First published September 21, 2020

As usual, this is just my opinion, based on using two now rarely used organs: the eyes and the brain

Another major sporting event down, and another one won by the guy on the most drugs. So that’s good to know.

Above, you see before and after pics of winner Bryson DeChambeau. When he won the US Amateur five years ago, he was about my size. He is listed as 6’1”, and since guys normally list their height in shoes, we may assume he is an inch or two shorter barefoot. If he were in Hollywood, we would subtract double that, but he looks around 6 feet on TV. He was of average build, so I would guess he was about 170-180 pounds at age 22. In golf shoes, I am roughly 6’2” and 170 pounds, same at age 57 as I was in college. But judging by the many photos of him online, he began pill popping early. I don’t think it started last year. At first he just gained a few pounds of muscle and stripped some fat, like a lot of guys are doing now, including many many guys on tour—including most of the top ones. But in the last year or so he has bulked up far beyond that. Several sources claim he gained 40 pounds, now weighing in at 240, but I don’t believe it. He looks more like 210 to me. But if women love to lie about their ages, men love to lie about their height and weight. Most famous guys exaggerate by large amounts.

Still, a gain of about 30 pounds, most of it muscle. We are told this miraculous transformation was achieved with nothing but protein shakes and pumping iron—the usual dodge. Even Schwarzenegger led with that story for a few years, until he was later candid enough to admit it was done with huge doses of steroids and other drugs. My guess is DeChambeau’s fellow players are worried about the example he is setting, since it draws unneeded attention to the sport and the question of drugs. The unwritten rule up to now appears to have been to keep the dosages low, to keep it from being too obvious. Golf can’t afford a Lance Armstrong-type blow-up, because it would threaten to take down all the top dogs of the past 20 years, including poster-boy Tiger and his PED-protege Rory. But Bryson, being the protected rich boy he is, figured why stop there. Why not blow up like a drug-filled balloon,

adding a full hundred yards to his drives, since no one would dare confront him. Daddy would pay off anyone who got in the way, as he always had.

That is just a guess, but it isn’t based on nothing. I know how these guys think, because—to a much lesser extent—I have been around them. I have never been blessed to hang out with the uber-privileged like the Stewarts, Grahams, and DeChambeaus, but in my younger days as a tournament golfer I met some of their lesser cousins from the sticks. The crybaby mama’s boys in their Jaguars who expected everything to be handed to them on silver platters. That is one reason (of many) I quit the sport before I was out of highschool. I was caught between these pampered pussies from the families “above” me and the white-trash cheaters below me, so there was no chance of comraderie or fellow-feeling from the beginning. I had one friend on the team—and he knows who he is—but he didn’t last much longer than I did. Like me, he dropped out of the rat race after college and now lives up the road.

Bryson’s win is a dangerous precedent, since it will signal the other guys that they have to up the doses as well, to keep up. Give it a year or two and you have the Tour de France all over again. Until then the USGA and PGA will look away, since the sponsors are all for stuff like this. Just think how sales of PEDs and protein shakes will rise after this! Look for Gold Standard to have their own tour event by 2022. This is the New World Order, on the golf course.

After I finished this paper, I tripped across DeChambeau’s victory press conference at youtube, where this is explicitly confirmed. The first thing they do is put a protein shake in front of him, right in front of the trophy. Then he asks for an Orgain. I had to look that up, but it is another protein shake manufacturer. Immediately after that he says to the camera, “I have so many sponsors”. Then he does a plug for Puma, mentioning his dad’s “volition” T-shirt. So even his dad has sponsors. More reason to think this was all scripted, and I don’t just mean this press conference. Then Bryson plugs Gary Woodland, who has the same sponsors. Gary Woodland, who won last year’s Open, of course. But that’s not suspicious. Next, he tells the tale of going to school without any lunch money, just proving this is all from a bad script. They must really think we are stupid, to think we would believe this. I literally couldn’t watch anymore.

I did watch snippets of the Open online, but couldn’t stay tuned for long. I am not entertained by the freak show. It was not only DeChambeau’s (who I will call The Sham from now on) monstrous body and swing that hurt my eyes, it was so much else. On one hole, Dustin Johnson and his caddy spent almost five minutes lining up an eight-foot putt, with the caddy twice straddling the line in several places. I thought maybe Dustin was going to putt between his legs, as he pretended to be a windmill. After all that jacking around, Dustin missed the putt.

