66 GOLF.COM / S e p t ember 2019
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.”
Every member of the team has a role to play, and they are
interconnected. On the eve of the Match Play, DeChambeau
grinded deep into the twilight, testing new grips, new shafts
and a dozen different wedge configurations. The only break
in the action came when he pulled out his phone and cued up
favorite clips from Anchorman, just to lighten the mood. Once,
twice, three times his caddie Tim Tucker made the lonely walk
to retrieve more bags of practice balls. By the time darkness
fell, DeChambeau had decided to change grips, going from
a beefy model of 121 grams down to 53. (All the monkeyingGOLF/Technology 2019
DREAMS
OF THE
PERFECT
GAME
BY ALAN SHIPNUCK Photographs by Ben Van HookIt’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.Tour