Some compelling storylines for the 119th U.S. Open

More so than the usual week in/week out PGA Tour events, the majors lend themselves to speculation about possible outcomes well in advance of the event itself. With the biggest of the three North American majors, the U.S. Open,  just around the corner, three compelling potential story lines arise:

• Brooks Koepka wins his third consecutive U.S. Open (and second major in a row)
• Phil Mickelson completes his “career slam” with a U.S. Open win (after six second-place finishes)
• Tiger racks up his sixteenth major

In an informal poll that I conducted on Twitter, Phil completing his slam was ranked “most compelling” storyline by 39% of respondents, narrowly beating out a Koepka three-peat, at 37%; only 24% ranked a possible 16th major for Tiger the most compelling story. When asked what they thought of the likelihood of any of these storylines coming to fruition, my Tweeps ranked Koepka as the most likely to come through, with 63% picking the three-peat; only 11% felt that Phil would come through for the win.

Let’s take a look at each of these potential headline-makers:

Brooks Koepka “three-peat” 

Brooks Koepka is on a hot streak. He has won three of the last five majors, and four of the past eight that he has played (he missed the 2018 Masters with a wrist injury). This run of major victories includes an amazing “double-double” – back-to-back wins in the U.S. Open and the PGA Championship. The inevitable question that arises is “Can he keep it up?”

To be honest, it doesn’t look good. Koepka’s only history at Pebble Beach is a T-8 in the 2016 AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am. With its small, subtly contoured greens and variable weather, Pebble is a course that rewards familiarity. The fairways have been narrowed, and skewed to take away the best angles into some of the more difficult greens, and the rough will be lush and deep. Koepka’s brute strength may get him out of some deep green next week, should the need arise, but you don’t win at Pebble—especially in U.S. Open nick—out of the rough.

Purely from a number-crunching point-of-view, the odds against a Koepka three-peat are pretty long. Winning the same event three years in a row has happened, and probably more often than most golf fans are aware of—in the post-WWII era only Gene Littler, Jack Nicklaus, Arnold Palmer, Billy Casper, Johnny Miller, Tiger Woods, Stuart Appleby, and Steve Stricker have all done it. In fact, Palmer did it twice, at the old Texas Open, and the Phoenix Open; and Tiger four times, at the Memorial, the WGC-Cadillac, and two runs of three at the WGC-Bridgestone.

As far as majors go, there have only been two “three-peats” since 1900: Willie Anderson’s run in the U.S. Open, from 1903 to 1905; and Walter Hagen’s remarkable four-year run in the PGA Championship, from 1924 to 1927. The talent pool was much smaller in those days, so there was a better (but still small) likelihood of a really dominant player going on that sort of run.

So what about Brooks? Koepka has demonstrated a remarkable affinity for the big events (coupled with a relative disdain for non-majors, where he has recorded only two PGA Tour wins: the 2015 Phoenix Open, and the 2018 CJ Cup, an offshore PGA Tour event held in South Korea), but will he pull off a three-peat in the U.S. Open and  back-to-back majors? He has already shown the capability to bust up the record books, so we will just have to wait and see.

Phil finally wins the U.S. Open

There are a number of factors weighing in both for and against Phil Mickelson finally achieving his career “slam” – a win in each of the four majors – with a victory at Pebble Beach next week. In the “For” column is his record at Pebble Beach – five wins in the AT&T Pro-Am, two in the last five years—including the 2019 event; a sentimental attachment to the course, where his maternal grandfather was one of the first batch of caddies when the course opened in 1919; and the knowledge that he is running out of time, at age 48 (turning 49 on Open Sunday), to close the door on his career Grand Slam.

