Follow live: Is U.S. Open Koepka’s to lose?

Mike Thomas is a common sight at the side of his son, Justin, during practice rounds on the PGA TOUR. Mike, of course, pulls double duty as both the father and the lifelong swing coach for the former FedExCup champ, and he’s often seen holding a wedge while observing Justin’s swing. The story behind Mike’s club is a special one that illustrates the strong relationship between father and son. To occupy his hands during the long hours of practice days, Mike used to grab one of Justin’s wedges while Justin was practicing nearby. There was one problem. The habit used to aggravate his son. “I mean he just always had to have a club in his hand from my bag,” Justin Thomas told GolfWRX. “And to be perfectly honest, it just pissed me off that I would want to chip with a club and he would always grab a 56 or a 60 (degree wedge). So I’d have to go across the green and get it from him and it was happening every week and I was like, ‘I’m done with this. I’m just going to carry an extra wedge. This is your wedge, don’t touch my other ones.’” And that, as they say, is how this whole thing started. It was in 2019 when Justin gifted Mike one of his old Titleist Vokey SM6 wedges to carry around. Mike still carries the same club, but it looks a little different now. Since the 2019 Genesis Invitational at Riviera, Titleist’s Vokey wedge rep Aaron Dill – who’s the man behind many of the genius wedge stampings on the PGA TOUR – has been stamping important memories and events that Justin and Mike have shared together. “They call it my walker,” Mike said. “I think the first stamp on it was in LA. … It says ‘Meat Coma.’ And the story behind that is we would go to Baby Blue’s BBQ every year in LA, and we basically ate ourselves into a meat coma. “So AD, Aaron Dill with Vokey and Titleist, he put meat coma on there. I think he put ‘Meat Coma 2’ on there somewhere, too.” Other stampings mention tournaments by their trademarks, like ‘Milkshake Invitational’ for the Memorial Tournament presented by Workday, which is known for the milkshakes in the Muirfield Village clubhouse. There’s other memories like ‘COVID-19 Quarantine’ and ‘Raising Money for Kids.’ The most recently noteworthy addition is ‘2022 PGA Championship,’ where ‘Champion’ is highlighted in a different color to celebrate Justin’s victory. That’s one of Mike’s favorites. Mike says he never requests a stamping, but when Dill sees him at a tournament, he’ll track Mike down and make the appropriate updates to the wedge. There’s only one problem. They’re running out of room on the club. “He’s got a great imagination for that stuff,” Mike said about Dill. “Somehow he’ll remember where (Justin) was, and he’ll go, ‘OK, we have to put the Scottish Open, the British Open, we have put the Playoffs on there.’ He somehow remembers where he was at. I don’t.” Justin finds joy in looking back at the memories, too. “I like looking at (the stampings),” he says, “and just laughing at the memories.” To solve the space issue, Dill said he’s currently working on an apparatus that would allow him to sturdy the wedge and stamp on the clubface, something he’s obviously never done when building clubs for competition. This wedge is one of a kind, however, with more stories to tell than any other club on TOUR.

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MAMARONECK, N.Y. - The kid will live to fight another day. Matthew Wolff, the 54-hole leader by two, just didn't have it for the final round of the 120th U.S. Open at Winged Foot on Sunday. He shot a final-round 75 to finish even par and in solo second, six behind Bryson DeChambeau (67), who shot the low round of the day by three. "I played really tough all week," Wolff said. "I battled hard. Things just didn’t go my way. But first U.S. Open, second place is something to be proud of and hold your head up high for." Wolff blinked first when he hit a wild hook and bogeyed the third hole. DeChambeau caught him with a birdie at the fourth hole, and took a lead he would never relinquish with a par at the fifth. Both eagled the par-5 ninth to remain separated by just one shot, but it was no contest from there as DeChambeau kept the pedal down while Wolff shot a 39 coming in. "My advice?" said Zach Johnson (74, T8) "Leave this parking lot with the positives because, my guess, there’s a slew of them. Whatever he’s doing right now is not ineffective. "... He’s going to slice and dice today," Johnson added, "and he needs to really focus in on some of the things that he did the previous three days, I think more so than today." The two main combatants have a history of butting heads. When Wolff won the 3M Open last year, DeChambeau tied for second. When DeChambeau won the Rocket Mortgage Classic in July, Wolff was second. Both tied for fourth at the PGA Championship last month. DeChambeau said he expects to run into Wolff again in the future, and it seems likely. Wolff is too good to just go away, and he's also irrepressible, approaching golf as a game, not science. While DeChambeau had ear buds in prior to the final round, Wolff was on the phone cracking up laughing. Although he said he would play his usual "rip dog" game, he was just a little off. "I really didn’t feel that nervous out there," he said. "Maybe at the start I did, but at the start I played pretty well. I don’t think it was nerves that were holding me back. I just think it wasn’t meant to be." A few breaks here and there, he said, and he might have made it closer. The final pairing further accelerated a youth movement that was already in gear. Wolff (21) and DeChambeau (27) combined to make up the second youngest final pairing in the last 50 majors, behind only Jordan Spieth (22) and Smylie Kaufman (24) at the 2016 Masters Tournament. Wolff's youthful exuberance will almost certainly come away from Winged Foot unscathed. "He's just a kid," said fellow Oklahoma State product Rickie Fowler (79, 17 over). "Some of the things he'll say, you sometimes forget that you're around someone who's - you look at him as one of our peers, someone you play against and compete against, but he'll say something and you're like, yeah, he's still a kid. He's 10 years behind us. "There's really no course that doesn't suit him," Fowler added, "just because he's able to work the ball both ways easily. He's a great ball-striker. His extra length, with the way the rough is, it helps on a lot of holes out here because you're going to miss fairways, and to potentially have between two and four clubs less out of the rough, that makes a big difference." That's the case on any course, and Wolff will almost certainly be a force on many of them.

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Tiger Woods’ Masters win is sure to change the landscape of golf betting. Is there now value on the field? How many majors will Woods win this year? Our experts debate.

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