Swing instructor predicts more majors in Bryson DeChambeau’s future – including this year – and the story of his Krank driver

Why is Schy so sure that DeChambeau is on the verge of taking his game to another level this year?

WINTER GARDEN, Fla. – Mike Schy has never been – well, shy – in predicting big things for Bryson DeChambeau.

The 2020 U.S. Open champion was Schy’s prized student, who won the NCAA men’s golf title and U.S. Amateur under his watchful eye at his performance institute – “we’re on our third tent,” he once told me – at Dragonfly Golf Club (formerly Riverbend Country Club) in Madera, California.

But the two took a break much like Ross and Rachel in the TV show “Friends,” during which DeChambeau bulked up and reached new heights with Chris Como. But last year, Schy and DeChambeau reunited, although as Schy explains, “he’ll never admit it,” and to that extent DeChambeau also counts on Dana Dahlquist for swing help.

Speaking at the PGA Merchandise Show’s Demo Day at Orange County National Golf Club, Schy is borderline giddy when the topic of DeChambeau’s prospects for 2024 are raised. Schy tired of Tour life and traveling as part of DeChambeau’s entourage early in his pro career, but he says, “I want to be at a major this year, maybe the Masters, because he’s going to win a major this year. He’s going to win more than one more major, I’m just not calling multiples this year.”

Why is Schy so sure that DeChambeau is on the verge of taking his game to another level this year? To explain, he circles back to October when he went to Miami to see DeChambeau, who defected to LIV in June 2022, play. Schy was curious to see what a LIV event looked like and he got a lot more than he anticipated.

“So, I’m out there at the pro-am on Thursday, and he’s not hitting it well. His driver flattened a bit in Saudi Arabia and he was hooking it again. He got that figured out but he’s clearly not happy with the way he’s hitting it. You know how he gets,” Schy says. “I don’t say anything unless he asks. He called Dana (Dahlquist) at one point and hung up on him. He called me over from 60 yards away and said, ‘Mike, why am I hitting it bad?’ I said, ‘Well…’ I determined his ball position was too far back. He said, ‘You think it’s that simple?’ I said, ‘All day you’ve been saying it should be simple. What’s simpler than changing ball position?’ This is right after he hit it fat in the water. He hits a couple and it’s better. He says, ‘It feels like I have more turn.’”

One day later, Schy continues, he’s in the lockerroom conversing with DeChambeau about his old swing and DeChambeau commented that what he used to do was wrong.

2016 RBC Heritage
Bryson DeChambeau talks with swing coach Mike Schy ahead of the third round of the 2016 RBC Heritage at Harbour Town Golf Links in Hilton Head Island, South Carolina. (Photo: Tyler Lecka/Getty Images)

“That really bugged me. I didn’t sleep that night. I even texted him some stuff that Homer (Kelley, famous for The Golf Machine) had said about ball position,” Schy recalls. “I walked into the locker room and it’s just him and I, and I said, ‘You know, dude, you were the consummate hitter. Now you’ve worked on this long drive thing and your right arm has moved into the front. You’ve gone from more of a hitting motion to more of a swinging motion. You can’t have the ball back in your stance in a swinging motion. Of course, he says, ‘I’ll have to think about that.’ ”

Schy notes that DeChambeau played well in Miami as DeChambeau’s Crushers won the Team Championship. A couple weeks later, DeChambeau gets back to Schy and tells him, “I figured it out. It’s all geometry.”

“I was laughing so hard,” Schy said. “He’s got to figure it out on his own. He can never give me any credit. I knew one thing, he’s always hated the ball forward. He’s always defaulted to moving it back.”

Schy’s story gives a window into the mind of DeChambeau but he’s just getting to why he’s predicting more majors in the future for DeChambeau. To do so, he backtracks to July.

“Do you know what bulge and roll are?” Schy asks. When I nod along, he purses his lips and says, “Sure, you do,” and then proceeds to give a lesson on how bulge is the curvature of the face from its heel to its toe, while roll is the curvature of the face from the crown to the sole. Schy continues pontificating for some time but as the announcers sometimes say, we’ll skip ahead in the action. On Friday night after making the cut at the British Open at Liverpool in July, DeChambeau phoned Schy and asked, “What do you think about bulge and roll?”

DeChambeau’s search for the perfect driver eventually aggravated his equipment sponsor Cobra — “he’s looking for a magic bullet,” Cobra’s Ben Schomin said a year ago — to the point that they parted ways with him. Being an equipment free agent freed up DeChambeau to go down more rabbit holes. The problem with his quest, as former long-drive champion Jason Zuback once said is, “the faster you move it, the more precise you need to be.”

