All eyes were fixated on Bryson DeChambeau at the Masters last November. He had won the U.S. Open by six stroke just two months earlier with a breathtaking display of power, and there was some belief—fueled by Bryson himself—that he’d bludgeon Augusta National into submission.
It didn’t work out that way. DeChambeau made the cut on the number and never factored on the weekend, eventually finishing T-34, 18 shots behind Dustin Johnson’s winning total.
“I’ve got to fix whatever is going on up here,” he said after a final-round 73. “I have no idea. Just dizziness. It’s only when I go from down to up, so I can’t even like think and talk right now.”
The 27-year-old now believes he knows what was causing the problem.
“I actually went to multiple doctors, multiple people, trying to figure out what this was,” DeChambeau said Friday, speaking ahead of his appearance next month at the Saudi International on the European Tour. “I got a couple MRIs. Went to an inner ear doctor, eye tests, eye pressure, ear pressure, even did ultrasound on my heart, ultrasounds on my neck to see the blood flow and how things were moving through the different areas of my body, and everything came back really, really well.
“The one thing I will tell you is that I’ve done a lot of brain training with Neuropeak, and the frontal lobe of my brain was working really, really hard and that’s kind of what gave me some weird symptoms, like crazy overworking.
Given this information, DeChambeau began to adjust his routine in preparation for the 2021 season. “So as I started to relax my brain a little bit and just get into a more comfortable situation and got on a really good sleep schedule routine, a lot of those symptoms went away,” DeChambeau said, “and they come back every once in a while but as I do a lot of breathing, it goes away and that’s really what I’m focused on trying to do.”
DeChambeau has spoken at length about pushing his body and mind to its brink in pursuit of added speed and distance. At last week’s Sentry Tournament of Champions, he said he nearly blacked out multiple times during recent training with long-drive champion Kyle Berkshire.
“There were times where I was seeing a tunnel, and I had to stop,” he said.
Currently sixth in the World Ranking, DeChambeau set a single-season record during the 2019-20 PGA Tour campaign with an average driving distance of 322.1 He’s averaging 329.2 yards off the tee so far rin 2020-21, nearly seven yards ahead of second place Rory McIlroy.