How ironic that Dustin Johnson used to be regarded within golf as a ‘flat-liner’, as a brutally long hitter whose exaggerated swagger suggested a man playing without a pulse.
We saw that incarnation, for 71 holes at least, at Chambers Bay at the weekend, as he sauntered after his 370-yard drives with a saloon-bar strut, while maintaining that off-putting tobacco-chewer’s habit of expectorating on every tee-box.
He looked the epitome of languorous Carolina cool. Until, that is, it came to the business of closing out his first major title.
Nothing expressed Johnson’s curious blend of physical power and psychological brittleness better than the fact that he reduced the 611-yard closing hole to two giant heaves — a drive and a five-iron — but needed another three strokes to cover the remaining 12 feet.
He could not have examined more angles of his eagle putt for victory than if he had used a protractor, but misjudged the pace and slope so badly that he left a four-foot putt back. This one he rushed, taking all of 48 seconds to steel himself, and as the ball grazed the left edge of the cup it was as if this strange and majestic Pacific links was liquefying beneath him.
How to react to his fourth major choke in five years? Johnson initially presented a mask of stoicism, seeking out wife Paulina Gretzky, daughter of ice hockey legend Wayne, and their six-month-old son Tatum for a moment’s solace. “I’m proud of the way I played and I’m most proud of my family,” he said, briefly, outside the locker room.
“So I did get to hold up my trophy at the end of the day, which is my son.”
This was no idle Father’s Day platitude, considering Johnson had been forced to take a leave of absence from the PGA Tour last season amid allegations, all strenuously denied, of failed drugs tests and affairs with more than one of his colleagues’ wives.
The essential purpose of that decision, he explained then, was to reinforce his relationship with a family he believed he had let down. But his endearing sentiments in the wake of so galling a near-miss were not wholly convincing.
A more telling window upon Johnson’s soul was the fact that he took no part in Jordan Spieth’s victory ceremony by the 18th green, a protocol normally expected of the US Open runner-up, and that he also swerved his full slate of media obligations.
One fleeting consolation was that he would move up to a career high of third in the world rankings, although this seemed little more than first bridesmaid behind the all-conquering Spieth and Rory McIlroy.
Another was that Monday marked his 31st birthday and, given Johnson’s notoriety for a ‘go hard or go home’ approach to partying, he is unlikely to have tempered the celebrations too drastically.
But even for a man with such a horizontally laid-back slant on life, the hurt of this unravelling will linger. For there is a sense that Johnson blames the absurdities of Chambers Bay rather than his own addled mind for the extraordinary turn of events in the Washington State sunset.
When his second putt on the 18th slid agonisingly past, he glanced reproachfully at the broccoli-like green, suggesting later that the ball missed because it bounced and kicked left at the crucial moment. While Johnson merited a degree of sympathy for the manner of his implosion, his insinuation that the course was at fault was a weak excuse.
But ought we to have been so surprised? Johnson, after all, has turned the art of throwing away a major into his own form of macabre vaudeville.
Johnson, according to his former caddie Bobby Brown, has an enviably childlike habit of forgetting even his worst lapses almost immediately. But this latest debacle will, however subliminally, be a source of pain.
For, just when the stage was set for Johnson to complete his own redemptive arc, to be remembered always as the first player to win a major with a closing eagle, he sadly gave yet more weight to his image as a serial choker.
— The Telegraph Group Limited, London 2015
