Bryson DeChambeau had a rough first round Thursday at the British Open as he finished with a 1-over 71 and sat seven strokes behind the leader when he walked off the 18th green.
DeChambeau spoke with the media after the round and had a rant about his driver, which is made by Cobra, saying that the club “sucks” and that it was to blame for his struggles at Royal St. George’s.
Fans rightly ripped him for it because it’s another example of why DeChambeau can be hard to root for. Blaming your equipment for a bad round on a course where you don’t need to hit driver all the time?
Weak.
Well, our friend David Dusek from Golfweek spoke with Cobra’s tour operations manager, Ben Schomin, who is one of the people in charge of building DeChambeau’s clubs and who caddied for him two weeks ago after DeChambeau and his former caddie parted ways on the morning of the first round of a tournament in Detroit. Schomin was not pleased with DeChambeau’s post-round statements. Not pleased at all. Check this out:
“Everybody is bending over backwards. We’ve got multiple guys in R&D who are CAD’ing (compute-aided design) this and CAD-ing that, trying to get this and that into the pipeline faster. (Bryson) knows it,” Schomin said. “It’s just really, really painful when he says something that stupid.”
DeChambeau is currently using a Cobra Radspeed driver that is 46 inches long and has 5 degrees of loft. You won’t find a club like that in your local pro shop. They are all made specifically for DeChambeau.
“He has never really been happy, ever. Like, it’s very rare where he’s happy,” Schomin said. “Now he’s in a place where he’s swinging a 5-degree driver with 200 rpm of ball speed. Everybody is looking for a magic bullet. Well, the magic bullet becomes harder and harder to find the faster you swing and the lower your loft gets.”
That. Is. Juicy.
Schomin added this:
Still, Schomin knows DeChambeau doesn’t mean it exactly the way he said it.
“It’s like an 8-year-old that gets mad at you,” he said. “They might fly off the handle and say, ‘I hate you.’ But then you go. ‘Whoa, no you don’t.’
Good for Schomin for speaking out like that. DeChambeau’s comments were childish and deserved to be ripped.
You should read Dusek’s entire piece on this because it’s all really good:
A frustrated Bryson DeChambeau said his driver ‘sucks.’ Cobra, his driver maker, is not happy
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