The golf world has fired up its Bryson DeChambeau talk to a new decibel since his win at the 2020 US Open at Winged Foot Golf Club in Mamaroneck, New York. Much of the banter centers around the idea that the young Californian is “revolutionizing the game” by playing it in a way that hasn’t been seen before. The proposition couches the question of whether his style of play will influence and change the way other Tour pros and top-level amateurs and college golfers will play the game as well.

First let’s define the phrase ’bomb and gouge,” that has inserted itself rather quickly into golf’s present-day vocabulary and has come to characterize Bryson’s game. Bomb and gouge refers to the strategy of hitting the golf ball as far as one can then if it happens to land in the rough gouging it out with a short iron onto the green. But did we really see anyone other than DeChambeau this past week purposely play Winged Foot this way? Certainly not.

Nor with all of this talk about how Bryson’s style will change the game (and despite Bryson in interview after interview himself encouraging all golfers to “swing their swing” and play golf their own way) are we really hearing a chorus of Tour pros singing out about how much they want to be individuals yet who want to play golf just as Bryson DeChambeau does? Absurd, right?

In fact, Bryson’s uniqueness as far as swing technique goes has everything to do with Homer Kelley’s book ‘The Golfing Machine’, which Bryson’s teacher Mike Schy gave to him when DeChambeau was just a teenager. That book views the swing as comprised of a blend of 24 components parts, with each component possessing between 3 and 15 variations. Cross multiply and combine the components and their variations and the number of possible ways to swing the club has so many zeros after its “l” that it takes someone with a degree in advanced mathematics to know this number’s name.

Yet all Bryson has done and all any golfer needs to do is to assemble a swing with one variation from the list of 24 components. If this still sounds a bit complicated, you wouldn’t be wrong to think it, but perhaps the most unique way in which DeChambeau has earned his non-conformist status and badge is the manner and degree in which he has embraced and enjoyed the game’s complexity and difficulty. There’s very little just “grip and rip it” going on under that Ben Hogan cap of his. Or, as Homer Kelley in The Golfing Machine puts it:

“Treating a complex subject or action as though it were simple, multiplies its complexity because of the difficulty in systematizing missing and unknown factors or elements. Demanding that golf instruction be kept simple does not make it simple-only incomplete and ineffective. Unless this is recognized, golf remains a vague, frustrating, infuriating form of exertion.”

Some also say he’s revolutionizing the game because he’s trying to hit the ball as far as he can. Let’s set aside for a second the fact the Bryson isn’t even in the top ten on the list of the Tour’s Driving Distance leaders. What is revolutionary about him is that he has succeeded in adding distance to his drives while taking strokes off of his scores, whereas many other Tour pros throughout the game’s modern history at least found their scores rising right along with their newly gained driving distance numbers.

DeChambeau, with another assist from The Golfing Machine, also stands out in the manner in which he has freed himself from the “Mechanical vs the Feel Player” duality trap, even as many people describe him almost by rote as a “mad scientist” with a robotic swing and game calculated on nothing but the impact numbers read off of a launch monitor.

The mantra “Mechanics produce and feel reproduces” is one central to Homer Kelley’s philosophy in The Golfing Machine, and it’s a one-two punch DeChambeau both strives to achieve and often discusses during his press interviews and in interview after interview.

Therefore, with all of the talk about his single length set of irons, (Bobby Jones used one too), his physical bulking up (Johnny Miller, Tiger, even Anika Sorenstam added significant muscle to their frames), his diet and workout routines (Gary Player was ahead of him by 70 years in this regard!), the one thing rarely discussed about Bryson DeChambeau is just how central to his career remains the book The Golfing Machine.

While the book has often garnered vicious criticism over the years, with proponents of its pages criticized by some unsparingly, to put it mildly, Bryson DeChambeau has put an oh so human face onto this work of genius by Homer Kelley. Just look at the young man’s smile of joy as he hoisted the 2020 U.S. Open trophy!