There is no day quite like it in golf. Final qualifying for the US Open, the thing the game has long called Golf’s Longest Day, asks players to walk thirty-six holes in a single sitting for a place in a championship that most of them have spent a career chasing. On Monday it played out across ten sites, and by the time the last of them had given up its answer it had spilled over into Tuesday morning, which is about as literal a reading of the name as you could hope for.
The headline number is forty-three. That is how many places were on offer once the exempt players had been accounted for, and filling the last of them took longer than anyone running the operation would have liked.
Kirk leads the way
The lowest score of the day belonged to Chris Kirk, who went round Hawks Ridge in Georgia in 65 and 64 to finish on fifteen under and take medalist honours by a comfortable margin. At forty-one, Kirk is not a man who needs to prove he belongs in a major field, and he is coming off a strong week at Oakmont last year, but the number still says something about how he is striking it. A soaked course took some of the teeth out of the test, and the better players punished it accordingly, yet shooting fifteen under across two rounds in an afternoon is a feat regardless of the conditions handed to you.
Kirk was joined by a familiar supporting cast of Tour names who had found themselves on the wrong side of the exemption line and chose to grind their way in rather than sit the week out. That is the quiet truth of final qualifying. It is not only club professionals and hopeful amateurs in the field. It is also established players who missed the cut-offs by the smallest of margins and would rather earn their place the hard way than watch the championship on television.
The last spot, decided after dark
If Kirk supplied the day’s best golf, the more memorable story came out of Oregon, where the field could not be settled before the light gave out. Andrew Putnam and Spencer Tibbits, level after their thirty-six holes, were sent back out for a sudden-death play-off to decide the final qualifying place, and they traded pars through six extra holes until darkness made it impossible to continue. Rather than guess at it in the gloom, officials suspended play and brought them back on Tuesday morning.
Three more holes were needed before Putnam finally edged it, claiming the forty-third and last seat at Shinnecock and turning Golf’s Longest Day into something closer to Golf’s Longest Day and a bit. There is a particular cruelty to losing a place like that, nine play-off holes spread across two days, and Tibbits will not need reminding of how close he came. Putnam, for his part, gets to spend next week at one of the great American championship courses, which is exactly the prize the format is designed to dangle.
A teenager in the field
Among the qualifiers was Miles Russell, the teenage amateur who has been threatening to do something like this for a while now. His day was not smooth. He ran up a triple bogey on the eighteenth in his morning round, the sort of hole that ends most qualifying campaigns on the spot, and then answered it with a 67 in the afternoon before coming through a play-off to claim his place. Doing that at his age, on a day built to expose anyone whose nerve wavers, tells you plenty about the temperament he is bringing to the professional game he is clearly headed towards.
Russell will have Charlie Woods on the bag at Shinnecock, the two of them committed to Florida State, which is the kind of detail that will follow them around all week and which they will presumably learn to tune out. The golf will be the harder part.
What waits at Shinnecock
The reward for surviving all of this is a tee time at the 126th US Open, which returns to Shinnecock Hills on Long Island from the eighteenth of June. It is one of the founding clubs of the USGA and one of the sternest examinations the championship ever sets up, a links-style test where the wind does as much defending as the rough. For the qualifiers it represents a step up in class that cannot really be rehearsed for. For the rest of us it is the most interesting week of the major calendar after the Masters, and the field that will contest it is now, finally, complete.
The men who came through Monday and Tuesday earned their places in the least glamorous way the game offers, which is to say they played their way in. There is something fitting about a championship that prides itself on being open to anyone closing its field with a play-off that ran out of daylight. The hard part is over. The harder part starts next week.
Sources: Golf Channel: site-by-site final qualifying results, Golf Digest: who qualified on Golf’s Longest Day, CBS Sports: Miles Russell among qualifiers