He made it all moot. The tortured history in tournaments that have gravity. The mysterious leave of absence in 2014 to “seek professional help for personal challenges I have faced.” The questions that never would have dogged him if only he were 5-foot-6 and built like a beanbag chair.
Even Sunday’s detour into physics and illusion — Is Dustin Johnson really such a magician on the course that he can make a golf ball move without touching it? — could not put him off the scent of a breakthrough championship.
With a sublimely oblivious round of 69 Sunday, Johnson fully realized his gifts, winning his first major tournament and in the process hurling a boxcar full of baggage into the Allegheny River.
“Feels good,” he said. “Feels well deserved.” No, the man does not deal in profundities.
“It’s a big monkey off my back. I feel a lot lighter,” Johnson joked.
No matter that for his last six holes, he labored under the shadow of a possible one-stroke penalty. (Don’t you know the folks in the press tent were sharpening their hyperbole, for Dustin Johnson was about to blow another major in the weirdest kind of way).
Johnson just kept those long legs moving, loping down fairways, face as unchanging as a portrait, chasing his ball and getting it to the hole in as few strokes as possible.
This time it was everyone else’s turn to fall back while Johnson managed the moment. A host of pursuers did just that — the most notable being Shane Lowry who led by four after 54 holes but had given it all back by the turn Sunday.
Behold the nine-foot par putt Johnson canned on No. 16. Even more lovely was the 6-iron to five feet he hit to No. 18 — after backing off once after a cameraman’s equipment chirped.
A year ago, he was three-putting from 12 feet on the 72nd hole to fall victim to his own unsteadiness. Sunday, Johnson finished off that approach to his final hole — “Might be one of the best shots I ever hit, under the circumstance,” he said — with a birdie putt and what was at the time a four-stroke cushion on the field.
Go ahead and assess a delayed one-stroke penalty after he was safely in the scoring area. Make it officially a three-stroke victory. No difference. The USGA could have thrown in a couple more penalties, maybe for cruel and unusual punishment of the golf ball. Wouldn’t have mattered. This was going to be Johnson’s day and there were no forces of man or nature that could stop it.
“(The penalty) didn’t matter. I’m glad it didn’t matter, because that would have been bad,” Johnson understated.
Think of everything else he has had to process while trying to adorn his superior skill set with a major title. The three-putt at Chambers Bay. The grounded club in the well-disguised hazard at Whistling Straits and the resulting devastating penalty. The collapses at the British Open in 2011 and another domestic Open the year before.
This time it was going to be a ball spontaneously coming to life, fibrillating on the green. Are you kidding me?
The drama within the drama Sunday involved not the 378-yard drive Johnson unleashed on his first hole of the final round but rather the micron his ball moved on the fifth green.
As Johnson finished his practice strokes and positioned his putter behind the ball on a six-foot par putt at No. 5, the ball ever so slightly ticked backward. Johnson backed off, called over an official and confessed to the movement but insisted he was not the cause. The official at the time told him, fine, play on.
By the time he had reached the 12th hole, holding a two-stroke lead, Johnson was approached by USGA officials bearing the news that he may be facing a one-stroke penalty upon further review and seeking any explanation from him as to how else the ball may have teetered.
That would hang over his head for the rest of the day, an anvil ready to drop when he got back to the clubhouse.
For all that Johnson had endured in past majors, it would have been so simple for him to use this weird turn as a reason to fold again. The woe-is-me excuse was right there for him to latch onto.
Instead he just kept hitting ropes.
“It’s something said we were going to look at when I was done,” he said afterward. “I just tried to focus on what I was doing, not worry about the penalty stroke and just play golf all the way to the house.”
And thus did Dustin Johnson become the best player ever to win only one major.
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