“There are going to be times that people hit it in the rough, and I think the person that’s going to win is going to hit the most fairways and going to make the most putts and also hit it on the greens,” said DeChambeau, who won the Open at Winged Foot the same year Homa went eight over par in the first round. “It’s a simple formula, obviously. But again, you have to execute it, right? That’s the whole point of a U.S. Open.”It is, DeChambeau added, supposed to be rigorous.Homa, of course, reveled in his Thursday even as he cautioned that it was much too early to declare anything close to a victory. He had a Thursday morning tee time, when the course was in the realm of soft, to start. By Friday afternoon, he warned, the place could be hellish.The U.S. Golf Association is hardly known for indulging easy Opens.The association’s devilish concoctions will be Friday’s problem, though. Thursday, with greens that were not exacting and a course receptive to strong iron play, was merely a start.“From the first tee to the last putt, I was very accepting and just looked at today as just a round of golf that will set me up toward the rest of the week,” Homa said after he had finished his round. “I think that they have the old cliché that you can’t win it the first day, you could lose it, and I lose a lot of these things on the first day.”Maybe something clicked these last few weeks as he contemplated how to manage the atmospherics that accompany playing a major tournament close to home.“There’s obviously, in ways, more pressure, but that’s coming from outside expectation that because a championship is in my backyard, quote-unquote, that I should now be a favorite to win,” he said in the interview. “On the inside, it’s just cool.”
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