SPECIAL TO GOLF NEWS NET
SOUTHAMPTON, NY – For everyone asking “Who is going to win the U.S. Open at Shinnecock this year?” I have the answer for you, and it’s obvious. The golf course will win this year’s U.S. Open.
Is Shinnecock Hills the hardest U.S. Open venue? Tough call with Winged Foot and Oakmont in the mix, but Shinnecock is often just as stern a test as any layout in the informal U.S. Open rotation. Hip high fescue, greens with insidious roll-off and cunning contours, and relentless, fickle winds can and often do send scores soaring. Even the greatest names in the game have been humbled at Shinnecock, and that includes Tiger Woods and Jack Nicklaus.
That’s the way it should be at the U.S. Open: the course is the star. Someone just happens to survive and take home the trophy.
Nevertheless, three familiar names top the betting sheets at Ladbrokes and vegasinsider.com as we turn towards the 126th playing of our Open. And those three names: Scottie Scheffler, Rory McIlroy and Xander Schauffele, have won eight of the last 16 major championships contested. And though Shinnecock is formidable on the eve of this championship, the trio remain undaunted.
“Shinnecock looks good. The fairways are very generous,” Rory McIlroy told sports writers at the Memorial Tournament, held just two weeks ago. “They’re more generous than they were in 2018. But the first cut of rough is 5 inches long. So, it’s like the first cut is maybe three paces wide and then it gets into the fescue….The fairways are very, very generous. So if you miss the fairway, I feel like you deserve a bad lie.”
Entering the tournament as the reigning back-to-back Masters Champion and a career Grand Slam winner, McIlroy is enjoying a remarkable renaissance at age 37. Yet his driving accuracy has dropped off since successfully defending his title at the Masters in April. McIlroy has also been laser focused on both distance putting and practicing putts with big breaks.
“The greens are rolling around 11, 11.2, something like that, and I really don’t think they need to get much faster,” McIlroy opined. “I think if they can keep them at that green speed, they can get them firm, and they can use the hole locations that they want to use without having some of the struggles that they have had the last couple of U.S. Opens. If it’s set up the right way, I think it’s one of the best championship tests in the country. It’s an amazing golf course.”
While it was 25 years since we had seen a career Grand Slam achieved before Rory accomplished it at the 2025 Masters, it could happen again this weekend as Scottie Scheffler will have bagged all four majors should he triumph. Scottie won his two Masters in 2022 and 2024, then he took home both the Wanamaker trophy and the Claret Jug last year.
No one had done that since Rory in 2014.
“I was a little surprised at the width of the fairways, but the green complexes there are extremely difficult, and I think that’s where the greatest challenge comes from,” Scheffler stated, affirming Rory’s comments from weeks earlier, though not intentionally. “The rough, also, was a really good penalty, I think, for the width. Once you start missing fairways out there, you have no chance,” he concluded.
Scheffler has been favored to win both the Masters and the PGA Championship this year, but he finished second or tied for second in both. He had never seen Shinnecock before his recent practice round.
“The fairways are generous enough to where it provides you some opportunity and that way it’s just that the green complexes are extraordinarily difficult, and so they can put the pins wherever they want and make the scores as high as they could possibly want ’em to be,” he asserted firmly.
Such a setup clearly favors Scheffler, known for an almost Tiger-esque when conditions get rough. He’s been known to put entire major championship fields in sleeper holds on his way to a dominant victory.
Most importantly, Scheffler has a head for grinding, so much so that’s iy’s actually a surprise that thew U.S. Open is the last of the four majors on his quest for the career Gran Slam. His blend of power and precision gives him a leg up on almost every other golfer.
Xander Schaffele, winner of both the 2024 PGA Championship at Valhalla and the 2024 Open Championship at Troon, agrees, emphasizing the need for as solid a head on the course as a golf swing.
“Your ‘Acceptance Meter?’ You’ve got to add some at the top end. If it’s 100, you need to make it 150 because 100 is not enough. It might be the second or third hole of the day and you might have already had four bad breaks. It’s really penalizing; it’s the most tired I am of the four majors.” Schauffele warned. Then he too agreed that his greatest challenge would be Shinnecock’s putting surfaces.
“Shinnecock’s greens have some of the most incredibly difficult and manufactured pin locations I have ever seen,” he stated, wide-eyed.
Indeed, the greens are the primary defense at Shinnecock, along with the fickle swirling winds. The fairways were far narrower with much more rough around the greens when Retief Goosen won here in 2004. And the fairways were somewhat wider when we returned in 2028 for Brooks Koepka’s successful defense of his title. Interestingly, in 2018 when the renovation was completed by Gil Hanse, they enlarged the greens but a lot of the enlargements weren’t really usable space; it was more runoffs to filter the ball away from the green, away from the pin.
“In 2004 and 2018 the up and downs probably came from a lot more out of the rough, a lot closer proximity to the green, noted 2003 U.S. Open champion Jim Furyk. “You’re going to see a lot of short game off of tight lies to elevated greens, pitching runs into hillsides, or skipping balls off of those runoffs with a little spin near the pin. It definitely takes some deft touch.”
Along with the aforementioned betting favorites, Golf News Net insiders are taking long looks at Matthew Fitzpatrick, Wyndham Clark, and the aforementioned Koepka. All are rounding into shape at the right time, all are former U.S. Open winners, and they all have the short games to particularly excel on links courses. All three will be interviewed by the media in the coming days for their thoughts on the set up at Shinnecock.
This will be Shinnecock’s fifth U.S. Open in its illustrious history. The U.S. Open returns again to Shinnecock Hills in 2036. It will be played back-yo-back with the U.S. Women’s Open that year.