Schy knew from experience that DeChambeau wouldn’t quit searching and he had his latest theory he wanted to test out.

“Bryson always wants to go to the super extreme and work his way back,” Schy says.

He told DeChambeau that Crank Golf, which specializes in drivers for long drive, had a model, the Formula Fire, with nine inches of bulge. DeChambeau said that wasn’t enough.

“I told him, that’s more than what you’re playing now,” Schy recalls.

Schy emailed Lance Reader at Crank at 6 a.m. that morning. Soon they were doing a group call with DeChambeau in England. “What do you have?” DeChambeau asked. “Well, what do you want?” Reader responded.

Crank sent DeChambeau a driver with 8 ½ inches of roll and bulge. A few days later he tested the club and it reduced the amount of curve on the ball. DeChambeau phoned Schy as if he’d just found the cure for cancer and said, “It’s not my swing, I knew it wasn’t my swing.”

The next day, he sent a file of TrackMan data to Schy and didn’t wait long before he phoned him to break it down. “Do you see it?” DeChambeau asked. “I reduced curve by 50 percent.” He added, “This is it.”

Ten days later in early August, DeChambeau shot 61-58 at The Greenbrier, making birdie at the final four holes to become the fourth player to shoot 58 in pro golf. DeChambeau bragged that his driver was a difference maker.

“It’s probably performed the best I’ve ever had in the past five years in professional golf for me, ever since 2018 when I was striping it early in the year,” he told the media.

Just a few weeks after Schy predicted bigger things ahead for DeChambeau, he flirted with the 50s again, settling for 62 at LIV Las Vegas. He closed in 74 on Saturday to drop to T-9, but Schy’s point is clear: armed with a driver he believes in, DeChambeau is primed to do damage and it’s why Schy is looking at airline reservations to Augusta.

After all, it’s all geometry.

[lawrence-auto-related count=3 category=451198867]

Bryson DeChambeau’s journey to become a U.S. Open champion was born…under a tent

Bryson DeChambeau developed his unique way of playing golf under a beat up tent in Madera, California under the tutelage of Mike Schy.

On Saturday night, when Golf Channel showed video of Bryson DeChambeau hitting balls under floodlights, Mike Schy chuckled as the “Live From” hosts made a big deal of his longtime pupil’s devotion to getting better.

That’s nothing. Schy, who began coaching DeChambeau at age 12, has watched him do Rocky Balboa-type workouts. There was the time after DeChambeau failed to earn his PGA Tour card in 2016 playing on sponsor exemptions and had nearly a month to kill before the Korn Ferry Tour playoffs began. DeChambeau arrived back home at the Mike Schy Golf Performance Institute headquartered at Dragonfly Golf Club in Madera, California, and declared he wasn’t going to hit a ball for three weeks but rather was going to revamp his swing plane by spending at least 4 hours a day on the “Schy Circle,” a swing plane training device engineered and built by Schy, until his hands bled.

“He did it for three weeks, alternating between swinging a heavy rod and a golf club. He put a cover over the range balls. If he wasn’t going to hit range balls, guess what, no one else was going to either,” Schy recalls. “Who else would do that? Hitting a golf ball is a drug and a fix for him, and to give up his fix and make his motion what he wants it to be, well, Bryson is obsessive-compulsive. You can’t stop him. If it means going all night, he’ll go all night. He’s always been that way. His modus operandi is, ‘I’m going to go to the range until I’m comfortable and then we can go play Fortnite.’ ”

The coda to this story: DeChambeau won the DAP Championship, the first Korn Ferry Tour playoff event, and was off and running en route to winning the 120th U.S. Open on Sunday at Winged Foot.

The truth is, it would’ve been a story if Bryson hadn’t beat balls after Saturday’s third round under floodlights.

“I told everybody on Thursday that he would win,” Schy says shortly after DeChambeau holed out for a final-round 3-under 67 and six-stroke victory over Matthew Wolff. “Bryson called me on Tuesday and told me he’d figured something out, not to tell me thanks for the help because that doesn’t happen, but he found something and I watched him play the first three holes and I knew he was going to win.”

Mike Schy with an assortment of his homemade gadgets and training aids. (Adam Schupak/Golfweek)

Schy watched the broadcast from home as DeChambeau validated all their hard work. He considered flying to New York before the final round but there were too many hoops to jump through in the age of coronavirus. While Schy has taken a backseat in recent years to instructor Chris Como, who is based at Dallas National Golf Club, where DeChambeau practices when he is home, Schy remains one of his closest confidants and their journey from Schy’s tent, where he has hundreds of gadgets and training aids, to major winner has been one strange trip.

