Mark it down as a quadruple bogey on the scorecard. And a warning to the rest of the field.
A day after the USGA alerted players that the U.S. Open at Shinnecock Hills would play firmer and faster over the weekend, Dylan Wu proved that those weren’t empty words.
Teeing off at 9 a.m. local time in the first pairing of Saturday’s third round, Wu got a bracing introduction to the new conditions. After ballooning his tee shot right into the fescue, Wu knocked his approach long and left into the native area, then gouged his ball onto the green and faced a 34-foot putt for par.
Which is where the fun began.
“I miss. I miss. I miss. I make,” Seve Ballesteros once famously said of a Masters four-putt.
Wu’s version involved an extra miss.
His first attempt rolled three feet past the hole. The second grazed the cup and settled two feet away. The third, well, you can see where this is headed.
Moments later, Wu had recorded a snowman 8 on one of Shinnecock’s friendlier par-4s.
He can’t say he wasn’t warned. After two days of relatively soft, receptive conditions, players had been told on Friday evening to expect a sterner test over the weekend. Green speeds, the USGA said, would increase from roughly 10.5 to 11 on the Stimpmeter, while the course would be set up to “play progressively firmer.”
The advance notice fit with the USGA’s transparent approach this week at Shinnecock, where course conditions became a flashpoint during the club’s last two U.S. Opens in 2004 and 2018.
Saturday morning began with some of the fiercest conditions of the week, with gusts in excess of 35 miles per hour.
Appearing on NBC’s Live From the U.S. Open coverage, USGA CEO Mike Whan called it the windiest morning he could remember at the club.
“Listen, I know everybody wants it as tough as you can make it,” Whan said. “At the same time, we want to play golf. We don’t want to get to a point where we can’t play golf because balls won’t stay on the green. It will definitely be firmer, it will definitely be a little bit bouncier than it’s been. But I think we are going to have to pay for that into Sunday to kinda get through today. As we can feel right now, this is pretty significant.”
By late morning, the gusts had mellowed somewhat. But Wu wasn’t having a much easier time of it. He was nine over for the day when he made the turn.
