There are no official stats for this sort of thing, but it’s safe to assume the U.S. Open exceeds other major championships in its number of angry participants. Other tournaments dole out ample disappointment and heartbreak, both of which present opportunities for a player to look in the mirror. When a golfer is angry, that’s not usually where they turn.
According to the psychologist and author Marc Brackett, anger reflects “perceived injustice.” Brackett’s definition wasn’t specifically referring to hack-out rough or putts rolling off of greens, but perceived injustice is indeed what many golfers grapple with playing in a U.S. Open. They’re not just disappointed in themselves. They’re angry at a golf course believed to be manipulated at their expense.
“When you have a championship that comes down to either luck, or a fortuitous bounce, or sheer luck, that's not right and we are there already,” Zach Johnson said at the 2018 U.S. Open at Shinnecock Hills.
"I feel like instead of difficulty, they just go for trickiness,” Ryan Moore said of the USGA in 2010. “I think they go for a spectacle; they want some hole to draw attention and make everybody look stupid.”
If it’s a given that the USGA’s brutal setup expected at Oakmont is going to trigger a segment of golfers, a better question to ask is if that anger ever helps. History suggests otherwise. Consider some of the more notable moments of U.S. Open outbursts in recent years—Jon Rahm dropping F-bombs and slamming his clubs at Erin Hills, Phil Mickelson hitting a putt while it was still moving at Shinnecock. They’re usually by golfers headed out the door. Perhaps they were angry because they didn’t play well. It’s just as likely they didn’t play well because they were angry.
“Anger can sometimes seem unprovoked or inexplicable, but in almost every case it’s a response to what we perceive as unfair treatment,” Brackett, the director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, writes in his book Permission To Feel. “We’ve suffered an injustice of some kind, big or small, and it makes us mad.”
What makes anger particularly challenging in golf is how it factors into a game already rife with uncertainty. Most players accept that the game is subject to bounces, and bad ones are inevitable. But on balance, their belief is better execution and strategy will yield better results.
The U.S. Open is one time they're not so sure. It’s not that skill doesn’t matter, otherwise the list of Open winners would be more eclectic than a selection of some of the premier players in the game. But when greens repel decent approach shots, or drives a few yards off line disappear into thick rough, an underlying sentiment emerges that skill isn’t enough; golfers often struggle to compartmentalize their objection to the golf course setup with the focus required to solve it.
“ Oakmont's going to be a great example of this, because when people feel offended, upset, angry, whatever it is, they voice it because they need to voice the dissonance in their brain,” the sports psychologist Bhrett McCabe said. “A lot of times there's a way to solve the puzzle, but a lot of times what they're actually saying is they don't believe that they have a plan to face the challenge. That's the trap.”
The trap is not the anger, but the feeling of powerlessness that it reflects. If a golfer is irate over a pin placement, the advice isn’t to tell them to love it. But they do need to be careful not to overreact.
“ It doesn't really matter what you're feeling. What matters is your response to the feeling,” Brackett said in an interview. “You can be angry and still do a great job.”
Kohjiro Kinno
In other sports, this is simpler. As Brackett notes, anger is a higher-energy emotion, which is why a football player in an ornery mood might hit harder than if they’re feeling serene. Even in golf, there are the occasional “red-ass” tee shots when you three-putt the previous green, stand up and smack your longest drive of the day. But good golf depends on more than adrenaline, and high-energy emotion also makes it difficult to think strategically, or to two-putt from 50 feet.
As a solution, experts like Brackett and McCabe advocate paying attention to your emotions enough to know how to manage them. “Name it so you can tame it” is the popular psychological term, and in their own indirect way, champions in recent years have all mastered a version. The defining shot of Bryson DeChambeau’s win last year at Pinehurst No. 2 was his tricky long bunker shot on the 18th hole, but right before it, he had to punch out from under a tree, with a limb hanging over his backswing. DeChambeau admitted he was concerned he was going to hurt himself on the shot; then he said he wanted to be anywhere other than the bunker. “One of the worst places I could have been,” he said. Another player might have unraveled from there, but DeChambeau shifted to strategy.
“Every time I got over the ball, ‘Just focus,’ ” he said he told himself. “'You've done this before. You can do it again.'”
Simple as it sounds, Brackett says self-talk like the kind DeChambeau employed at Pinehurst is an essential tool when trying to regulate your emotions. And it doesn’t take a PhD for others to recognize its importance.
“The more you let your mind dwell on negatives, of whatever type, the larger they grow and the greater the risk that you will convert them into excuses,” Jack Nicklaus, a winner of four U.S. Open, said in his 1997 book, My Story. “I have preferred to save my energy for finding solutions to problematic conditions, rather than waste it on whining.”