OAKMONT, Pa. — Now comes the hard part.
Sam Burns held strong on Saturday, handling the nerves of the 36-hole lead at the U.S. Open and parlaying it into the 54-hole lead with a gritty third-round 69. At four under, he's a shot ahead of both his final-round partner Adam Scott and his partner Saturday, the equally determined J.J. Spaun. Together with Viktor Hovland, they're the only four players under par heading into Sunday. Barring a charge from the bottom reminiscent of Johnny Miller, it seems overwhelmingly likely that one of the quartet will lift the U.S. Open championship trophy.
Oakmont will demand its price in grit and resilience and the ability to stomach the terror of mistakes, but through it all, Burns might have the one weapon that the others can't match: his putter.
First, the broad perspective: Look at the PGA Tour's Strokes Gained/putting stats, and there's Burns, in first place. A month ago, when World No. 1 Scottie Scheffler was asked which part of his game he would trade with another pro, he didn't hesitate to namecheck his friend:
“I remember when we played the Presidents Cup in 2022, it was like he was putting to a hole that was the size of a basketball hoop,” Scheffler said. “So I do a lot of practice rounds with Sam, and he’s a tremendous putter. I would trade that with him.”
The statistical bona fides, and the respect of his peers, are beyond question. It's a massive advantage for him wherever he goes, but at Oakmont, with its lightning-fast greens and almost unreadable breaks, that advantage might be more exaggerated than anywhere else. It's simple math: If putting is your greatest strength, you want the course to have difficult greens so that your skill stands out even more against your competitors. Plus, there's a familiarity to Oakmont that gives him a further leg up.
"I think the golf course I play at home, Squire Creek, it's a [Tom] Fazio design. It's big surfaces and lots of slope," he said. "So, I think I'm kind of used to having a 15- or 20-footer that may break five or six feet. I like that kind of artistic ability to kind of see the break.
"These greens are very challenging," he continued. "I think it's not so much the raw speed of these greens; it's the adjusted speed with how much slope there is. You can have some putts on like No. 1 for example, putting from the front of that green to the back is … it must roll a 30, and putting from the back to the front it probably rolls a 6. It's just how much slope is in that green."
Burns was master of those greens on Friday, when he gained more than three strokes on the field and turned in one of the greatest U.S. Open rounds ever to charge up the leaderboard. In Saturday's third round, he was on the job again, and in every possible way. Sometimes he was lagging from great distances to give himself a bogey-saving tap-in (No. 2), sometimes he was burying six footers to save par (Nos. 7 and 14), and sometimes he was claiming the rarest of Oakmont gifts, a birdie, with a seven-footer (No. 13). He had just one hiccup, a missed six-footer on the par-3 16th, but he finished his round with a grueling two-putt from 57 feet to preserve the one-shot lead. He also joined Ryan Fox as the only player to go 54 holes without a single three-putt … and believe us, there have been a lot of those to go around.
Come Sunday, that skill with the flat stick is going to be somewhere beyond critical, for both attacking and damage control, and it's hard not to think that it may give the five-time PGA Tour winner who has just one top-10 in 18 career major starts the edge he needs over his competitors.
There is one caveat, though, and it threatens the whole premise of the argument. Spaun, though not as skilled a putter as Burns week to week, has been red-hot on Oakmont's greens and actually leads the field in SG/Putting (though Burns out-performed him on Saturday). Still, when it comes to a single round, you have to give the nod to the player with the greater résumé throughout the year, and that honor belongs to Burns. Sunday will easily be the toughest round he's played in his life, but if Burns manages to survive the test and capture his first major, there's no doubt that 28-year-old’s greatest asset in the journey will be the club he holds on the greens.