The U.S. Open champ won’t stop obsessing over something bigger than another tour victory: the perfect, repeatable swing.
Written content by Michael Rosenberg via Sports Illustrated
Golf’s brainiest player would like you to know he is no genius. Bryson DeChambeau took a four-hour IQ test not long ago, for a company he works with called Neuropeak, and he scored 121—above average, certainly, but not Mensa material. Sure, the man they call the Scientist talks excitedly about air density and wind vectors, spreads the gospel of single-length irons, and once said he would decide whether to pull the pin on putts based on the coefficient restitution of the flagstick. But that’s passion, not genius. Despite how he acts sometimes, DeChambeau does not always think he is the smartest person in the room.
His IQ is a nugget of information, and DeChambeau shares it because he is obsessed with information. Pursuing it, understanding it and using it is the core of his success. Tiger Woods is famously trying to surpass Jack Nicklaus’s 18 major championships, Rory McIlroy is focused on winning the Masters to complete a career Grand Slam and Brooks Koepka is aiming to win at least 10 majors. The 27-year-old DeChambeau has every reason to set high goals, too. He is just the third player, after Nicklaus and Woods, to win the U.S. Amateur, the NCAA championship and the U.S. Open. He has been the PGA Tour’s best player since the June restart, and he crushed the Open field in September at Winged Foot by six strokes.
DeChambeau, who tied for 29th at Augusta National last year, will be the favorite when the 2020 Masters tees off on Nov. 12. But the world’s No. 5 player says he is not gunning for a certain total of titles. To DeChambeau, golf is not a game to be played but a puzzle to be solved.
Golf’s most famous numbers-cruncher does not write down his score after every hole. He waits until he has finished the front or back nine, then enters all his scores—and all of his playing partners’, too. This is odd for many reasons, but one is that by DeChambeau’s own admission (confirmed by testing), his short-term memory is not great. “As a kid, when I would study for tests, it always took me double the amount of time for somebody else to study,” he says. “I couldn’t remember stuff. I would read it, read it, read it and it just would not happen.” He struggles to recall numbers, but he intensely soaks in experiences. He can wait to write down 27 golf scores at once—nine for him, 18 for his two playing partners—because he remembers every shot they hit. Read more from Sports Illustrated.
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