Witness insurmountable deficits turn into unforgettable victories at the Travelers Championship, the northeast one and only PGA Tour signature event. See Scotty Scheffler, Rory McElroy, Victor Hovlin, Patrick Cantley and returning champion Keegan Bradley, as well as other PGA Tour stars in all four days of the competition at close by TPC River Highlands. The excitement tees off June nineteenth through the twenty third. For tickets and information, visit Travelers Championship
dot com. The Travelers Championship there is only one. It's the Son of a Witch podcast time your host Claude Harmon. It is US Open week, the third major of the year at Pinehurst. I've been on site all week and yeah, this is going to be an interesting one. I think every time the US Open comes to Pinehurst, it's just a very very unique golf course and I think there are a lot of different I think there's a lot of different ways to play the golf course. I think
there's a lot of different strategies to employ. I think a lot of it's going to be player dependent, and I think everybody is going to be trying to figure out how is the best way to get around this golf course. It's I mean, it's midweek and the greens are lightning already and they've had a little bit of rain. They're not massively massively firm, but they are very very fast, and there just isn't a lot of usable area on
a lot of these putting surfaces. I'll give you a great example, so the that's I mean on the front nine, I think two of the greens that stand out, or the second green and the fifth green, And some of these greens look look very very big on TV. They they'll look very big in the telecast, but there's very little usable area on the greens, first of all, where they can pins. So if you look at the fifth green, which is a par five, it's a very it's a
big green. There's a lot of space out there. It's a big, big putting surface, but there's really only a small part of the green that that it can put the pin positions on. And if the balls start rolling off the greens, which they are designed and tend to do here at Pinehurst, you're going to struggle. We were
out today Brooks and DJ played with Phil Mickelson. Phil came so close here in ninety nine and I got to kind of pick Phil's brain and talk to him about, you know, kind of what he thinks about the golf course, what he thinks about how to play the golf course. One of the big differences is they really have changed the areas off the fairways. They've planted a lot of fescue grass, and they're kind of in a bunch of
really clumpy pieces of grass. So DJ today one of the holes in the background was of fourteen hit the golf ball maybe a yard and a half left of the fairway and it nestled down right behind a giant clump of fescue. He somehow managed to get it on the putting service, but it could have gone anywhere, and that's less than it wasn't even two paces from the fairway.
So I think that the strategy off the tee is going to be very important, and I think which strategy the players employ will kind of define I think this US Open. I saw Victor Hovelin's press conference day VIC saying he's going to try and be very aggressive off the tee with driver so that he has shorter irons in his hands and then can be way more conservative with the shorter I think that's a really good strategy unless you spray the driver. If you spray the driver,
you just don't know what you're going to get. So if the driver goes offline, you're looking at any possibility. You look at the possibility of making a par you're looking at the possibility of bogie, or you're looking at some very very big numbers. And that was the interesting thing in talking to Phil about the way he kind
of thinks about this golf course. He said it takes a lot of discipline, and what he meant by that was, if you do hit it offline, how aggressive are you on the next shot, because you could have only if you bomb one off the tee and it misses the fairway, you could have a much shorter club in your hand. But Bill was saying that he thinks the strategy and the mind games that this course plays is Okay, you
missed the fairway. You've got a short club in your hand, and you think, okay, well, let's say I'm only one hundred and twenty yards one hundred fifty yards away. It's probably going to be a wedge. Maybe for a lot of these long hitters, and they're going to say, okay, do I need to be aggressive here and try and get this on. The problem is if you miss the green, left, right, or over the green, it's very very difficult to get those up and down. It's very difficult to make pars
from there. So what Phil was saying was he likes the strategy of if you get in trouble off the tee, then lay it up short. And he was thinking, and I talked to a lot of the players. You know, so far this way you can score from the front of these greens. You can. It's very difficult to score left, right or long. So the play if you are going to miss a fair way is lay it up short. Then you can run it up a lot of these slopes.
