All of those players either have won majors before or look like they’re bound to sometime in their golf-addled lives, yet for a good while Saturday, the guys leading them looked like two dudes in a dinghy with a menacing tide just behind. Those would be Russell Henley and Mackenzie Hughes, the former 32, the latter 30, with Henley winning thrice on tour and Hughes once, and if you watched all four of those, you’re either a close relative of either or a Ph.D. in golf geekdom. Henley has played 26 previous majors and finished in the top 10 nada, and Hughes has played in eight, missed six cuts and finished in the top 47 nada. Henley prepared for here by missing two cuts out of the past four, finishing 71st and 72nd the other times, while Hughes prepped much more consistently with five straight missed cuts.
So who knew? They sat up there at 5 under par, and then at the last minute came Oosthuizen, that 2010 British Open dominator and six-time major runner-up. “I think I was too dumb, really, when I won the Open to get nervous and to know what was going on,” he said after closing Saturday with the kind of 51-foot eagle putt that could turn most anyone into good Saturday night company. Now he will battle his own diminished dumbness plus the Torrey Pines South Course among three guys sitting up there ahead of the rising tide lifting a bunch of boats that don’t really need much lifting: McIlroy and DeChambeau at 3 under par, the 26-year-old Rahm and the 24-year-old Scheffler and the 22-year-old Wolff at 2 under par, then Johnson and Morikawa and Schauffele at 1 under par.
As said Satchel Paige in his secrets for longevity: Don’t look back. Something might be gaining on you.
Henley, with a steady, beautiful, four-birdie, four-bogey, 10-par 71 to add to his opening 67 and his second-round 70, ventures into ground he has never seen in his first 32 years of life in Georgia (childhood) and South Carolina (residence), leading the U.S. Open heading into Sunday. “Yeah, I mean, things always happen kind of when you least expect them a little bit with golf,” he said, “like right when you kind of stop pressing and start searching for your game.” Hughes, with an eagle putt from near Canada on No. 13 and four pars and a birdie from there for a 68 worth savoring, also travels the uncharted dating all the way back to childhood in Ontario (the one in Canada). “You get goose bumps thinking about it,” he said, “so I know I’m going to be nervous tomorrow.”
It would be one thing if these two contention greenhorns plus Oosthuizen had a bunch of meek sorts doing the loud lurking. They do not. On what Johnson calls “a real golf course,” the kind that yields “a lot of really good players up at the top of the leader board,” there’s that fearsome cavalry of lurkers.
Of the lot, the most notable charger would be McIlroy, who won his fourth major title in Louisville in August 2014 at age 25 and got even rational people yammering about double-digit totals up ahead. He was that compelling. There have been 25 majors played since then, and time has reached the horrifying point when Saturday marked 10 years since McIlroy’s eight-shot pulverization of the field at Congressional, and McIlroy has sprinkled six top-fives, 12 top-10s and six missed cuts among those 25.
He tried to think of the last time he had a chance like this 75 percent of the way through.
The 2018 British Open at Carnoustie came to mind. So did the 2019 U.S. Open at Pebble Beach. In neither case does the memory bank register a heavy dose of McIlroy. Yet it’s a testament to his prowess that he pegged the art of accepting boredom as crucial to his gaudy Saturday.
“Yeah, I think just accepting hitting my approach shots to the middle of the green,” he said, as if there weren’t millions of hackers out there who dream of just that. “I got pulled into being overly aggressive a couple of times out there [Friday].” That led to bogeys on holes such as Nos. 5 and 14, which he called “huge momentum-killers, so accepting the fact, okay, I’m going to hit a wedge [to] 20 feet away, I still have a decent chance of holing [the birdie putt], but if I don’t, make par, move on. I think that’s typical U.S. Open golf. You have to accept that middles of greens and pars are good, and I got that mind-set today.”
He parred eight of the front nine, then stemmed the yawns some with birdies on Nos. 10, 12, 13 and 18, what with 12 coming when he visited the rough near a bunker and a rake beside the green, then chipped to the right ridge and saw that thing do precisely as it was told and roll in.
Even DeChambeau, who has brought to the PGA Tour a certain muscular razzmatazz, spoke of the importance of boredom, concluding his 68 and saying, “Well, I was certainly glad to come away free of any mistakes today,” and, “You’ve really got to be patient out here at these majors.” That includes even when you’re winning by six and running off with people’s imaginations, as he did last U.S. Open at revered Winged Foot.
He and McIlroy and the other lurkers had avoided the meanness always among the provinces of a U.S. Open, the kind of meanness that reserves the right to take a resurgent Bubba Watson, dole him a 77 and deposit him way down the board from 3 under par to 3 over par. Or the kind of savagery that can take an inspiring story such as the 48-year-old Englishman Richard Bland, the co-leader after Friday, and ladle spite upon the inspiration, a 77 sending him from 5 under par to 1 over par.
“Some days," Bland said, “it’s just going to beat you up all day, and today was my day,” a day even more punishing given its raft of lurkers.
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