(Reuters) – Golf equipment manufacturer Cobra said Bryson DeChambeau’s comments about his driver following his one-over-par start to the British Open were “stupid” and that the American was like “an 8-year-old that gets mad at you”.
DeChambeau, who has packed on roughly 30 pounds of muscle and become the longest hitter on the PGA Tour, said his driver “sucks” after he found just four of 14 fairways at Royal St. George’s on Thursday.
The 27-year-old, who sits seven shots adrift of first-round leader Louis Oosthuizen, currently uses a Cobra Radspeed driver that is 46 inches long and has only 5 degrees of loft.
Most golfers on the PGA Tour opt for lofts of between nine and 10.5 degrees for their drivers.
“If I can hit it down the middle of the fairway, that’s great, but with the driver right now, the driver sucks,” DeChambeau said.
“It’s not a good face for me, and we’re still trying to figure out how to make it good on the mis-hits. I’m living on the razor’s edge, like I’ve told people for a long time.”
Cobra’s tour operations manager Ben Schomin, who caddied for DeChambeau two weeks ago at the Rocket Mortgage Classic, said the team had been working tirelessly to accommodate him.
“It’s just really, really painful when he says something that stupid,” he told Golfweek.
“He has never really been happy, ever. Like, it’s very rare where he’s happy,” Schomin said of DeChambeau’s demands of his driver.
“Now he’s in a place where he’s swinging a 5-degree driver with 200 mph of ball speed. Everybody is looking for a magic bullet. Well, the magic bullet becomes harder and harder to find the faster you swing and the lower your loft gets.”
Schomin compared DeChambeau’s frustration to “an 8-year-old that gets mad at you”.
“He didn’t really mean to say it that harshly. He knows how much everyone bends over backwards for him, but it’s still not cool,” Schomin said.
(Reporting by Manasi Pathak in Bengaluru; Editing by Peter Rutherford)
