“Who’s more foolish: The fool?
Or the fool who follows him?”
— Obi-Wan Kenobi
. . .
Right about the time Bryson DeChambeau was leaving TPC Southwind’s practice range ahead of his Friday morning round at the WGC FedEx-St. Jude Invitational, local health officials revealed that Memphis’ newest COVID outbreak had reached levels not seen since mid-January.
The differences between January’s wave and the Delta variant’s advance are, of course, numerous. For Americans, vaccines are now easily available. For children, Delta appears more dangerous than COVID’s original strain. Even for the vaccinated, breakthrough cases appear to be more common.
DeChambeau too is different than he was in January. A COVID infection in July sidelined him from a scheduled appearance at the Olympics in Japan. And in Memphis — DeChambeau’s first event since the Open Championship three weeks earlier — the PGA Tour’s resident “mad scientist” was noticeably lighter than earlier in the summer, even since his slim-down from the stocky frame that he adopted in late 2019 and early 2020. Earlier in the week, DeChambeau described his bout with COVID as little more than an inconvenience, with “a few coughing spurts” that cost him what he estimated as 8-10 pounds. He expressed no plans to get the COVID vaccine, claimed (wrongly) that getting vaccinated would have taken away a dose from “people that need it,” and insinuated (again, wrongly) that the vaccine’s safety remains unproven.
Science comes down to what can be proven. And in the six years since DeChambeau’s introduction to the golf world as a purported science-driven renaissance man, all he has proven is that he’s less interested in knowledge than in the appearance thereof.
At a Masters press conference in 2019, DeChambeau — who studied physics at Southern Methodist University — misused the term “terminal velocity,” a basic term in his purported field of expertise. The next year, he shared his goal to live past the age of 130. A few months later, he blamed a slow start at the 2020 Masters on too much “brain training” (“the frontal lobe of my brain was working really, really hard, and that’s kind of what gave me some weird symptoms, like crazy overworking,” DeChambeau said). And at the first event of 2021, DeChambeau claimed that during hours-long speed sessions, he “g[o]t these extra endorphins, and that’s kind of what breaks your neurological CNS [central nervous system], I guess, is what breaks your nervous system down, which is a great thing.”
There is psuedo-science. Then, there is quackery. And then, there is DeChambeau. He’s not a scientist. He’s not a genius. He’s a narcissist who has no idea what he’s talking about and isn’t fooling anyone anymore.
That is, except for the people who want to be fooled. And if 2021 has revealed anything about humanity, it’s that we are more inclined to believe what we want to believe than what stares us in the face. And DeChambeau — who, coincidentally, bore a Trump Golf logo on his staff bag until 2021 — is a figure who some people want to follow. So they do.
During Friday’s round in Memphis, that following became literal. Grouped with Dustin Johnson and Cameron Smith, DeChambeau led a crowd off TPC Southwind’s first tee that rivaled any gallery on the course — including that of living legend Phil Mickelson, who’d teed off less than a half-hour earlier. Alongside the first green, a middle-aged fan awaited DeChambeau’s arrival in a black t-shirt with the words “TRUST THE SCIENCE” emblazoned alongside a picture of DeChambeau. At the third hole, as DeChambeau headed out to find his 342-yard drive, a fan in a lime green Puma cap decorated with Bay Hill umbrellas and lime wedges urged a friend to chat DeChambeau up.
As DeChambeau and his partners continued on, their following swelled. At the fourth hole, a crowd stacked shoulder-to-shoulder cheered when DeChambeau’s 22-foot birdie putt fell. At the sixth, hundreds of fans wrapped all the way around the back of the green and down the right side of the fairway to watch DeChambeau wedge a 120-yard shot to 12 feet (he two-putted for par).
“Who is that?” a woman asked as the 2020 U.S. Open winner walked up the fifth fairway. The man at her side gave the burly golfer a long glance. “Oh,” he said confidently, “that’s Brian DeChambeau.”
“Oh, DeChambeau!” she responded.
There is something comfortable about following this depthless man. He is the living embodiment of clickbait, requiring no context or thought. He is amusing, and for people willing to be fascinated, he is that too — but only for the moment that one’s attention stays with him. A hole later, or a day later, or a month later, he regains it for long enough to please him and the fans who follow him. Like the former president with whom DeChambeau has shared casual rounds, DeChambeau is obsessed with legitimacy to which he has no right; and enough people are willing to give him the appearance of it that both sides of the dynamic continue.
It would be tempting to dismiss DeChambeau as the unserious person he is, and to dismiss his supporters as monolithic marks — the sorts of fans who listen to Barstool podcasts and walk around PGA Tour events with aluminum bottles of Michelob Ultra stuffed in the pockets of their cargo shorts. To be sure, those fans are among those shouting “Let’s go Bryson!” from DeChambeau’s crowded gallery. So too, though, are there less cartoonish fans — men and women, old and young, children and their parents. The chorus of American voices choosing misinformation and fantasy over a more difficult reality are not just hard-line conspiracy theorists; the difficult reality is that they come from all of us. If DeChambeau’s antics are little more than performance, then he continues performing for a reason: he has an audience.
There would be room in this crowd for humility, if DeChambeau had any to offer: to explain that he’d once shared their skepticism, but that the virus had shown him that the skepticism had been misplaced — and urge his crowd of followers to avail themselves of the protections that he had not. Humility — admitting mistakes and learning from them — is the essence of science, after all.
But humility, by its very nature, requires that unwanted truths be admitted. It cannot coexist with hubris. And between hubris and humility, DeChambeau has made his choice.
. . .
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