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Complain all you want about the course setup, a controversial rules interpretation or the weather, but for the second straight year, the United States Golf Association put the players in position for one heck of a show at the U.S. Open.
Following Bryson DeChambeau's walkoff up-and-down at Pinehurst to defeat a despondent Rory McIlroy last year, journeyman J.J. Spaun gave golf fans an inspiring, emotional encore at Oakmont Country Club, draining a 64-footer - the longest putt of the tournament - to finish birdie-birdie and capture his first major championship for only his second career PGA Tour victory. It was a spectacle made memorable by the chaos of a wet and wild Sunday. At one point on the back nine, there was a five-way tie for the lead.
“Sport is at its best when there’s chaos, and today we had chaos…Chaos meant unbelievable, unmissable, you couldn’t pull your eyes off the screen,” Paul McGinley said on Live From on Golf Channel.
Spaun started with five straight 5s, including a rotten break on the short par-4 2nd hole where his approach struck the flagstick on a bounce and careened backwards off the front of the green. He ultimately shot a 40 on the front and looked like he would fade from contention. Instead, he used a mid-round rain delay to reset. His inward nine of 32 was nothing short of heroic. His piped drive onto the 17th green and the putt at the last are the kind of clutch shots that will be replayed forever. If you were like us - watching from the couch - that final round felt almost as compelling as Rory McIlroy's career-grand-slam-winning Masters earlier this year.
It turns out that we didn't need a star-studded leaderboard at the 2025 U.S. Open to be thoroughly entertained. A bunch of unlikely names and America's most demanding course were more than enough. “It was insane and intense, excruciating and exciting, messy and memorable,” Rich Lerner added on Live From in the aftermath.
Here are our takeaways from the third major of the year:
Oakmont's hack-it-out setup
Jason Scott Deegan: Heading into Sunday, social media was abuzz with fan reactions that Oakmont was boring, soulless and no fun to watch (or play). I couldn't disagree more. I loved the carnage. If the heavy rough and penal architecture is what it takes to challenge the players at majors, then so be it.
So many top players like Rory McIlroy and Scottie Scheffler didn't play well because they didn't adjust their attitudes and expectations to the conditions. Oakmont requires sound decision-making and even better execution. Bogeys will happen. Layups off the tee or out of bunkers and rough are necessary. Players are too used to making a lot of birdies and golf being easy for them. We saw Rory smash a tee marker and throw a club. We witnessed Scottie get into an animated discussion on the range with his swing coach. Both still finished among the top 20, even if neither was a key to the weekend's action. This is the type of frustration we amateurs feel every time we play. It's a relief to see the best players in the world struggle with the same demons once in a while.
Tim Gavrich: Jason, I couldn't agree more. Oakmont felt like a cure for a recent run of U.S. Open setups that, while often compelling, have felt just a little bit safe. If it wasn't the best U.S. Open of recent memory (the heavyweight slugfest and late drama of 2024 will be hard to beat for a long time), it was definitely the most U.S. Open since 2013 - a true war of attrition where a narrow, rough-heavy course gradually sucked the life out of the field until one golfer was left standing. I thought the rain would make Oakmont easier and less compelling, and while I hope the weather will by drier in 2033, I was very impressed by how the course stood up.
Did the final score under par matter?
JSD: Having played Oakmont a month before the championship in similar conditions - we got poured on multiple times - I was actively rooting for a winner over par. That hope seemed to fade with a deluge Friday night, softening the course for Saturday's third round. But the downpours Sunday reeked havoc, taking away the advantage the wet conditions afforded Saturday. At various points during the final round, I was rooting for Adam Scott first, then Carlos Ortiz and finally, it was easy to switch loyalties to Spaun. He was so gutsy and clutch that he deserved to conquer Oakmont by staying under par.
TG: The 2025 edition broke a streak of six U.S. Opens where the winning score was 6 or more under par. And while I'm not generally a big par-hawk, the U.S. Open is the one tournament where I make an exception. I want the winning score of the U.S. Open to be close to par or slightly over. That level of rigor has become so different from what professional golfers on a regular basis that it deserves to be the standard at least once per year. It takes a different mentality to accept a 73 as a good or even great round of golf on occasion than it does to consider a 66 a disappointment. As we saw time and again this weekend, most professional golfers are constitutionally unable to play conservatively and tactfully. Once a year, it is fascinating to see greed and aggression not just challenged by a golf course, but mocked and dismissed.
Did the USGA handle the weather correctly?
JSD: Throughout the back nine, the NBC broadcast showed a course riding the line between playable and not. Justin Thomas chimed in with the same thoughts.
Man…. This course looking a little questionable to play right now
— Justin Thomas (@JustinThomas34) June 15, 2025
The showers that forced an earlier delay returned, soaking some spots to the point of being too wet to hit quality shots. Sam Burns, the overnight leader, fell apart, making double from a low area in the 15th fairway that he thought should be a free drop. He pleaded his case to two different USGA officials, showing how saturated the ground was near his ball with multiple practice swings that resulted in splashes. But because no water was visible, his requests were denied. He yanked the shot into thick rough left of the green and never recovered. It felt like the wrong decision.
TG: I'm going to side with the USGA rules officials here. They granted plenty of temporary water (née "casual water") relief during the round, but clearly Burns was not bringing water up around his shoes when taking an ordinary stance before hitting the shot. Shifting back and forth and pressing one's feet down to well up water does not work; neither does swiping one's club agross the ground to send water flying. The Rules of Golf can be your friend, but not always. The bigger issue is that through 63 holes, Burns had looked like the second coming of Dustin Johnson in 2016. But his double-bogey on 11 was the beginning of the end of his challenge, and the incident on 15 was the nail in his chances.
