U.S. Open 2025: The secret everyone misses about U.S. Open carnage

OAKMONT, Pa. — This is the platonic ideal of the U.S. Open. Biblical in its Old Testament fury, where hope is offered as sacrifice and hubris meets its inevitable humbling. Where the rough is rough, where the greens turn to toast and roll faster than gym floors, slick enough that even gravity seems to accelerate. Where the scoreboard is painted funeral black, as if the USGA knows what's coming. Where the only place that feels remotely safe is bellied up to the clubhouse bar afterward, nursing something to dull the pain.

This is Oakmont, where for one week every few years, the world's best players are stripped of their superhuman veneer and made mortal.

“I don't think people turn the TV on to watch some of the guys just hit like a 200-yard shot on the green,” Xander Schauffele remarked on Monday at Oakmont. “I think they turn on the U.S. Open to see a guy shooting eight over and suffer. That's part of the enjoyment of playing in the U.S. Open for viewers.”

In any other sport, systematic failure would be unwatchable—a football game where quarterbacks can't complete a pass or a basketball run where there’s a lid on the rim and it’s closed violate every principle of entertainment. But at the U.S. Open, misery becomes must-see television. The appeal works at multiple levels, each more psychologically complex than the last. There's the schadenfreude—watching them bleed, seeing this game they make look effortless reveal its true nature. There's the therapeutic comfort—if doubles and triples and worse can happen to guys who've dedicated their lives to perfecting this craft, maybe we shouldn't flagellate ourselves over our weekend warrior disasters. And there's something philosophical in its democratic cruelty—if it can humble them, then we're all just fellow travelers united in our shared helplessness.

Yet while that's the romantic delusion we cling to—this notion that struggle creates kinship—the truth is weeks like this only underline the expanse between them and us.

They may bleed, but they bleed in technicolor. They may stumble, but they stumble with poise; anyone who’s watched Jordan Spieth understands maintaining a grace that transforms possible failures into something approaching art. This is what separates the professional from the pretender—not the absence of struggle, but the poetry found within it.

Oakmont members like to boast their greens are so fast that the USGA has to throttle them back for championship play. These are the fastest putting surfaces in professional golf, slick as January ice and twice as treacherous. There will be three-putts that roll like pinballs and four-jacks that would make hackers weep with recognition. But our weekend foursomes would watch helplessly as golf balls careened past holes, through fringe, and into whatever lies beyond the realm of reasonable recovery.

The rough is where most disasters are born and bred. During practice rounds, some players were rationing their approach shots from the thick grass, preserving their swings, their bodies, their nerves. It sounds comical until you remember Phil Mickelson once injured himself here during a casual scouting trip and emerged to declare the grass itself "dangerous," as if Oakmont's rough was some kind of botanical villain. And the rough doesn't always announce its malevolence. It's not uniformly thick and lush and gnarly. Occasionally it whispers sweet lies, presenting opportunities that look reasonable, almost inviting. Rising star Jackson Koivun discovered this on Monday. He was deciding between going with 6- or 7-iron for an approach on the 15th hole. He went with 6. The ball went all of four feet. That’s Oakmont’s trick, blurring the line between success and failure until even the world's best second-guess their most fundamental instincts.

To be fair, you will see plenty of players laying up or punching out sideways from the thick stuff, accepting their fate with the resignation of the wise. But for us amateurs, that hack-it-out strategy would be the mandatory play every single time, and there's little guarantee our next shot wouldn't find the same rough, or worse. What looks like a bogey for Scottie Scheffler becomes a snowman for the rest of us.

The professionals possess knowledge that extends far beyond our understanding. They know precisely where to lay up, calculating to the exact yardage that gives them the best chance to save par from an impossible situation. They know how to stop bogeys from bleeding into doubles, doubles from becoming disasters. They know how to compartmentalize, to move on, to bounce back from catastrophe with the emotional control of a surgeon. Amateurs? It's all chaos. We're only vaguely aware of where we want to go but have no idea how to get there.

As for what they are doing, much of it comes from pure talent and skill honed over decades. Distance matters here more than anywhere else in professional golf. Hitting out of Oakmont's rough with 140 yards remaining is challenging enough. Doing it with 200 and change left, to a green running close to 15 on the Stimp, is impossible. The difference lies in raw speed, creating enough force to slice through the tangles that would grab our clubs like quicksand and leave us looking for where our ball went, if it went anywhere at all. They know how to play defense on approach. These are big greens, yet large parts of the surfaces won't hold. The key is understanding where to miss, where not to go and how not to go there. On the rare opportunity you have the greenlight, you have to make the most of it.

Yet the mental game separates them even more dramatically. When we face a difficult shot, doubt creeps in immediately—our grip tightens, our swing lengthens, our confidence evaporates. They step up to the same shot with a process, a routine, a belief system built through countless of hours of practice and thousands of competitive rounds. They've been in these situations before, not just at Oakmont but in situations around the world where conditions test every aspect of their games. Watch them closely this week as they navigate the minefield. Notice how they pre-shot routine never changes, whether they're hitting a comfortable wedge or attempting to advance a ball 30 yards from thick rough. Observe their body language after a poor shot—disappointed but not defeated, analytical rather than emotional. See how they manage their expectations, celebrating small victories and accepting harsh realities with equal measure.

This is what makes the U.S. Open so compelling and cruel. For four days, we get to watch the world's best players get reduced to something we recognize, and feel a fleeting sense of connection. But that connection is largely illusory. Their 75 is a masterpiece of course management and damage control; ours is often a celebration of pars mixed with explosive disasters. At Oakmont, even their struggles are superior to ours. And somehow, that makes it all the more beautiful to watch.