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Wyndham Clark was standing in the right rough of the 18th hole on Sunday, needing a par to win the U.S. Open, when microphones captured his caddie, David Pelekoudas, offering his final instructions. They were the same two words Pelekoudas said on the tee minutes earlier, and the same words he said to Clark dozens of times across four stressful rounds at Shinnecock Hills.
“Good process,” Pelekoudas said, a somewhat vague phrase that Clark acknowledged played an important role in capturing his second U.S. Open title in four years.
“My process is picking the correct club, trusting that club, being assertive, having my intermediate target, and then, you know, pull the trigger and have it be very kinda simple and lack of clutter in my brain,” Clark explained after his one-shot win over Sam Burns. “So every time he reminded me that I get back into the shot rather than maybe the moment or that I just made a bogey or someone else makes birdie. So it gets me back into, ‘Hey, this is what I do to hit a good shot, and I would do it.’”
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The significance of “good process” ties to Clark’s work with mental coach Julie Elion, who has been with the golfer since before his first U.S. Open win in 2023, and who has helped the golfer channel his focus as distractions have mounted.
On Sunday, despite holding a six-shot lead at the start of the round, a healthy percentage of the gallery was instead supporting playing partner Scottie Scheffler, sometimes openly rooting against Clark. It would have been easy for the negative energy surrounding Clark to take over. But Elion and Clark had a similar experience to draw on from his first U.S. Open win at Los Angeles C.C. Although not as outwardly hostile as at Shinnecock, the crowd for Clark’s first major was also pulling for another player—in this case, playing partner Rickie Fowler.
But Elion and Clark had devised a plan then as well. “Whenever he heard, ‘Go Rickie!’ or ‘Come on, Rickie!’ he simply deflected it and said to himself, ‘I got this,” and remembered his own goals,” Elion wrote in her book, “Mastering Your Mental Game.”
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Clark acknowledged that he relied on the same reframing at Shinnecock, and this time, he had two words he could return to when he needed it.
“I knew there was gonna be a lot of … whether it’s negativity towards me or cheers for Scottie, so there was a very similar thing,” Clark said. “Anytime they said that I replaced it with something positive, either about myself or my game or what’s gonna happen.”
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Main Image: David Cannon
