The 126th US Open begins on Thursday at Shinnecock Hills, and by the time Scottie Scheffler walks to the first tee with the career grand slam sitting one good week away, the hardest golf of the fortnight will already have been played. Not by him. By the 43 men who spent the previous Monday grinding their way into the field through final qualifying, the day the USGA likes to call, with no great exaggeration, Golf’s Longest Day.
It is the part of major championship week that television tends to skip, and it is the part most worth watching. A few hundred professionals and amateurs spread across ten sites, 36 holes in a single day, and a handful of places at the end of it. No appearance money, no exemptions, no soft landing. You either shoot the number or you drive home. For the players on the right side of the cut line it is the best day of their year. For everyone else it is a long evening with the clubs in the boot.
Nine extra holes for the final spot
If you want a sense of how thin the margins are, consider what happened in Oregon. Andrew Putnam and Spencer Tibbits finished their 36 holes tied for the last available place and went to sudden death to settle it. They played six extra holes on Monday and still could not be separated before the light gave out and the officials sent them home. They came back on Tuesday morning, played three more, and only then did Putnam finally claim the 43rd and last spot in the championship. Nine playoff holes to decide who gets to tee it up at a US Open, and who gets to watch it on the sofa. There is no purer distillation of what qualifying does to a person.
That ruthlessness is the point. The US Open has always sold itself as the most democratic of the majors, the one where, in theory, anybody with a low enough handicap and a strong enough Monday can find themselves inside the ropes alongside the best in the world. In practice that promise is mostly a romantic one. But it is not entirely empty, and the names that came through this year prove it. Established Tour winners such as Billy Horschel, Emiliano Grillo and J.B. Holmes all had to go back to qualifying like everybody else and earn their way in on merit. The exemption list does not care what you once were.
An unusually deep run of amateurs
The more striking story this year is the amateurs. More than thirteen per cent of the Shinnecock field is made up of players without a paycheque, which is a remarkably high figure for a modern major, and the quality of them is higher still. Jackson Koivun, the top-ranked amateur in the world, arrives for what is expected to be his final event before turning professional, the sort of farewell that can either launch a career or quietly remind a young man how far he still has to travel. Neal Shipley, who has made a habit of being the low amateur at majors, is back to do it again. Miles Russell and Ben James, two of the most talked-about juniors in the American game, continue their unhurried march toward the professional ranks.
Then there are the stories you could not script. Logan Reilly holed the winning putt to give Auburn the national title barely a fortnight ago, and rather than enjoy the afterglow he is now standing on the same fairways as the world’s best. Arni Sveinsson became the first golfer from Iceland ever to qualify for the US Open, which is the kind of sentence that tells you the game’s geography is still being redrawn in real time. None of these players will be favoured to contend. All of them have already won something that cannot be taken away.
What Shinnecock will do to them
The reckoning, of course, is the golf course. Shinnecock has a long memory and very little mercy. The last time the US Open visited, in 2018, not a single player finished the week under par, and Brooks Koepka won with a number that would have missed the cut at half the tournaments on the calendar. The fescue does not check a player’s CV before it swallows a tee shot, and the greens, on a firm and windy afternoon, can make a good round disappear in the space of three holes.
For the qualifiers and the amateurs, that is precisely the appeal. They have already done the difficult thing simply by being here. Whatever Shinnecock has waiting for them from Thursday is, in a sense, a reward rather than a punishment. The grand slam talk will dominate the broadcast, as it should. But the better stories this week belong to the players who had to survive Golf’s Longest Day to get a seat at the table at all.