Bryson DeChambeau Could Have Been Bobby Jones. Instead he's Spaulding Smails

If you are someone who grew up playing golf, or if you picked up the game prior to the COVID boom, there is a good chance you know the famous story of Bobby Jones calling a penalty on himself in the 1925 U.S. Open.

For a century, the story was such an important part of golf’s honor code, it might as well have been the Gettysburg Address of American golf. Jones was already a two-time major champion when he teed it up at Worcester Country Club — he’d won the U.S. Open in 1923 and U.S. Amateur in 1924 — but he wasn’t a global star and sporting icon just yet. He was about to supercharge the game in America, to become arguably the most famous American athlete outside of Babe Ruth, but he was still on his ascent in 1925.

As the story goes, Jones was addressing his golf ball in the first round in deep grass around the 11th green when he called over his playing partner, Walter Hagen, and a rules official. He informed them that when he grounded his club, his ball had moved just a fraction, and he was penalizing himself one stroke. No one else had seen the ball move, and Hagen supposedly tried to talk him out of it, but Jones was adamant. He added a stroke, finished his round, and signed his scorecard. At the end of the championship, Jones was tied with Scottish golfer Willie Macfarlane. They’d have to face off in a playoff.

“If Bob had kept his mouth shut, he would have had a 76 instead of a 77 in the first round and he would today be the champion of America for the second time,” read the coverage in the Brooklyn Eagle. “But that is not Jones’ way. If he’d kept silent, his Southern conscience would have tortured him day and night. The specter of that oscillating sphere would have haunted his dreams. Bobby spoke and because he voluntarily penalized himself a stroke, he must win the title all over again today. Imagine a baseball player doing what Bobby Jones did with everything at stake. You can’t. Neither can we. The sanctity of golf, its glorious traditions, are in safe hands.”

Jones would go on to lose to Macfarlane by a stroke at the end of two 18-hole playoffs. Years later, whenever people tried to praise Jones for his integrity, he supposedly replied: “You might as well praise a man for not robbing a bank.”

There is a good chance one of golf’s most famous quotes is apocryphal. The anecdote did not surface until 1960, when Charles Price, the founding editor of Golf Magazine who eventually became Jones' biographer and friend, used it in a column. But the authenticity of the quote hardly mattered, it was just the vessel that carried the lesson to generation after generation of golfers. In baseball, in football, in basketball and soccer, it was understood that deception and cunning behavior on the edge of the rules to gain a slight advantage was acceptable, even encouraged. But in golf, that kind of behavior was unthinkable. You learned to err on the side of Bobby Jones because if someone questioned your integrity, the stink might linger for decades. Gary Player is 90 years old and people still whisper about what happened at the 1974 Open Championship at Royal Lytham & St. Annes, and about the time Tom Watson confronted him during the 1983 Skins Game.

Bryson DeChambeau certainly knows the famous story about Jones. There was a time, in fact, when Jones was one of his heroes. It was Jones, after all, who first played with single-length irons. The first time DeChambeau visited Augusta National, he stood in awe for several minutes in front of the glass case that holds Jones’ irons, calling the moment inspiring and gratifying. DeChambeau grew up understanding that your integrity on the golf course is not something you were careless with.

But what happened at Royal Birkdale after DeChambeau was hit with a two-shot penalty by the R&A for improving the area of his intended swing during his Friday round lies at the heart of a conflict that golf is going to need to reckon with before very long.

Not all growth is good growth.

On Friday night of the Open, when DeChambeau turned the sport into an episode of his own personal reality show, when he made the oldest major championship feel like part of the modern YouTube circus, I was briefly amused. I was, after all, benefiting from it as a journalist. DeChambeau asking to return to the scene of the alleged crime, then smashing golf balls in the dark and playfully offering the press almonds and beef sticks, all of it was a surreal bit of weird theater. In the moment, I enjoyed live-tweeting it to the world.

But it was clear, in the aftermath, how those kinds of antics become the pheromones that attract the dumbest possible acolytes, the newly minted golf fan who fell in love with the sport during COVID and is now happy to sully it for others with their ignorance or lack of interest in its history. You could see it mushroom in real time, the army of people eager to share loud opinions about rules they barely understand, a cadre of sycophants insisting that DeChambeau was being persecuted for his politics, or his association with LIV Golf. Bryson cannot seem to resist the allure of their attention, and a lot of his antics do feel like a performance specifically for them.

That’s fine when it’s confined to his YouTube channel. He loves the idea that millions of kids might get interested in golf by watching his Break 50 series, which is entertaining and interesting. But where does the internet personality end and the golfer begin? Every year, there are a handful of kids at the Drive, Chip and Putt who arrive in Augusta saying they were inspired by Rory McIlroy’s swing. A dozen years from now, will we see a generation of kids inspired by DeChambeau to throw tantrums over a two-stroke penalty? Will they march into scoring and demand their scorecard a day after their round so they can auction it on TikTok?

I don’t like gatekeeping when it comes to sports. There is a reason that Caddyshack is one of the most revered sports movies of all time — who doesn’t love to see the snobs and the wealthy country club elite knocked off their pedestal? But DeChambeau’s recent habit of turning himself into a perpetual victim is detracting from what a dynamic golfer he is. Even Danny Noonan needed Maggie to snap him out of feeling sorry for himself so he could focus on what matters. Reportedly asking the R&A if the President of the United States can join a rules dispute at the Open means you have become Spaulding Smails, not Ty Webb.

{{inline-article}}

I think it goes too far to call DeChambeau a cheater. I’m inclined to believe what people like Max Homa, Sam Burns, and Scottie Scheffler said about him at the Open.

“Bryson, I've known him for a long time, and he's a lot of things, but he's definitely not a cheater,” Scheffler said. “I've never seen him cheat once, whether we were having a putting contest on the putting green or chipping contest, or anytime we played amateur golf, I never saw anything suspicious.”

Scheffler also didn’t entirely let DeChambeau off the hook. He said it looked like he was somewhat careless around the ball. In general, Scheffler said, players have to know where the line is and be certain they don’t cross it.

“I feel like at times, sometimes you see players maybe push it a little bit further than they should,” he said. “I think we need to kind of get back to the traditions of the game and maybe we do need to police things a little bit more stricter in the game.”

DeChambeau was initially furious but as the weekend went on, he seemed to revel in the engagement, demonstratively tip-toeing around his ball several times, pretending to use a weed wacker in the long grass. What it lacked in shame, it gained in attention and engagement. It was a commanding performance, one that made him the main character for as long as possible.

He looked like a man who couldn’t believe his luck. Who could have believed there were so many golf fans out there who would love you, even if you’ve been accused of robbing a bank?