Wyndham Clark beats golf's degree of difficulty

The U.S. Open champ has earned his way, a process that will get harder for incoming PGA Tour golfers.

Wyndham Clark won a typically grumpy U.S. Open at Los Angeles Country Club on Sunday. He beat Rory McIlroy, Rickie Fowler and Scottie Scheffler to do so. He also showed how to beat the system, or at least the one that’s on the horizon, and threatens to make it harder for the next Wyndham Clarks to do this.

Clark is 29 and has worked diligently, and through turbulence, to become an over-month sensation.

He was ranked 80th in the world when he showed up in Charlotte, in May, and entered the Sunday round with a two-stroke lead over Xander Schauffele, another member of the upper crust. He played alongside Schauffele and won the tournament by four shots.

He did not make last year’s U.S. Open and was ranked 259th at the time. The win in Charlotte boosted Clark to 32nd when he got to LACC, and he became the lowest-ranked player to win the Open since Graeme McDowell in 2010. He leaves the premises ranked 13th. 

It is agonizingly difficult to win major championships, as Fowler can testify after stretching his schneid to 0-for-48. One cannot assume this was the hatching of golf’s Next Great Player, but Clark has twice shown that he can handle bloody Sundays and, in fact, enjoys them.

“When I came here I played the course and said, this is my kind of place,” Clark said. “I told some people this week that if things go well I can be right there on Sunday.”

Clark is now in position for all sorts of spoils, including the Ryder Cup team in the fall. More important, he can now drink from the elitist wine cellar that the PGA Tour has set up for its top players, the same self-fulfilling theory that lowers the velvet rope for “power conference” teams in the NCAA basketball tournament.

The Tour already has “elevated” events, with restricted entries, in order to gather the best players. In 2024 there will be “designated” events, in which 70 to 78-player fields will luxuriate without a 36-hole cut, and the minimum purse will be $20 million.

The fields will be restricted to the Top 50 players on the FedEx Cup money list, plus the next 10 who aren’t eligible. In the “non-designated” events that are scheduled between the elite events, players will be ranked by their performance and the top five performers will be allowed into the sanctum.

A player like Clark, then, still has a theoretical chance at upward mobility, but not a very good one. With guaranteed money in the designated tournaments, it will be difficult for the chosen ones to play their way out, and leave room for a member of the underclass to get in.

Formerly, the top 125 money winners for the year got privileges on the tour the next year. That system was sometimes criticized for subsidizing mediocrity. In truth, there are more than a few Wyndham Clarks out there with the talent to win who just need a crack in the door. No matter. The Top 125 is now a relic.

The Top 50 makes up the eight designated fields, and the Top 70 are fully ticketed into the rest of the “full field” events. Otherwise, you wait for an opening.

So even though the crowd, so to speak, gave its full-lubricated support to McIlroy and Fowler, a lot of folks in the locker room, and a lot of pros who didn’t make the Open field, and maybe even some fans who want a fresh face, were happy for Clark.

Aside from a couple of bogeys down the stretch that narrowed what once was a 3-stroke lead over McIlroy, Clark was unshakeable. For the tournament he ranked 2nd in strokes gained off the tee, seventh in tee to green, and third around the green, consistently turning thorny situations into pars. He didn’t knock out many flagsticks on Sunday, but he did coax a lot of cross-country putts into gimme range, including a 60-footer on the 72nd hole.

On the 8th hole Clark basically whiffed on a chip out of the greenside junk, but got up and down in two for a bogey that could have been much worse. McIlroy was failing to sink a birdie putt on the 9th at the time. Then Clark turned in all-world par saves on the 9th and the 11th. When he got to the 612-yard 14th, Clark nailed a 280-yard fairway wood and became the second player on Sunday to reach that green in two. The subsequent birdie contrasted with McIlroy’s sloppy bogey on 14, in which he dumped a wedge shot into a bunker.

McIlroy was first in the Open field in off-the-tee and tee-to-green. He was 29th in putting overall and 57th on Sunday, when he got a birdie on the unchallenging first hole and none thereafter. He still hasn’t won a major since he picked up his fourth at the 2014 PGA. Asked if he was getting tired of the post-tournament inquisitions, McIlroy smiled and said, “I’ll go through a hundred of these if it means I get my hands on a trophy.” Which is why Everybody Loves Rory, unless your paycheck comes from a sheikdom.

This was the first Open to visit Los Angeles since 1948. Reaction was mixed. The course was lovely on TV and grew more teeth as the event went on, but it was the lowest-scoring Open ever. Some players, notably Open champs Brooks Koepka and Matthew Fitzpatrick, didn’t like the blind shots and the hungry Bermuda rough. The USGA rolled over for NBC and moved Saturday tee times deep into Eastern prime time, which meant Clark and Fowler played the 18th hole in near-darkness, and Clark voiced his unhappiness with it. They had teed off at 3:40 p.m.

And there were much bigger gaps in the grandstands than are normally seen at majors. There were only 23,000 fans allowed on the property, and there were an estimated 9,000 tickets available for general admission. Ticket prices varied, but generally it required hocking your first-born son, which isn’t a great option on Father’s Day weekend. It was a difficult, confusing walk, and on many holes the fans were kept ridiculously far away from the action. Fitzpatrick and others decried the quiet. 

What’s interesting is that Riviera, a much more fan-friendly course and the place where Ben Hogan won 75 years ago, can’t get an Open supposedly because it doesn’t have enough room for money-changing tents, but LACC somehow did have that room even though it denied fan accessibility. But Riviera is viable enough to be the Olympic golf venue in 2028.

Clark brought a compelling story along with his wedges and putter. He was a Colorado state champion at his Highlands Ranch high school, and got a ride to Oklahoma State. At about that time, his mother Lise was entering her punishing final round against breast cancer and its effects. When she died, Clark’s emotions snapped, and Cowboys’ coach Mike McGraw said he needed to abandon golf and get his life together. He basically deactivated him in hopes of redshirting him. Clark eventually transferred to Oregon when Matt Wise turned pro, and became the Pac-12 Player of the Year.

“I was mad but Coach McGraw was right,” Clark said Saturday. “He’s been like my second father. Max Homa said every golfer thinks he’s one shot away from winning the Masters or one shot away from quitting golf. It’s a great quote because it’s true.”

Clark found the tour but couldn’t find an identity. “I had no idea where the ball was going,” he said. In Detroit he walked off the course from the fourth hole, which wasn’t close to the clubhouse, and his caddie John Ellis, who was an assistant coach at Oregon, confronted him.

The turnaround came, in stages, when Clark took a break from official instruction and found a way to “own” his swing, with help from Ellis. Psychologist Julie Elion propped him up.

But the voice of his mom, gone since 2013, remained the clearest. His dad Robert was a pro tennis player and became Wyndham’s golf partner during rounds at Cherry Hills (home of the 1960 U.S. Open that Arnold Palmer won). The Clarks were married at Riviera, in fact.

Lise was a former Miss New Mexico USA and was the national sales director for Mary Kay cosmetics. A former cheerleader, her nickname for Wyndham was “Winner,” and occasionally she would reach back and execute a cheerleading move in which she would land and form a V, for “victory.” 

Clark shed a tear or two as he hugged Ellis on the final green, but this was no bolt from the blue, no lottery ticket that he cashed. Neither was this a Hollywood denouement. The best player won, and now he has earned his way into the boardroom. Helpfully, Clark left a diminishing trail of breadcrumbs. 

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