SOUTHAMPTON, N.Y. — There comes a point in every runaway tournament victory when the only story bigger than a player winning would be that player not winning. Unlike, say, football or basketball, you can’t run out the clock in golf, and that means there’s always the chance, however slight, that even a massive lead can vanish into the late-Sunday-afternoon air.
Wyndham Clark leads the U.S. Open by six strokes. This is a substantial lead by any measure; it’s the third-largest 54-hole lead at a U.S. Open in the modern era, behind Tiger Woods’ 10 in 2000 and Rory McIlroy’s 8 in 2011. Both of those leads resulted in victories, and there’s a whiff of inevitability about Clark, too, simply because of the way he’s worked his way around Shinnecock Hills with a kind of determined precision that’s eluded the rest of the field.
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For Clark, the moment of inevitability came on Shinnecock Hills’ 614-yard, par-5 16th hole, when he arced a brilliant second shot just over the sloping edge of the green, inches from disaster, and set up the eagle putt that would put him a touchdown ahead of the field. It’s the kind of shot that deserves to be remembered, and if it had happened on Sunday — or if the fans hadn’t already streamed to Shinnecock’s exits to catch the train — it would have gotten its due from the gallery:
That moment right there ensured that Clark will be the story Sunday, win or lose. Coronation or collapse, that’s all that remains here at Shinnecock Hills and the 2026 U.S. Open.
And here’s where we get to the tricky part of this story. With very few exceptions, there’s an anticlimactic air about any march to a multi-stroke victory. There aren’t many players who can inspire the gallery to cheer a runaway win. (There aren’t many players who could inspire the empty grandstands at Shinnecock, period.)
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Clark, who’s never really been a fan favorite, has a checkered recent history, but he’s doing his best to restore some connections with the gallery. Would a runaway win do that? Maybe, maybe not. But there’s another possibility here, too.
The agonizing element here is that the more compelling story is the more (potentially) heartbreaking one. Clark will start Sunday alongside Scottie Scheffler, who’s both celebrating a birthday and chasing a career grand slam. Scheffler will be the overwhelming fan favorite, and any cuts he can make in Clark’s lead — a birdie on the first, say — will send a charge through the gallery. And it’ll be up to Clark, who will surely be feeling like a man on an island, to hold on … or not.
That’s what makes golf so fascinating. For every Tiger Woods march to glory, there are a dozen stories of collapse and heartbreak, a life’s dreams crumbling as millions watch. Greg Norman at the 1996 Masters. Jean van de Velde at the 1999 Open Championship. Jordan Spieth at the 2016 Masters. All of them close enough to taste victory, close enough to see the flag on the 18th hole … only to squander it all, to watch their hopes vanish like wisps of smoke. It’s painful as hell to watch, but you can’t deny that it’s compelling.
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What awaits Wyndham Clark on Sunday afternoon? A second U.S. Open trophy, an elevation to his generation’s best? Or one of golf’s most momentous collapses, one that will haunt him the rest of his career? It’s all waiting out there at Shinnecock, and it will all the way to the final green.
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