me to get it out on to the green and control that.

but when it’s in the middle of the fairway like I had it on 18, I was able to hit a nice shot to 11 feet and almost made birdie. It’s kind of living on the razor’s edge, and if I can figure out how to make that driver how to go straight and figure out the jumpers out of the rough, it would be awesome. I just can’t figure it out. It’s forever.

Q. When you’re dealing with that kind of thing with the driver, are you going to be having somebody working on that now? Did you not realise that during the practice round? What’s the dynamic of that, and how difficult is that to change in mid-stream during a tournament?

BRYSON DECHAMBEAU: I’ve realised this for years now. This has happened since 2016-17 when players stopped drawing it. There’s not very many golfers that draw it anymore. It’s not because of spin rate. Everybody thinks it’s — we’re at 2000, 1800 spin or whatever. It’s not.

It’s literally the physics and the way that they build heads now. It’s not the right design, unfortunately, and we’ve been trying to fix it and Cobra has been working their butt off to fix it, we just haven’t had any results yet.

Interview transcript by asapsports.com