“When he was 12-13 years old, he was spending every waking hour with me at the tent. I’d never had anyone like him or at quote ‘that level,’ ” Schy says. “Even at an early age, we were talking swing theories that he wanted to try and test. That was an element that was important to our journey. Decisions and choices have consequences so there could be some bad golf. As long as he was willing to accept that, we could experiment and cross some things off.

“When we went to one-length clubs and a one-plane swing, everyone thought we were super-crazy, not just crazy. They said it wasn’t going to work, he wasn’t going to get a golf scholarship, but the more we went down the rabbit hole, the more it was making sense and you could see how accurate he was becoming and the control he gained over the ball. It was a lot of work and I always tell him don’t discount all the work you’ve done.”

Schy always knew DeChambeau was capable of achieving extraordinary results in professional golf and encouraged him to do it his way. But he also warned him that marching to the beat of his own drummer would bring with it a host of doubters.

“We were in a car in L.A. and talking about the future and I told him, you have to understand one thing: you could be the No. 1 golfer in the world, win several PGA Tour events, win a major, maybe even two, and people are going to still think you’re crazy – that this doesn’t work, whether it is the clubs, your swing, your mannerisms, they’re going to be doubters,” Schy says. “I told him, I’m a Golfing Machine instructor. There are 13 million swings so pick one and trust it’s the right way for you. You have to own this 100 percent because there are going to be people who are going to crap on you every day. And they did. There have been rough times, but that’s all part of the journey.”

[vertical-gallery id=778067171]

Even now that DeChambeau has achieved the ultimate validation in winning a major, Schy doesn’t expect DeChambeau’s triumph to inspire a revolution of followers rivaling that of Tiger Woods winning the 1997 Masters. Not immediately, anyway. It will take time for DeChambeau’s principles to be accepted.

“Do I think it will change? I do. I think people will view what he’s done and say I need to evaluate it. Even after today, they’re probably going to say, eh, that worked for him but that’s it,” Schy says. “There will eventually be a groundswell and it will happen over time.”

Schy still isn’t sold on the DeChambeau diet and the way he has bulked up, but he trusts DeChambeau’s team of experts who treat him like the elite athlete that he is.

“He’s a beast when he works out,” Schy says.

Hitting bombs was always part of the plan. “We used to say that we want to be like Jack Nicklaus. We want to hit it to the moon and have it land soft,” Schy says.

But he argues that’s not what has made DeChambeau into a major champion. Schy says DeChambeau has become such a dramatically better putter. He remembers the time in January 2018 when DeChambeau snapped his putter and dragged it behind his car to teach it a lesson after a particularly frustrating performance at the Farmers Insurance Open.

“I don’t know if I ever believed that he would be one of the best putters in the world,” he says.

At an early age, Schy recognized that DeChambeau’s inquisitive mind was one of his greatest assets. He’s never been afraid to go down a rabbit hole, test something new and different, and challenge the status quo.

“He’s been that way since he was a kid,” Schy says. “For him, the more numbers he has the better he feels. Give him 100 numbers and he’s happy. Give him 1 and tell him you’re not sure about the others and he’d rather shoot you. People don’t understand that about him. It’s about feeling comfortable. For him the more information he has, the better he feels.”

As for DeChambeau’s many quirks, Schy shakes his head and says, “We call it the Bryson Way.”

Now, the Bryson Way is major-championship proven. Validating? Sure. But the mad scientist is far from done shaking things up. He’s already talking about a 48-inch driver and adding more bulk to his frame. He’s going to continue to tinker and pursue greatness; that, too, is the Bryson Way.

“We’re still crazy, just remember,” Schy says.

They wouldn’t have it any other way.

[lawrence-related id=778067283,778067203,778067220]

Bryson DeChambeau once hit a tire for 5 hours (and others tales from the practice tee)

Whether it is single-length clubs or finding a perfectly balanced ball, Bryson DeChambeau always is seeking an edge. He’ll also outwork you.

[jwplayer Ri0Q4E7a]

Bryson DeChambeau has been called a lot of things, but a phony should not be one of them.

He is often ridiculed on social media for, among other things, his “Mad Scientist” shtick. It would be one thing if it was just the keyboard commandos trolling him, but even DeChambeau’s fellow competitors — from Brooks Koepka, who isn’t afraid to fire shots publicly, to those in the caddie yard — roll their eyes at some of his outlandish claims. In a recent ESPN.com article, Justin Thomas said the following:

“I’m the farthest thing from Bryson [DeChambeau],” Thomas says. When I ask if he thinks Dechambeau’s physics-professor image is genuine, he shrugs and adds, “I don’t think so. I’m not even sure he himself knows what he’s saying sometimes. But either way, that’s not me.”