Then there was Matthew Wolff’s ridiculous swing, with that dipsy-doodle hip flip, and that silly loop in his swing like he was lassoing a calf at the rodeo. Seriously, a swing like that is a sign of mental illness. Didn’t his father ever say to him, “Son, you have to quit that shit, you look like a ninny. You’ll be laughed off the course.” I mean, really, any sane person would say to himself, “Hey, I don’t need to do that, and it looks idiotic, so why not just cut it out”. But once again, I would guess that, being a Wolff, he felt he didn’t need to. These people live in a bubble created by Mommy and Daddy, which insulates them from any self-awareness. We have seen that from their cousins in other fields like art, science, and government, where they somehow manage to convince themselves they are fascinating in some way, despite all evidence to the contrary. This is just how it looks in golf.

The only thing I enjoyed was seeing these overpaid and overfeted nambies hack it around for 18 holes. The US Open is one of the few times these guys have to play a course that isn’t set up to coddle them.

They actually had to face a bit of weather and some lies that weren’t perfect. They also didn’t have a gallery to block all their worst shots or throw them back in the fairway. Still, I didn’t notice any out-of- bounds. Most courses normal people play have out-of-bounds all over the place. They were also allowed to play in twosomes, which prevented anyone from noticing how slow they were playing. If they had played in foursomes, they couldn’t have finished in under six hours.

Once again, I know this from experience. As I said, the only time I played seriously was in highschool, and back then my buddies and I would walk and play in about three hours, even in a threesome or foursome. When I was 16 I shot my first 69. I grew up on a fairly long and difficult course, so going under 70 wasn’t easy. And I bogeyed three of the last four holes, due to fading light (or maybe it was a choke). Anyway, my father entered me in the Club Championship due to that. You will say that was a stretch, since what chance does a kid have to win the Club Championship. If you are under 18, you have to play in the championship flight. But you see my dad had won the Club Championship at 17, and again at 21. They even changed the rules after he won the second time, so that members’ sons didn’t qualify. So his entering me wasn’t out of left field. The idea had some pedigree. Problem was, things had changed since his time. He won in match play, which goes very fast. Match play is a two- some, obviously, so it tends to move along. But by my time, the tournament was medal play. And because I was just a kid, the pro put me in a foursome no one else wanted to play in: the slowest, most obnoxious guys in the tournament. It was excruciating. The round took 6.5 hours, more than twice as long as I was used to. By the end I was ready to tear my hair out. I didn’t break 80 either day.

I still prefer to play pretty fast. Just for fun, I timed myself yesterday. I played nine holes by myself, with no one in front of me. It took about 1.25 hours. I shot 35 from the back tees, on a course with a 73.8 rating. On the longest hole on the nine, I hit driver-four iron. I hit the drive 330. How do I hit the ball so far at my age? Drugs, protein shakes, weight training? No. I have a 48-inch driver with a 7-degree loft. And yes, I mostly hit it in the fairway. I have to here, since there is no rough, just unplayable sagebrush. If the pros think hitting out of four-inch rough is bad, they should try hitting out of two-foot-high sagebrush. Or sandtraps with no sand in them. My guess is they don’t practice that shot.

I have had people ask me how I maintain my game without ever playing. This was the third nine holes I have played this year. I haven’t yet played 18 in 2020, and that isn’t so rare. I normally play just a few times a year, when friends or family can get me on a course. I can’t afford to play otherwise. Yes, I could afford a cheap muni green fee of under $30, but there aren’t any cheap muni courses around here. But the answer to the question is that I maintain by changing as little as possible, in my clubs and in myself. I stay thin and limber by riding my bicycle and doing yoga. So I still have loose shoulders and a fast swing speed, even in my late 50s. Nothing much has changed in the past 40 years. Plus, most guys my age are swinging around a lot of injuries. I see it on the practice tee, where I can usually list a guy’s previous injuries just based on his swing quirks. The only major injury I have had was three years ago, when I crashed my motorbike. But luckily I came out the far end of that no worse for wear. It is the same with my clubs, which haven’t changed much either. I have the same putter and irons I had in highschool. That’s right, you read that right. My irons are from 1969, so they were hand-me- downs even then. Wilson Staff Dynapower. I have reshafted them, adding half an inch and taking them up to D6, but they are otherwise the same. Never been rechromed. They only get played about four times a year, often less. The set includes a 2-iron and a 1-iron, and I keep them in my bag and love to hit them. I prefer hitting long irons to hitting woods. I hit the 1-iron very high.* I have never owned a hybrid and never will. The only update to my bag is the long driver, which I need to play on the newer long courses. In highschool, I hit my 43.5 inch persimmon driver about 290, but I have lost about ten yards over the years. The long graphite driver more than makes up for that, putting me back

