SAN DIEGO — Despite the decades of ceaseless agitprop—Francis Ouimet’s upset, Ben Hogan’s comeback, Payne Stewart’s farewell, e pluribus unum marketing—the U.S. Open has never really been an incubator of fairytales. Of dramas, sure. And thrillers. But the previous 120 editions of this championship have witnessed more horrors than syrupy, feel-good fables.
That might explain why Richard Bland was beating balls on the range long after completing his second round at the top of the leaderboard at Torrey Pines. In U.S. Opens, nice guys with a great back story—the 48-year-old Englishman just won his first event in his 478th start—tend to meet the same fate as that kid in a slasher movie who decides to go investigate the noise.
We watch, hoping for the best but with a grim sense of foreboding.
Bland won’t be alone in feeling the vice tighten over the next 48 hours at Torrey Pines to where only one man (maybe) is still drawing breath. The U.S. Open is the most pitiless of the majors, each day a punishing gauntlet from which no competitor ever seems to emerge saying he shot the best score possible. Every round concludes with an official tallying of strokes, and a more private, rueful accounting of those left out there. By mid-afternoon Friday, the 156 players in the field had passed 1,000 bogeys made with the likelihood of a couple hundred more before sunset.
The South Course at Torrey Pines is the most architecturally prosaic venue the USGA visits and would be Exhibit ‘A’ in any malpractice suit against the ‘Open Doctor,’ Rees Jones. But it is adequate for what modern U.S. Opens are intended to do, which is expose every weakness from technical flaws to faintness of heart. Laudable design is immaterial to that objective on the logic that any course can be made difficult. It requires only fertilizer, green rollers and a dab of sadism.
Check. Check. And check.
The leaderboard at the 121st Open is bookended by men in their late 40s: Bland and, 22 strokes to his south, an Australian qualifier named Steve Allan. Until this week, Allan hadn’t competed in a major for 11 years and hadn’t made a cut in one for 16 years. He and Bland have combined for 13 career starts in major championships, just a few more than Phil Mickelson’s six victories in them.
Steve Allan plays a shot on the 17th hole during the second round at the 2021 U.S. Open at Torrey Pines Golf Course in San Diego, Calif. on Friday, June 18, 2021. (Darren Carroll/USGA)
Unlike at the Masters, a U.S. Open leaderboard is where kings and cobblers collide. Just 34 days ago, Bland was unknown to even attentive golf fans. Now he finds himself being pursued by guys like Louis Oosthuizen, Bubba Watson and Brooks Koepka (who has won more majors than his prey has played). The elite and the everyman mingle at the other end of matters too. Allan was only four shots worse than Justin Rose, who has finished top 8 in both previous majors this year. On any given day, the talent gap between the best and the rest just isn’t that yawning.
Allan will have some well-known company at the airline check-in desk tonight. Will Zalatoris was runner-up at the Masters and hit as many greens in two days as the leader (26), but a balky putter condemned him. Webb Simpson had won the U.S. Open as many times as he had missed the cut, until today. Billy Horschel, Sam Burns and Garrick Higgo are all good enough to have won recently on the PGA Tour, but weren’t good enough this week to survive the cut. One troubled phenom returned (Matt Wolff) while a comparatively serene one (Viktor Hovland) departed early, WD’ing with an eye injury.
As the second round began to wind down, the north and south poles of the halfway leaderboard were separated by only nine shots. Like most Friday afternoons at U.S. Opens, players made progress long after they had completed their rounds. Rory McIlroy signed for a scrappy 73 shortly before 1 p.m. that left him 1 over for the tournament but he figured he’d be in the top 20 by day’s end. Within a couple hours, he was. Veterans of Open wars—in experience, if not in age— know that sometimes you just have to sit back and let the USGA do its work for you.
The man who spent much of the day in the lead, has only ever played one U.S. Open. But Bland has taken his share of gut punches. He lost several playoffs in qualifying. “I’m not going to lose any sleep over that,” he said cheerfully. “I’m just enjoying this one right now.” When you come across a 48-year-old man who believes in fairytales because he’s seen too much of the other side, it makes you want to believe right along with him. No matter how much we are conditioned to expect something else. Odds are that Bland won’t sleep tonight, but he will dream.