Oddly enough, the last last item in the “For” column is the first one in the “Against” column. Only seven players have won a major at age 44 or older:

• Harry Vardon, 44, Open Championship – 1914
• Roberto de Vicenzo, 44, Open Championship, 1967
• Lee Trevino, 44, PGA Championship, 1984
• Jerry Barber, 45, PGA Championship, 1961
• Hale Irwin, 45, U.S. Open, 1990
• Jack Nicklaus, 46, Masters, 1986
• Julius Boros, 48, PGA Championship, 1968

This accomplishment occupies even more rarefied air than winning three of the four majors—a feat that has been achieved by 16 players in history.

Also working against Phil is his recent playing history: five missed cuts out of 13 events since the Safeway Open, in October; only two Top 10s (the AT&T win, and T-2 in the Desert Classic); and only one of the remaining finishes inside the Top 20.

A win in this U.S. Open for Phil—to close out his career slam, at the golf course where his grandfather caddied as a 13-year-old, on his 49th birthday (which is also Father’s Day) to make him the oldest to ever win a men’s major—would eclipse even Tiger’s recent Masters win as the golf story of the year, and maybe even the decade. At the end of the day on Friday, June 14th we will know if he’s got a shot (by making the cut), and if he accomplishes that, the eyes of the golf world will be watching his every move on the weekend.

Tiger gets his 16th major

There are people out there who are putting Tiger Woods at the top of their list of potential winners next week at Pebble Beach. Much of the reasoning that is being used to support this view is based on the accomplishments of a very different person than 2019 Tiger: the blowout 2000 U.S. Open at Pebble Beach, when he won with a score of 12 under par, an amazing 15 strokes ahead of second place. Some of this support for a Tiger win is based on his having won the Masters last April, and the rest is rooted in pure fanboy-ism.

From where I stand, all of these lines of reasoning are spurious.

First, there’s age. Forty-three-year-old Tiger is not 24-year-old Tiger. Sure, he just won the Masters, but the Masters was always the best bet for Tiger to notch up another major victory. It’s a course he knows well, where he had won four times before. (To be honest, he didn’t win the 2019 Masters so much as Francesco Molinari lost it with his back-nine-Sunday collapse.)

Second, there’s his history of injuries. As Indiana Jones told Marilyn, “It’s not the years, honey, it’s the mileage”. The violent action of Tiger’s golf swing has, over the years, resulted in back problems (and three corrective surgeries), knee problems, and even a stress fracture in his left tibia (the larger of the two bones in the lower leg.) Injuries add up, and athletic injuries can force changes in a motion sequence, to avoid pain or re-injury, which result in unaccustomed stress in another part of the body, leading to new injuries.

Tiger has played eight four-round events since December–who can say when (or if) the accumulated stress will catch up with some part of his battered body? One lunge at a ball buried in the deep, lush U.S. Open rough may be all it takes to push yet another tendon or ligament past its capabilities.


The fanboy enthusiasm that inundated the world of golf after Tiger’s Masters win earlier this year was tempered somewhat by his missed cut at the PGA Championship, but the embers flared again with his T9 finish at the Memorial, two weeks before the U.S. Open, when a fourth-round surge (70-72-70-67) shot him up the board from 25th to T-9, sending his fans into fits of ecstasy.

It must be remembered, however, that Tiger doesn’t really like Pebble, despite the events of June 2000. He has cited the late-in-the-day bumpiness of the poa annua greens as one reason, and the lengthy rounds typical of the pro-am format have kept him away between Opens. Taken on balance, the factors working against Tiger taking the win in the 119th U.S. Open are tipping the scales away from this Open becoming Tiger’s 16th major.

Only time will tell

All of this pre-event prognosticating may turn out to be for naught, of course. Pebble Beach has a history of turning up early-round leaders who have the media folk looking around and asking, “Who  is that guy?”, and turning to their players guides for background details—and sometimes one of those guys wins (remember Vaughn Taylor, in 2016, and Ted Potter Jr. in 2018?). And it can even happen in the U.S. Open, as it almost did in 2010, when Frenchman Gregory Havret came within a stroke of taking eventual champion Graeme McDowell to a playoff. All I know for sure is that I can hardly wait to see it all play out.