Beefed-up golf dipshit Bryson DeChambeau came down with COVID-19 in late July, had moderate symptoms, lost a bunch of weight, and had to miss the Olympics. Turns out, to no one's great surprise, DeChambeau had not been vaccinated, and in fact to this day remains unvaccinated. The reasons for this are drearily familiar: Mainly he's a moron, but in his version of events the vaccine is not effective or "mainstream" enough for him to feel comfortable using doses that could otherwise go to the vulnerable:
"I'm young enough, I'd rather give it to people who need it. I don't need it. I'm a healthy, young individual that will continue to work on my health. I don't think taking the vaccine away from someone who needs it is a good thing. My dad is a perfect example. He got it early on because he's a diabetic. People like that need to get it. My mom got it. I don't want to take away that ability. Now as time goes on, if it is mainstream, really, really mainstream, then yeah."
ESPN
This is stubbornness and stupidity dressed up as selflessness, and it sucks. There are no vaccine shortages in the United States. Every grocery store and pharmacy within a 30-minute drive of my home is offering no-appointment walk-in jabs; the Centers for Disease Control say more than 56 million delivered vaccines have not yet been administered; state public health officials say they are drowning in stored doses as millions of perfectly jabbable bumpkins and goobers resist vaccination for similarly baffling reasons. DeChambeau's dose is not going into the shoulder of some vulnerable person who would otherwise be screwed. It is in fact sitting in a freezer somewhere, nearing its expiration date, likely to go wasted. The strain put on the beleaguered healthcare system by every new preventable illness is infinitely more dangerous for the vulnerable than putting a couple shots to good use could ever, ever be. DeChambeau either knows this or is capable of knowing this, but like several insanely stupid baseball players and millions of other brain-beshitted Americans he simply prefers his own rotten logic, and has the deranged YouTube videos to support it.
So it's even easier to root against this pinhead right now than usual, and that's really saying something. Spectators gave DeChambeau four rounds of the business at the St. Jude Invitational over the weekend. A popular new taunt used against DeChambeau is the word "Brooks" or "Brooksy"—in reference to DeChambeau's biggest rival, Brooks Koepka—shouted from the gallery; Koepka, in a video posted to Twitter back in early June, offered to send a case of beer to fans who may have gotten in trouble for shouting the taunt at DeChambeau. Beer is a powerful incentive, and DeChambeau is a supreme dickweed, and so the Brooksy movement has only picked up steam in the two months since. There was an awful lot of this sort of heckling from the crowd in Memphis on Sunday.
Your mileage on this sort of thing may vary. Shane Ryan of Golf Digest calls this fan behavior a "harassment campaign" and considers it "outrageous and unforgivable" bullying; to me that is a pretty ridiculous case to make in a world where aggressive taunting of athletes across all other sports is generally considered benign, except in not-rare-enough cases where it involves actual slurs. It's not clear that the heckling had any effect on DeChambeau's play, but it was certainly a noticeable soundtrack to what was otherwise the round from hell: DeChambeau entered Sunday in the final pairing at 18 under par, but got warned along with playing partner Harris English for slow play, and then got stuck with the dreaded play clock.
Harris and especially DeChambeau are slow players, generally, but what got them way behind time-wise was DeChambeau's tee shot on the par-four sixth, which landed just in bounds but crammed up against a temporary fence. It was actually a pretty sweet break for DeChambeau, all things considered. He got a free drop due to the fence and then another bit of relief after it was determined that his stance following the drop would've been on a cart path. In a sign of things to come, DeChambeau immediately pounded his next shot into a tree. It was all downhill from there.
The timing started on the 11th, which perhaps not coincidentally featured those shots into the water and a double-bogey from English and a triple-bogey from DeChambeau. Bryson finished his round with a 4-over-par 74, hit just five of 14 fairways on the day, and dropped from second place to a tie for eighth. Afterward he continued his recent trend of declining to speak to reporters, but English was of the opinion that the heckling did influence DeChambeau's play: "It kind of sucks and obviously he hears it, and it affects him a little bit and he doesn’t like it, and I think that causes them to do it more."
One way DeChambeau could get spectators to knock it off is by winning. That would probably do the trick. Aside from that, he could maybe earn a little sympathy by being less of a shithead about everything from vaccine acceptance to playing the game at a reasonable pace.
