Bryson DeChambeau Dreams Of The Perfect Game

It’s not the field he’s determined to conquer (though he wouldn’t mind giving his fellow Tour pros a good thumping). It’s a complete mastery of golf itself that he’s after, one painstakingly precise pronation at a time.

- Alan Shipnuck

There is a stirring at the driving range: Bryson DeChambeau has arrived. The postures of the Cobra engineers stiffen. A Flightscope technician fiddles with the dials on his launch monitor, suddenly looking busy. The JumboMax guy lays out a row of new prototype grips. A Bridgestone rep readies the latest batch of balls tweaked to DeChambeau’s specifications. Finally, Bryson’s caddie trudges over with an ungodly number of extra clubs stuffed into the bag. His boss sprinkles bonhomie as he works the range, joshing with a few players and then busting the chops of his assembled team. The practice tee is both a laboratory and a playground for DeChambeau, 25. It’s where he digs secrets out of the dirt while crunching terabytes of data in his beautiful mind. It is where he feels most at home.

Today, in late March, at the Match Play Championship, in Austin, Texas, seven people have assembled around DeChambeau, and this is just another day at the office; variations of this scene are repeated during practice sessions every time he shows up at a tournament. It is the most unwieldy entourage on Tour, subject to side-eye from colleagues and snarky comments on Twitter. But to Bryson, this collection of thinkers and tinkerers are an indispensable part of his success, and they all share a common vision. “He’s on an endless quest,” says Ben Schomin, the director of Tour operations for Cobra Puma, “and he knows he can’t get there alone. We’re here to help him and to challenge him and sometimes talk him off the ledge. It’s a symbiotic relationship. Are there times when he drives us crazy? Maybe. But we learn as much from Bryson as he does from us.”