AR
For the last three years, and even after the chaos and volatility we saw at Shinnecock on Friday, it’s tempting to view Dustin Johnson as a figure of the past. Figures of the past live on in stories, and everyone who has spent time around Dustin Johnson, even if it’s only peripherally or for a short time, has a favourite DJ story. Here’s mine:
It was 2014, I wanted to profile him for a book I was working on, and his agent David Winkle arranged for me to walk with him for an hour on Wednesday at the Colonial pro-am. He surprised me the entire time—he was engaging and thoughtful, occasionally crass but never dismissive the way I thought he might be. At one point, he barked at his brother and caddie AJ, who was still relatively new on his bag and resting under the shade of a pecan tree, to get him the yardage. The moment I’ll never forget, though, came when one of the pro-am players came by with a yellow flag.
“Is this kosher?” he asked, holding the flag out for Johnson to sign. Johnson signed it without much acknowledgement, but it apparently wasn’t good enough for the man.
“Will you sign it, ‘To Steve’?” he asked.
Johnson took the flag back, looked at it—everything he does happens at his own slow rhythm—and wrote the words “All the best” above his signature.
I found this very funny, though I suppressed it, but you could see the man’s heart sink. The dilemma passed over his face, and he mustered up the courage to ask again.
“But can you sign it ‘To Steve’?”
DJ, now slightly annoyed, took the flag back again. He took a long look and then made up his mind.
“Well, they already got their name here,” he said, laying a large finger on the flag.
I peeked over—he was pointing at the signature of another player, who had written “To Steve.”
The man looked at him, wondering if this was some kind of joke, but DJ just stared back with those dead eyes. The man, of course, cracked first.
“Yeah,” he said. “That’s awesome.”
And he walked away with a story that I’m sure he never told.
*****
Warren Little
On Friday at Shinnecock, Johnson’s name appeared on the leaderboard in second place. He’s 41 years old for the next three days, and this was a return to form that was hard to see coming unless you paid close attention to his last two outings on LIV—fourth in Korea, T-5 in Andalucia. He did the bulk of his damage late on Thursday, with four straight birdies to start his back nine (Shinnecock’s front), then came back Friday morning to make two more birdies to finish his first round. There wasn’t much break before he teed off for Round 2, and he stayed even through 10 holes. At four under, he was the nearest chaser to his white-hot playing partner Wyndham Clark.
We barely had time to process this renaissance, though, before the ship took water. A double at 11, two more bogeys at 12 and 13, and then the true disaster: A quad at 15 that included one bunker-to-bunker gaffe, a chunked follow-up that stayed in the sand, and a skulled bunker shot that ran off the green. Shinnecock is the kind of course where you can hit three shots from two different bunkers on the same hole, and though he recovered to make birdie on 16 and make the cut, he had dropped from solo second to T-53, from a single shot off the lead to ten, and it felt like his moment had passed.
About 90 minutes ago, Dustin Johnson was -4 and just one off the lead.
He's now +4 after this quadruple bogey and in danger of missing the cut. pic.twitter.com/uL5OxWrA67
— U.S. Open (@usopengolf) June 19, 2026
Even so …
… in some ways he was the most interesting man on the course. Even now, past his prime and perhaps pat his interest in playing elite golf, there’s an aura around DJ that very few other plays can match. It’s his size and power, his obvious athleticism, that grim Clint Eastwood demeanour, and the slow, almost predatory way he moves. There’s a sense that he’s pure id, which is a polite way of acknowledging the perception that he’s not very smart. I don’t agree with that, although his interviews can be painfully dull and he doesn’t seem to take great pleasure in ruminating, or sometimes even talking. But those qualities almost make his brand stronger, and when you combine that with a celebrity wife, a couple majors, and the pure alpha energy, he’s a perpetually fascinating figure for galleries. I dare you to look away.
He’s one of those apostates whose reputation has been hurt the least by going to LIV, probably because unlike a Graeme McDowell or Jon Rahm, you never expected him to care about (or even consider) any of the ethical problems with the Saudi regime, and so you could never accuse him of playing the hypocrite. But the move still took a toll; he put together a decent year of major performances after the defection, including two top-10s, but in his last 11 tries, he’s missed six cuts and never finished inside the top 20. He hasn’t even won on LIV in two years, and it all prompted a chicken-or-egg style question:
Did he sign with LIV because he stopped caring about golf, or did he stop caring about golf because he signed with LIV?
That may be too glib, too nonspecific, but either way, you can’t call it—whatever it is—any kind of tragedy. He’s in the late stages of his career, he won two majors, he has a lot of money, and if anyone seems capable of contentment after the hurricane of a dynamic career, it’s him.
But this all sounds very conclusive, very fatalistic, and after his round, Johnson didn’t sound like someone who thought of himself in the past tense. Around 20 reporters gathered around him by the flash area—a testament to his ongoing appeal—and he seemed mostly at ease despite his 77.
Christian Petersen
“ I felt like I played really solid today,” he said. “Hit a lot of good putts that didn’t go in.”
Recapping his own around, it was mostly a story of a punishing wind and a few unfortunate rocks.
“The first one on 15,” he remembered, “the rock got in between the face and kicked it. I mean, it went five yards further left than it should have … it came out and hooked. And then the next one, it hit a rock and it popped it straight up, and so it came out shorter. And then on the third one, I hit a rock and it went into the ball.”
“Sounds like a lot of rocks,” one reporter observed.
“Yeah,” he said, “it’s tough. It’ the ones that you can’t see. Obviously, the big ones that are sitting on top of you, you can move them, but I had where I could see them but they were in the sand.”
On his recent form, he spoke about returning to the original lofts on his clubs just before Korea, where he just had an instinct to bend them back. But while he spoke about the present, the most interesting elements of his biography came to mind; the pedigree that included a grandfather drafted by the Lakers and a father who starred in high school football; the teenage hustler who won money against grown men at his club in Columbia, S.C., after he finished his shift on the maintenance crew; the dark turn when he became involved on the fringes of a theft and murder investigation; the rebirth under a “hardass” coach at Coastal Carolina; the quick rise on the PGA Tour; the heartbreaks at majors until the breakthrough at Oakmont, followed five years later by the COVID Masters; the wild rumors, the wild suspension, the wild marriage, and the disappearing act that took the wild away.
There’s more salt with the pepper in his beard these days, but nothing else about him feels particularly old or lost, and his natural talent is still obvious at a glance. Nevertheless, the events of the last few years have made DJ seem like golf’s forgotten man. He made us remember him again on Friday, even if it didn’t last very long, and all things considered, it was a good memory, and maybe even a poignant one—a reminder of the small pleasures we’ve lost in the torrents of history that still sweep a divided sport through its most turbulent decade.
DJ, take us back.
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Main Image: Mike Mulholland