over 300. But the point I was making is that because nothing has changed in my game, even my clubs, I have had to make zero adjustments in the past 40 years. I locked into a game at age 16 and stuck with it. There was no reason to change it, that I could see. Even my short game stays pretty sharp. I tend to get up and down most of the time. The reason for that is that I never bought a lot of wedges. With all those long irons in my bag, I had no room for three or four wedges. So my short game is simple. I chip with a wedge and pitch with a sand wedge, and that’s it. I only have to memorize two basic shots there, not a dozen like Phil Mickelson.

So you can see why I would not be too entertained watching these tour guys take five minutes to choose a club or line up a putt. You may know that The Sham is one of the worst in this regard. He has been called out by Brooks Koepka for his slow play. Before The Sham bulked up, he and Koepka almost came to blows—and who knows, maybe now that The Sham is on a constant roid rage, they will.

Being a guy that the rabbithole likes to call to, I thought of one other thing. Koepka was almost the only one who declined to play in the Open this year, allegedly due to Covid. But maybe. . . maybe he didn’t want to watch The Sham win. Koepka got second to Gary Woodland last year at Pebble Beach, in a tournament that looked scripted to me. Maybe Koepka didn’t feel like playing that part again.

This all just goes to say I don’t buy all the Tour hype. It should be obvious that these guys aren’t on Tour because they are such great athletes. They are on Tour because they are from the right families. They grew up playing golf all day every day, and were sponsored from the time they were out of diapers. They know nothing but golf and couldn’t hold a conversation about anything else for five minutes. I have met a few of them and they are beyond boring. They are one-dimensional. Even regarding golf, many of them are sub-intelligent. David Feherty called one of them “the imbecile” on Sunday, though I am not sure what that was about. Seems a little revelatory to me. The Sham appears to be gunning for that title, and I predict he will soon regret bulking up. Even if he isn’t bounced from the tour in some sort of Lance Armstrong spectacle after failing a drug test, he will find that such gains are only temporary. You end up paying for them later. Ask Mickey Rourke or Carrot-top or Madonna (or Tiger) or a thousand other people who thought drugs were the way to go. As with coke or speed or anything else, you have a few months or years on fast-forward, and then a crash. This may conflict with The Sham’s plan to live to 140.

I don’t think all the fads will work for him either, including the single-plane swing. That might work for some old guys with back problems, but I don’t see it as the swing of the future. It was supposedly invented by Moe Norman, who we are told had the most perfect swing ever. Since he only had half a swing, and hit his drive about 180, that is quite a claim. In fact, I have looked at Moe’s swing on youtube, and he has a loop in it. How is a loop a single plane? Someone doesn’t know much about physics here. So why is Norman still promoted to such astonishing degrees, years after his death? My guess is because he is from the famous Norman family, maybe even related to Greg Norman. Otherwise I can’t explain it. I certainly have no desire to pattern my swing on Moe Norman, or to listen to him yap like a fat little parrot.

Also interesting to know is that this US Open wasn’t open at all. It was closed to those with exemptions and invitations, so that may be the new (ab)normal. There was no qualifying for this tournament. None of the amateurs qualified, and none of the pros either. The PGA Tour has always been closed to everyone except sons of the Families, and we see that solidifying even more here. Q- school has always been rigged, and as we saw with Payne Stewart** all other avenues are probably rigged as well. That is the way the world works, so why expect anything different here? Until

September, the Tour had no Monday qualifying for tournaments, and though they are back to four qualifiers now, I expect we may see that drop even lower. They have added a pre-qualifying round and a second entry fee to prevent outsiders from hopping the fence, so in the near future you may have to be born onto the Tour.

Some newcomers will ask why I care: I never tried to qualify for a tournament, so why do I seem so bitter about it? My regular readers will know why. It is because although I didn’t hit this wall in golf, I did end up hitting it in several other fields, including art and physics. In art I hit the low ceiling very early and very hard, that crash determining everything that came after, including my now infamous writing career. If art hadn’t been killed on purpose years before I was born, I wouldn’t be on this page now.

