Bryson DeChambeau’s attempt to hit a hole-in-one over the house goes viral

It’s been quite a year for Bryson DeChambeau. With that bunker shot he won his second US Open, was mentioned by name by Donald Trump in his election victory speech – “We must protect our super geniuses” – and now he stands over his home in Grapevine on the 16th day of a potentially never-ending challenge, Texas to make a hole-in-one.

It started out as a bit of fun. A shot of a mat outside his £1.6million glass villa, over the roof and on to the backyard green space, seemed a nice gift for the short attention spans on TikTok and Instagram. The next day he had two shots and so on until he had 120 misses with the 15 shots of the 15th day. and he looked like a fraternity between Captain Scott and Sisyphus.

Oddly enough, interest in this deliciously pointless endeavor has dwarfed viewership for regular golf. So far, the daily highlights videos have garnered nearly 75 million views. Considering that the average Sunday TV viewership of a regular PGA Tour event in 2024 was 2.8 million, it shows the power of the new, or at least the hope, of seeing DeChambeau through the bathroom window.

To be fair to the orchestrator, this is exactly what a very successful, young, single sports star should be doing with his free time.

And people like him now. It seems like an eternity since he was doomed to whine about flying ants, cameramen, the barometric air pressure in Brooks Koepka’s head, and debate the airspeed of an unladen sparrow (I think that was him). Eddie Pepperell called him “the easy-going, single-minded goofball,” but he later apologized and DeChambeau is a breath of fresh air, hermetically sealed in a bottle made from the finest unicorn horn.

Hell, he actually expands the game. It finally happened. And while many golfers find it difficult to stop being boring in order to strengthen the brand – Tiger Woods’ recasting as gag-master-general of celebrity matches remains the height of anxiety – for a true innovator it comes naturally. You can be pretty sure that if the sport has a higher purpose, it will be DeChambeau who decides that Elon Musk is a good name for an aftershave and thus saves America.

However, frustration is spreading. So far he has tried wearing his golf cap the normal way, backwards and without a hat. He tried wearing golf shoes and flip flops. On the fifth day he muttered, “Oh, this is boring,” but it’s addictive. “I won’t stop until I’ve made it,” he said, but after hitting the flag a few times he may have made himself a hostage to fate, or at least bounced the evil off the rock garden.

“The shot distribution is going to be pretty darn good,” he added on the sixth day. “Never give up,” he vowed to himself on the tenth day. “That looks good,” he says every day to the man standing on the roof giving feedback; He’s been up there long enough to get the gutters done.

But credit to DeChambeau for reminding the golf world at large that it needs him and restoring the sport to its rightful place: a bit of fluff to distract the adults from putting away the trash cans. And in doing so, he has decisively refuted the old adage that says you shouldn’t hit wedges in a glass house.