2025 U.S. Open: final takes
TG: Years like 2025 are why I go back and forth between declaring the U.S. Open or the Open Championship my favorite major. The willingness of the USGA to push professional golfers - an increasingly entitled and whiny class of athlete - to their breaking point is tremendously admirable because not only does it bring the pros down a peg, it reminds fans that adversity is tremendously compelling in sports in large part because it is so rare. The USGA does not set out to win popularity contests - witness their and the R&A's noble efforts to regulate golf equipment to the chagrin of manufacturers and golfers alike. Instead, they lean into a set of principles and traditions that they believe are worth preserving even if they are not entirely in vogue. People who want golf to last centuries beyond this point should applaud the U.S. Open as a counterpoint to change that coddles.
On a more player-oriented note, Bob MacIntyre has become one of my favorite professional golfers of the last generation. He's gritty, he's authentic and, most importantly, he's a lefty. We southpaws still have yet to capture a career grand slam, and if the man from Oban's performance at Oakmont is any indication, he should be the first of us to win a U.S. Open soon. Perhaps he'll do it in 2027 at Pebble Beach, 100 years after Tommy Armour last brought the trophy back to Scotland.
JSD: I used to think Pebble Beach was my favorite U.S. Open venue, but Oakmont's modern transformation by Gil Hanse won me over. (Another factor: The fans and the players probably see Pebble Beach too much to really appreciate it.) The other big takeaway is how important it is to have a drivable, risk-reward short par 4 in the final 5 holes of a major championship venue.
With the 17th derailing Tyrrell Hatton's chances, and cementing Spaun's charge, the final stretch wouldn't have been nearly as compelling. The 17th is the perfect marriage of playable for the members every day and dynamic and volatile for the pros. Without it, we wouldn't have enjoyed one of the most memorable U.S. Open Sundays of the last decade.
Comments (5)
I enjoyed reading the three other comments about this article and can see the validity in each, and suggest that the editors write an article, if they see fit, about the pros and cons of how “easy” the pro tour–and its courses–is for today’s players.
As for “ratings, ratings, ratings”, I will add a few points to clarify my beliefs. Doubtless the USGA looks at other factors besides just ratings when deciding whether to finish any tournament on Monday; that is factual and cannot be argued. What is really at stake with ratings is advertising revenues, as advertisers are trying to gauge the extent of their “reach.” One recent example of their power was the viewership at this year’s PGA Championship of about 5 million viewers on Sunday, which was nearly as high as this U. S. Open. Contrast this to 1.5 million viewers on the Monday playoff of the 2025 Players Championship (which would be essentially comparable to a major finish/playoff after Sunday). Clearly, this is cause and effect: the tournament sponsors, producers, and managers (the USGA) want to keep the whole of the final round on Sunday, predominantly because they DO NOT want to part with various monetary revenues, the largest of which comes from the Sunday audience.
Commenting on the final round last Monday evening, Tony Kornheiser (again, of PTI) opined, ““I believe they should have finished [the U.S. Open] Monday…“I believe the USGA did not want that to happen because they wanted the Father’s Day audience on television, and between the hours of 7pm and 8pm with no competition at all from the NHL or the NBA.”
What the pros do and where they do it has become so different from what ordinary golfers do on ordinary courses that it has become laughable. Why not just call it the Golf Show and trot out the show ponies every weekend. Oh, that already happens and they call it LIV.
I'm glad they didn't postpone it. The course looked in good enough shape to me. It's nice to see the players struggle for once. They always get to play in perfect conditions. I like to see them frustrated. That's how a US Open should be.
My feelings about this 2025 U.S. Open were ambivalent, though the events of the week touched on two main yet contrasting themes: it was essentially unexciting–because it was so penal–up until the last day, when an improbable story line prevailed. And J.J. Spaun certainly emerged as a star. On Friday, though, Michael Wilbon (on “Pardon the Interruption”) had perceptively noted that “The course was the star,” since, at that point, there were few, if any, household names on page one of the the leaderboard.
Paul McGinley’s comment about the “chaos” of the last day was intriguing but also a bit hyperbolic: golf isn’t all that interesting if the chaos leads to an excess of capriciousness. I found it telling that yesterday one of the NBC commentators described how the course treated Adam Scott and Sam Burns after the bad weather: it was “kicking them around.” It was even more than that: the course + setup + bad weather equaled too much unpredictability. Why was play not postponed until Monday? Ratings, ratings, ratings.
In an ironic way, there WAS a definite order to the proceedings: the course systematically crushed and spat out every aspirant to the trophy, one by one, with the exceptions of Robert MacIntyre and J.J.Spaun–who happened to pull his game together and play with some precision, not to mention heroics, after the break. Bad weather or not, it seemed an inevitability that Oakmont would eventually decimate the field, as the outlying scores of the leaders would regress to the mean. Give the players credit for at least making it a genuine battle of man versus nature–both contrived and unruly.
But it could have been a better battle. What I also noticed was quite a good deal of unnecessarily aggressive play throughout the round, which seems typical of the modern player, even from those whom you might think of as conservative. I think the old “let others make the mistakes [in majors]” philosophy of Nicklaus would have served most of them better. While there are a few spots where calculated risk makes sense (e.g. the 17th), Oakmont was not a course to be trifled with. In the end, even at that, it was J.J’s Spaun’s inspired putting, his strong finish, and his great patience that still managed to win the long and strange day.
It’s not just about ratings, ratings, ratings. The logistics of an extra day are staggering. Volunteers are needed, staff and players have travel plans for Monday that need to be changed, and fans at the event on Sunday want to see a winner.