Rory McIlroy made no secret of his disdain for Bryson DeChambeau and accused him of holding the Open Championship hostage after he threatened to withdraw from the tournament after he received a two shot penalty.
DeChambeau was adjudged to have inadvertently improved his lie in the fescue right of the par-4 5th and was informed of the penalty after his round which took him from one shot shy of Lucas Herbert to three adrift.
After a two hour debacle that involved him storming to the driving range to hit balls in near darkness, the R&A found out he was playing via his Instagram post thus allowing them to eventually release the tee times. McIlroy feels DeChambeau’s reaction to the penalty was entirely performative.
“Late night for everyone. Yeah, look, I won’t pretend to be up here and defend Bryson. I’m not particularly fond of him. I think a lot of it’s performative. I think a lot of it’s for attention,” McIlroy said after his third round.
“To hold the tournament hostage like that, and to have all of us, players, volunteers, everyone waiting on him to depart, I didn’t feel like it was a great look.”
McIlroy revealed that he watched the incident live from the players lounge after his own round on Friday and believes the punishment inflicted on the American by the R&A was completely justified but wouldn’t divulge whether he believed DeChambeau’s actions were intentional or accidental.
“I was watching it live. I was up in the players lounge watching it with a few other players, and as soon as he made the step into the ball, we all sort of looked at each other, and we were like, that didn’t seem right.
“Then when I heard that he was called in by the rules officials, it was pretty obvious for why.
“Yeah, I think there’s no doubt that he improved the line of his backswing. Again, it’s like, whether it was careless or whether it was intentional, I don’t think it matters. Hopefully it was careless, but I think the two-shot penalty was justified for sure.”
The reaction to what happened on Friday night was frenzied with people condemning and defending DeChambeau in equal measure. But perhaps the beauty and burden of the television camera is that it allows officials to review questionable looking incidents.
There is no love lost between McIlroy and DeChambeau. The latter beat McIlroy in the 2024 US Open at Pinehurst before McIlroy got his own back at the Masters last year where he refused to speak to him during the final round which left DeChambeau bewildered. The Holywood man feels golf should be a self policing game but said that the evidence which was caught on camera was overwhelmingly against DeChambeau’s claims of innocence.
“Yeah, it’s hard. Every shot is on camera. There’s a lot of guys that play this week and the shots aren’t on camera. So you can say that that’s unfair or whatever, or it might happen more than it does. It’s obviously impossible to police everyone, and that’s why it is, for the most part, a self-policing game.
“I think when there is obvious evidence like there was last night, then obviously that’s a different story.”
Max Homa and Russell Henley are two golfers to have publicly defended DeChambeau with Homa adamant that his compatriots wouldn’t cheat the game while Henley had sympathy for the two-time US Open winner constantly being on camera.
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