But like I said, if you miss these greens left and right or long, I mean sometimes you can be dead. I mean sometimes you're staring at you know, double triple quad by just missing the green. Because depending on where they put the pin positions, you could miss the green to left, to the right, over the green and basically
have no shot. Try and hit a great chip. But the slopes here, the speed of these greens or are so fast that you could hit it over the green and then hit it all the way off the front edge. If you're on the left side of the of the green and miss it, you could chip it up to certain pin positions and it could run all the way
over to the other side. So I think a lot of the strategy this week will be how disciplined can you be off the tee, and then how disciplined can you be if you miss the fairway, Because I think the winners here tend to be the guys that drive the golf ball the best. They tend to be the players that hit a lot of fairways. If you get the ball and play, then you can somewhat be I don't know if you can be aggressive, but you can
somewhat try and take advantage of a good drive. I think good shots this week you were going to see a lot of really good quality iron shots that if you can get them pin high left, pin high right, twenty feet, twenty five feet, sometimes thirty feet. Sometimes just getting the iron shot that you've got to stay on
the green is going to be a good shot. So I think this is very much a USGA US Open style of golf course this golf course is going to play very, very different than the last major we saw at Valhalla, where it was soft, it was very easy, everybody was shooting low, everybody was having good rounds. I just don't think we're going to see that. So depending
on the way they set the golf course up. I asked you a couple of the players, if they gave you a score and said, okay, right now, you could not tee it up, what score would you take, not even teeing it up and take your chances? And I heard anywhere between even par to one under to two under. But you just don't know. I mean, somebody could go out and just light it up and shoot you four five six under. And I could also see even par one over, maybe two over. I could see that winning.
And I think we could see some gaps between where the leader is and then where the guy in second and the guy in third is. We saw that in fourteen when Martin Kimer won here. There was a big gap between what Martin was doing and then what the rest of the field was doing. So I think strategy has been vital in the practice grounds. The players and their caddies are all talking about okay, how far up do we want to push our drive? Do I need to hit drive here? And then what are the consequences?
What is the risk reward of smashing driver? But if you miss it at all, you just don't know what you're going to get. You could get a decent lie, you could get a very very sandy lie, and then you could get a lie where you're struggling to advance it. You might have to chip it back sideways, you might have to go backwards. So I do think the buzzword for this week for every player is disciplined. And I think that the USGA and the US Opens like to test the player's minds as much as they like to
test the players golf swings and technique. And I think that is the fascinating thing about the venues that they choose for US Opens. I think that's the fascinating thing about the way the USGA sets up these golf courses. It is as much a mental test as it is a physical test, as it is a techn test. Give Dad the gift of more golf this Father's Day with the Rapsodo MLM two pro. Whether Dad is trying to
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tea box. Okay, what are we doing here? How far up do we want to push this? Can we just hit the fairway here? Hit an iron off the tee. In Brooks's case, Brooks and in his caddy Ricky Elliott Brooks has got that driving Nike. It's a driving iron, it's a three iron. He can probably hit that to forty to two fifty in the air. So Brooks is, I think, is going to hit a lot of I mean his driving iron off the tee. He's going to
hit some three woods off the tee. He is going to hit driver And I think the longer hitters do have an advantage here, but they only have an advantage here if they hit the fairway. If they don't hit the fairway, it's it's it's crapshoot. You just don't know what you're going to get. Who are the favorites this week? I mean, wow, you would think that this is a ball striker's golf course. You have to be able to control the flight of your golf ball, the curve of
your golf ball, control the trajectory, control the spin. Ricky Eleduo, caddy's for Brooks, Keka said he bought that you have to play this course through the middle of the greens because if you're trying to come in on angles, and that was something that I heard a number of players say, you have to hit a lot of straight shots here because the way the slopes are the way the runoff
areas are. If you overdraw that. If your drawer of the golf ball, you're right handed and you overdraw it, it's going to go left and then go further left down these slopes. Does it go down into the runoff area or does it keep going and go all the way down into where these fescue bushes have been planted? Are you on hard pan? DJ had a drive on.
They started on the tenth hole today, par five. It was a little into the breeze and he just said, listen, there's no real reward for me trying to go there, trying to get there in two. So he tried to lay it up, blocked it just a little bit. It was there's a bunker to the right of the first or right of the tenth green, and he wasn't in the bunker. He was kind of on the top of the right side of it. And it was basically as
hard as a cart path. It was like concrete. So that's the other thing is some of the areas around these greens they're baked out. It's warm here. I don't think we're going to get a ton of rain. So this golf course is going to play very very firm. This golf course is going to play very very bouncy, and I think we are in for a four day USGA US Open kind of war of attrition. You know, do you have the game to manage this golf course, but do you have the mental side to manage the misses?