Last June, on the day after the U.S. Open, I drove 3-plus hours from Pebble Beach Golf Links to Dragonfly Golf Club in Madera, California, and spent the day with instructor Mike Schy and his talented assistant Jordan Keyser at Schy’s Golf Performance Institute, where DeChambeau cut his teeth and the motto is, “Only if you want to get better.”

Mike Schy with an assortment of his homemade gadgets and training aids. (Adam Schupak/Golfweek)

Schy is one of the most creative minds in golf instruction. He’s from the Ben Doyle school, a disciple of The Golfing Machine, and has taken Doyle’s famed golf cart filled with a thousand training aids and expanded the concept into a tented area. Schy’s on his third tent at Dragonfly and there’s a gazillion self-made gadgets that Schy can turn to – “If I can’t buy it, I build it,” Schy said. DeChambeau’s original set of one-length clubs? They “garage-punked” them here, slathering the long irons with more than $200 of lead tape. They drilled holes and burned through three grinding wheels to achieve the proper weight in the wedges. It took three weeks to assemble. In other words, DeChambeau happened to have the perfect instructor for him conveniently near his hometown of Clovis.

If anything, DeChambeau suffers from an inferiority complex. He doesn’t think he’s as good as he actually is so in his mind he has to find some edge — whether it is determining a perfectly balanced golf ball in Epsom salt or using a protractor (drawing compass) on the greens — so he can win.

That is why even though he had just shot 66 at Muirfield Village Golf Club to take the 54-hole lead at The Memorial, he returned to the range at 7:30 p.m., for another hour-plus session and closed the place in darkness.

“I’d have to shoot 54 to walk straight to the car,” DeChambeau told me.

“He’d still hit one ball,” DeChambeau’s caddie, Tim Tucker, said.

This flag from Bryson DeChambeau’s 2015 U.S. Amateur victory hangs in the clubhouse at Dragonfly Golf Club.

DeChambeau continues to bulk up, weighing in at 239 pounds this week, during the COVID-19 induced downtime and has talked about getting even bigger. He says 270 isn’t out of the question. C’mon! Whatever he’s doing, it’s working. (Schy used to have DeChambeau swing a heavy broomstick, and said the resistance it creates helped improve his swing speed.) DeChambeau ranks first in driving distance this season averaging 321 yards, nearly 19 yards farther than last season and third in Strokes Gained: Off the Tee, up from 24th last season. DeChambeau also recorded a ball speed of 203 mph with his Cobra drive last week during the “Speed Zone challenge.” That’s ridonkulous.

None of this surprises Schy or Keyser.

“We call it Bryson’s way,” Schy said.

Which means he’s going to turn over every stone in search of marginal improvement. Sometimes, it takes him on a wild goose chase, and other times he strikes gold. But Schy will just laugh and say that’s Bryson’s being Bryson.

Inside Mike Schy’s tent at Dragon Fly GC and looking out to the field and bunker where Bryson DeChambeau used to do Schy’s tire drill. (Adam Schupak/Golfweek)

Schy showed me a drill using his favorite training aid, a yardstick. He gives away at least a hundred each year. DeChambeau carries four of them in his bag and uses it for alignment, aim, foot and ball position and more. In one drill, he’d have DeChambeau roll putts down the yardstick. I asked Keyser, who grew up practicing with DeChambeau here and played competitively in college before joining Schy as an instructor, what’s the longest she’d seen him do the drill?

“He won’t leave until he does so many in a row that go to the end perfectly,” she said. “His belief was if you’re going to set up a drill, if it takes an hour or six hours, you’re getting better.”

Yes, she’s seen him do the same putting drill for six hours.

Another drill that Schy likes his students to do is hit a tire. It teaches them not to flip their hands. The goal is to get the whole shaft on the tire and prevent the head from bouncing. If the core is engaged, you’ll keep the shaft against the tire. Schy has an old extra-loop radial and here’s the story Schy tells and that Keyser witnessed that convinces me that DeChambeau is anything but a fraud:

He used to move the tire about a half-inch up and down the range. He also would do the tire drill in a bunker, which was even tougher (I tried it. This is straight out of a “Rockymovie.)

“One time, Bryson did it for 4-5 hours. I think that was also the day we challenged him not to talk for 6 hours. That was a good day,” Schy said.

That is the Bryson Way and through hard work and good old-fashioned tenacity he became a five-time PGA Tour winner by the time he was 25. Someday, his dedication and determination to get better will be admired as it eventually came to be for the likes of Lee Trevino, Vijay Singh and Tom Kite, who outworked the competition all the way to the World Golf Hall of Fame.