So content was Bryson DeChambeau with his career-best fourth-place finish at the PGA Championship that he ... grinded for nine hours on the range last weekend, trying to take his game to even greater heights.
Forever in search of a new “nugget,” DeChambeau said he found something in those marathon sessions that should help him this week at The Northern Trust.
“I think I’ve figured something out in the golf swing that will hopefully help me hit it a little straighter,” he said Tuesday. “That would be nice.”
His length, of course, has not been the issue since he added roughly 40 pounds of muscle over the past year. He currently leads the PGA Tour in average driving distance, at 323.9 yards. But there were a few examples at TPC Harding Park in which DeChambeau felt as though his driver swing abandoned him. On the 14th hole, for instance, in a strong left-to-right wind, he lost a few tee shots into the right rough when he failed to turn the ball over.
So how, exactly, did one of the game’s bulkiest bashers work on his accuracy during the off-week? It’s a trial-and-error process in which DeChambeau said he “must have tried 50 different things” as he worked his way through the entire bag.
“It’s just a process of elimination going on,” he said, “and then finding a little nugget every once in a while going, Oh my gosh, it works with everything! And that’s what I felt this past week.”
Still, DeChambeau said he was pleased with how he performed at the first major of the year, after all of the work he’s put into overhauling his game and transforming his body over the past nine months.
“Very, very validating,” he said, “and something that I’ll take for the future and hope that will suit me well for these majors coming up.”
DeChambeau enters the FedExCup playoffs as the No. 4 seed. He won at TPC Boston when the Tour last held an event there, in 2018.