Because you are going to hit the players here this week. They will hit bad shots, they will hit bad drives, they will hit bad approach shots. It's what you do when you hit a bad one. I think that is going to be what how the whoever holds the trophy on Sunday, in my opinion, is going to be the player that manages their game the best. So who are the who are the favorites? I mean, you gotta think Xanderschoffle is a favorite. Is just coming off winning his
first major championship. Scotti Scheffler. I saw Scotty and his Kattie Teddy Scott on Tuesday. They were just walking around the front nine with just a bunch of club and a putter, so they weren't even hitting any t shots or iron shots. They were just going out and going directly to all of the green complexes and then having balls kind of run off and then go play them. So I think Scotty's strategy. Listen, it's not even close. He's the best player in the game right now. He
has the most confident of any player. He's coming in here off another win at Memorial, which is a very very difficult golf course, but it's a completely different setup. But the other thing that I think is always going to be a question at US Opens and the US Open venues is the setup. How fast does the usj want to get these greens? Wyndham Clark was saying on Tuesday night or Tuesday in his press conference that already the greens were borderline. Are they going to put water
on them? Are they going to let them bake out? And I think the USGA likes they like even par. They don't have a problem if even par wins major championships. There are a lot of people that like that style of golf. They don't want to see a birdie fest. They don't want to see ten, twelve, thirteen under win majors. They want the test to be tough. Listen, this test is tough. I think a lot of these greens and
they have been redesigned, but the green complexes. The original green complexes were never designed to be at the speeds that the modern day golfers and the modern day setups set up. They just weren't. These greens were originally designed when they would roll six, seven, maybe eight on the stemp. If these things get over ten eleven, we are going to see some carnage. The other thing is with how much back and forth. I think there will be around
these greens where you'll see players mis agree. They'll be down in a runoff area if they've short sighted themselves. They know that if they if they hit the golf ball too far, it could run off the other side, or run down the front, or run down the back. So do they try and get quick or try and get cute and not judge how far they hit it? And I do think we are going to see players chipping around these greens and get it on the putting surface and then it's going to roll up. A good
example is the fifth Green, the par five. The pin on Tuesday in the practice round was kind of front ish to the right. I saw some players lay it up over on the right hand side, chip it up, not chip it far enough, and then it basically went sideways, did a big loop, went sideways, went all the way
down the left side, down into the bunker. I saw some players chip, some that didn't get up to the flag, same thing, rolled all the way up, then started to come back down on the left hand side, missed the bunker, rolled all the way down to the runoff areas, got behind a bush and they're staring on a par five where you're trying to make up ground here. I mean, there isn't a lot of There aren't a lot of birdie chances here, right. That's that's something that all of
these players are going to have to deal with. I think the hard holes out here, the ones to watch are going to be two six eight, eleven, sixteen. If you could somehow for the week play those five holes and even or one under for the week, you are going to pick up maybe a stroke and a half, maybe two strokes against the field. So everyone out here knows what the hard hole are, they know what the test is, and they know where they're going to need to try and just hang on. I think every us
OPENED and the USGA likes this, right. They love a very very difficult test, and they love hard holes, and they know that everyone knows kind of what the hard holes are. So, like I said, I think on the when we look at the hardest hole, I think one of the hardest holes is going to be the sixth hole. I think sixteen is going to be a very very difficult hole. The second hole, based off of that green
complex is difficult. Eight is no bargain. Eleven the second hole on the back nine Again, you get out of position there and you're really really going to struggle. The only two fives on this golf course are five and ten. That's it. Those are the only two real legit birdie chances I think you're going to have. And then the rest of it is just you hang on. You just try and get it to the house. Uh. Seventeen today, which is the par three, five irons, four irons for
some of these guys. And yeah, that's well in excess of two fifteen to two twenty. And DJ hit a shot today in the practice round, hammered a four iron thirty feet left of the flag, just barely stayed on the green, didn't go down into the left green side bunker. We got up there and we're thinking, this is a very very good golf shot under these conditions. Now, the best players in the world don't think thirty feet is
a good shot. They just don't. But us opens sometimes pin high, or sometimes anywhere on these greens, twenty to thirty feet are going to be good quality shots. Witness insurmountable deficits turn into unforgettable victories at the Travelers Championship, the northeast one and only PGA Tour signature event. See Scotty Scheffler, Rory McElroy, Victor Hovlin, Patrick Cantley, and returning champion Keegan Bradley, as well as other PGA Tour stars in all four days of the competition at close by
