Two Tuesdays ago, when the world played golf chaos broke out and furious, Wyndham Clark was in no hurry to write a shocking and horrifying Twitter post. He didn’t get angry during his meeting with the PGA Tour commissioner about surprise pact with Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund. He doesn’t moralize or criticize or really do anything other than golf.
His chosen course on Tuesday is Los Angeles Country Club, will host the US Open, its first major tournament, nine days later. One member of the club is Clark’s caddy, a friend turned tutor, who knows some North Course secrets that only a handful of the game’s biggest stars have ever seen: the way a shot The ball can break here, how the speed can change there, how solid the routes can become.
The rewards came Sunday night, when Clark, 29, edged Rory McIlroy at the US Open by one stroke and entered the sacred brotherhood of major championship winners.
Until Sunday, Clark’s best record at a major tournament was a 75th-place draw at the PGA Championship. His previous two Open appearances were even worse, ending in misses.
But his mother, his “supporter” who passed away nearly a decade ago, once offered an ambitious piece of advice: “Play big.”
This season, he’s emerged as a deadly foe and hinted that he, despite his massive track record, could soon become a force on the game’s biggest stages. With his iron adjusted a few degrees and his swing monitored and fine-tuned not by a platoon of advisors but solely by Clark and his caddy, he arrived in Los Angeles after winning the championship. rival Wells Fargo and have four top 10 finishes since early February .
That Wells Fargo victory, in May at Quail Hollow in Charlotte, NC, against a list of opponents whose surnames – McIlroy and Spieth, Scott and Day – epitomize golf excellence even before Clark finished college.
Victory at Quail Hollow, a past and future PGA Championship venue, Clark encourages. He reasoned that he had beaten the major champions in a major tournament.
“I just feel like I can compete with the best players in the world,” he said last week, “and I think I’m one of them.”
Now he certainly is.
“There have been so many times I envisioned myself being here in front of you guys and winning this championship, and I feel like it’s my moment,” Clark said during the trophy ceremony near the stately clubhouse.
By the time Clark waited on Sunday afternoon in the first tee box with Rickie Fowler, the other half of the final game of the Open and a close but not quite club to the king of golf, he had followed his mother’s creed all week. He shot 64 under 64 on Thursday, better than many major champions in the 156-man field, and followed by 67 and 69.
It was good enough to share the lead in the final round, with Fowler and Clark both under 10 points. McIlroy, the four-time major winner mired in a nine-year drought, was shot at sunrise on Sunday. Scottie Scheffler, the world’s top player, is three points behind Clark and Fowler.
Clark needed just four shots to take the lead. The first hole, with its wide taxiway and views over the Beverly Hilton, has been one of his favorite spots throughout the tournament, ever since he started the Open with a big hit. nearly 33 feet long. He didn’t achieve the same feat on Sunday, but his birdie was enough to single-handedly take control of first place after McIlroy’s birdie gave him part of the lead. in a short time.
Clark’s lead ended quickly, as he hit the ball on the second hole for the second time this week. Fowler also slipped with a bogey, kicking off a boom for a player Thursday who shot 62 points, a half-time record for an Open.
Clark made a birdie on the fourth hole, the first of five par-3 tests on the court along Wilshire Avenue, to put him 11 points below. McIlroy is under 10, and Fowler is at 9. Scheffler, steady but not spectacular, hasn’t changed his score in either direction.
The sixth hole has players nervous for days, a par-4 blend of blind tees and demanding terrain. Clark won a birdie there on Thursday, before leveling on Friday and Saturday.
On Sunday afternoon, looking for a little more distance between himself and the others, Clark stood at the tee and hit his shot 266 yards high. It stops on thick grass but by the standards of some other locales on the field, is not prohibited. He tilted his head to the left, looked toward the pin about 54 feet away, looked down, and swung his sword. The ball landed on the green, rolled over the cup but made a short shot to score a birdie and two shots ahead.
It was on the eighth hole where Clark’s advantage might have been fully unraveled, as his second shot landed in the green foliage of the vicinity looking more receptive to the scythe than it was. a stick. According to league officials, Clark’s first escape attempt went all the way by 8 inches — an amount that seemed to be about 8 inches too high. He escaped by lifting a shot over the green into the right rough and eventually saved the bogey, his lead scraped into a hit.
Clark and McIlroy both played from nine to 34, one under. However, for both, the back nine is more often bruised. Their position on the leaderboard didn’t change until the 14th hole, when McIlroy’s wedge hit his ball into the side of the bunker. With free relief, he dashed for the whip near the hole but could do no better than leave the field with a donkey.
Clark’s experience was much more comfortable, his second shot putting him less than two dozen feet from the par-5’s pin, creating an eagle chance. Clark’s shot went right to the right of the trophy, but the subsequent attempt to catch the bird missed, bringing his lead to three.
That is brief. Clark missed an equal chance on the 15th hole when his hit didn’t break through enough, and then his tee shot on hole 16 went into the bunker. Despite the excellent wedge play on the third shot, a short hit soon hit Clark’s second drug error in a row.
Collapsed, McIlroy, who had struggled on the green for most of the day, barely missing a birdie putt on the 17th hole, his familiar anguish resurfaced.
“I was right there,” he said in a television interview afterward. “It’s a good return at this level, and I have to keep putting myself in these positions, and sooner or later, it’s going to happen to me.”
Finishing under nine, McIlroy scored a par on the last hole, where Clark scored a par or birdie in each of the first three innings. If Clark can stick with that history, galleries know, he’s going to be a major champion – as he concluded last month, he’s almost ready.
Par, stays under 10, ends up under 10. His eyes sparkle.
“Your mother was with you,” Fowler soon told him. “She would be so proud.”
He played big.