But back to the matter at hand. Like a lot of these people, The Sham claims to be from poverty. He supposedly had to copy his highschool physics book by hand because his parents couldn’t afford it. Right. They could afford for him to play golf everyday, but couldn’t afford a textbook for school. Just so you know, his middle name is Aldrich, a name he got from his Dad, who also has four names. As a little reminder, John D. Rockefeller’s wife’s name was Abby Aldrich. She is the one who founded the Museum of Modern Art, so you begin to see why I am here today. Abby was from the Aldrich family of bankers, including Senator Nelson Aldrich of Rhode Island and his son Winthrop. Winthrop’s mother was Abby

Also see Major General Thomas Aldrich, who just died in 2019 in Roseville, CA, not far from where

The Sham was born.

So it looks to me like everyone on the Tour is Jewish. Same thing we found with all the Presidents, all the Supreme Court Justices, all the movie stars, all the physicists, all the famous artists, and everyone in the media. Everyone famous is Jewish, from a limited number of interconnecting lines going back for millennia. They are the ones that get all the promotion, in all fields. But they don’t want you to know that, so a large percentage have to pretend not to be Jewish. They pretend to be Christian or Buddhist or something. Which explains all the Christian posing on the PGA Tour. It always seemed forced to me, and a bit overdone. Remember, Payne Stewart himself was part of this, with his famous WWJD bracelet. I have proved that Stewart was CIA and his plane crash was faked, which means his Christianity was probably fake as well. And if a large part of his career was an act, what is to stop us from assuming the same of the rest of these pros?

*For the one or two of you who want to know, the secret to hitting long irons high is two-fold. One, you have to be a picker, not a digger. In other words, you have to catch the ball right at the bottom of the swing, not on the downswing. To do that, you have to play the ball at the middle of your stance or forward a bit, like a fairway wood. Second, with any shaft length over 39”, you should play a regular shaft, not a stiff or X shaft. This gives you the extra kick at impact, and allows you to feel the clubhead. Feeling the clubhead means you can feel if you are off during the swing, and make tiny corrections coming through impact. Stiffer shafts prevent that. In my opinion, everyone is playing shafts that are at least one step too stiff. Pros used to play stiff but many now play X. It is very difficult to hit long irons that are stiff or X, since to pick them off the ground and hit them high, you have to time the swing perfectly. Think about trying to hit a ball on the upswing without a tee. Almost impossible, right? Well, no, but you can’t do it if you don’t know where the clubhead is. You need a softer shaft. I don’t really know why pros have moved to stiffer shafts, but I have a theory. As with almost everything else in a human life, it is mostly a pose. It is based on the word “stiff”, which I hope I don’t have to explain to you. Men feel they have to have a stiffer shaft, while women golfers don’t. Nuff said.

On the flip side of that, my feeling is that one of The Sham’s tricks is a whippy shaft. I have seen some stop- action photos of his downswing with the driver, and the shaft is bent far more than you would expect. So while these guys are claiming to have 2X and 3X shafts in their drivers, they may actually have regular or even whippy shafts. The whippier the shaft, the more clubhead speed you can generate. Whippy shafts are hard to control, which is why drivers went to stiffer shafts to start with. But this may be why The Sham is using the short, upright, one plane swing: it takes a lot of the spray effect of the whippy shaft out of the picture. A classic golf swing has two separate uncoils that have to be synchronized: the arm/body coil and the wrist coil. The Sham’s new swing simplifies the first part as much as possible, with much less body turn and a shorter arm swing. He is mostly just wrist popping it out there, backed up by increased strength in his arms—allowing him to create arm speed without a long swing or a lot of body synching. You may say it seems to be working for him, but I predict it won’t last. It will be hard to maintain, since the bulk actually brings in another variable. You don’t want more variables. What I mean is, he will have to maintain exactly that level of bulk/strength, since if the arm strength varies, it will throw off his wrist timing. With a normal person, strength doesn’t vary, since it is just a factor of what you eat and what you do. My strength has varied very little over 40 years, which is why my timing has stayed the same. But The Sham has a drug cocktail he now has to keep fine-tuned as well. If he gets bigger or smaller he will have to change his timing.

**Stewart failed Q-school, but we are told he “earned his tour card in 1982”. Earned it how? We aren’t told, though they imply he entered via the Asian Tour somehow. Since the Asian PGA Tour didn’t start until 1994, that is vague. Before that, it was the Asian Circuit, which was granted exemptions into some major western tournaments, but which had no formal link to the PGA or USGA.

http://mileswmathis.com/decham.pdf