TPC River Highlands. The excitement tees off June nineteenth through the twenty third. For tickets and information, visit Travelers Championship dot com. The Travelers Championship there is only one, so I think this week is a lot about managing the expectations. I think the rounds are going to take forever. I don't think we're going to finish. I think there. I don't think people will finish on On I certainly don't think people are going to finish Thursday. The field's too
big and the golf course is just too difficult. You are going to see guys playing hockey, ping pong around these greens. You know, miss a green, try and go for it, run it over the other side of the green, and we're going to see some big numbers and the pace of playof I think we're looking at in excess of five hours. I think we could get into six hour rounds this week because the test is just so difficult. That's what the USGA wants. They want this to be
the toughest test possible. What does Rory McRoy do this week? He's saying that he's never felt better. He's saying that he's never had a better opportunity, he's never been more ready to win his fifth major. And we've talked about it on the pod before. I think it's just it's shocking to me given how great a player Rory McElroy is. He's hitting on the range today, he was hitting balls next to DJ and I mean it's hard not to watch him, right, I mean, he's hitting balls. He's just
got everything. He's just so impressive as player. And yeah, I could see him win this week. I could see him get his fifth major. But if he doesn't get off to a good start he's I think That's been one of the issues that Rory's had in trying to win that elusive fifth major championship is sometimes in these majors he doesn't get off to a fast start. This is not a golf course. This, I'll say it again, This is not a golf course you can play offense on.
This is a golf course where you're trying to play defense, and rarely are you going to get opportunities to play offense. But the problem is, and I'll keep saying this, this golf course, the setup, and what the USGA likes is they like to have players play defense when they should be playing offense. And they love them. They love them to play offense when they know they should be playing defense. And so great ball strikers, yeah, great ball strikers will
really really like this place. And if you are coming into this tournament this week with a lot of really really good form, I think you would think you would have a chance. I do think that on golf courses like this that are this difficult, where the test is so penal if you miss shots, you could also see not a household name leading on the leaderboard, go leading on Thursday, not a superstar, not someone that anybody would
have picked in their fantasy. They could be leading because in a lot of ways, they just don't know anybody. They don't know how hard the golf course is, so they're just firing at every flag and you could get lucky, you could have a great ball striking week, play super super aggressive and if you're on, yeah, maybe you can
take advantage of it. But I think respecting this golf course is something that's going to be very very important and strategy getting around here and thinking your way around here. The other thing is with as long as the players are going to be out on the golf course, As I said, these are going to be very long rounds. It's hot, it's dusty, it's lenxy, it's the ground is hard, it's tough walk. You have to stay focused. You drop your focus for one swing out here at Pinehurst this
week and you could be making double or triple. So I think the winner this week is going to be a combination of really good ball striking. You're going to get You're gonna need to get lucky. You're gonna need to get some good breaks. You're going to need to have some good fortune, you're going to need to get out of jail free card and so we have seen that in the past here. I think there's a very,
very rich history here at Pinehurst. There have been some great battles here, Phil Michelson and Payne Stewart in ninety nine. The golf course that Martin Kimer played here in twenty fourteen, A lot of people at the end of that week thought what golf course was he's playing, because it certainly wasn't the golf course that everybody else was playing based off of the score that he shot. A big time US Open USGA type golf course, a big time US Open USGA set up. And I have no idea who's win.
I have no idea who's gonna be on the leaderboard. But I think we are in for an exciting four days. If you like really tough golf courses, if you like to see the best players in the world challenged basically from the first t shot until the last put on eighteen, you're gonna love this week because I think that's what
we're going to get. I do think Pinehurst at the end of this week, Yes, the winner will be the star, but I think Pinehurst will also be one of the stars of the show here because it's a great golf course. It's a great design, and it's a very cool golf course. It looks cool. I think it'll look great on TV, and I think gets your popcorn out because there will
be some carnage. There will be some unbelievable shots. There will be a lot of shots that a lot of people watching will think that's not great, it's kind of mediocre. But if you haven't been out here and haven't walked around and been inside the ropes and seen how difficult this test is, this is a tough one. And I can't wait to see who hoists the giant trophy on Sunday. So buckle up, kids, because we're in for a good one.
I want to thank everyone for listening, rate, review, subscribe wherever you get your podcasts US open this week Son of a Butch. We'll be back next week.