His last title ended in disaster. His US Open comeback is encouraging
For at least one golfer this week at the US Open, just getting on the course is a big win.
Because the last time JB Holmes played a major tournament round, it was a disaster.
It is worth spelling out the details of how painful things were that day, how bitter the taste of the big tournament was in his mouth, to understand why he booked a tee time. this week — at Shinnecock Hills, at the big, bad US Open — cool and purposeful.
In that round then. It was the 2019 Open Championship Sunday at Royal Portrush, and Holmes combined it with a real chance to win. He entered Sunday alone in third place, six shots behind leader Shane Lowry, and is about to enter the penalty shootout alongside World No. 1 Brooks Koepka.
“It’s hard to finish a big match. It’s a tough test,” Holmes said after that third round. “Then we will see [Lowry] Tomorrow I will go out, I hope, put in the number and give him something to look at.”
Even though he had gone through the Ryder Cup form of his previous career (Holmes was part of the 2008 US team that took a beating at Valhalla), there was reason to believe that Holmes could be a problem in contention. He had closed out the star-studded Genesis Open earlier that year, his fifth PGA Tour victory. And he’s been a mainstay on the Tour for more than a decade, enduring multiple brain surgeries and a host of complications.
This was just the latest in a tortuous path for Holmes, whose background is a tall tale: He grew up in Campbellsville, Ky., and made the Taylor County High School golf team as an eight-year-old third-grader.
“I wrote books for 10 years,” he said in an interview in Portrush. “I don’t know if that’s a record.”
And now he was on the verge of success.
Instead, Holmes’ number to watch it was notable for an entirely different reason. He hit his opening shot in the final round out of bounds, leading to a double, and things only got worse from there. With Portrush battered by wind and rain, Holmes piled up six bogeys, four doubles and three bogeys against just one birdie, shooting 41 on the front nine and 46 on the back nine to post 87, the worst round of the day by seven. He dropped from third to T67, costing hundreds of thousands of dollars and valuable ranking points in the process.
Holmes didn’t speak to reporters after the round, which was understandable but he left his only post-mortem to Koepka, who was in a slow-play battle at the time and spent the day frustrated by Holmes’ slow pace. (In his defense, it’s hard to shoot 87s at any real speed.)
“It’s not that he takes that long. He doesn’t do anything until it’s his turn. That’s the frustrating part. But he’s not the only one doing it here,” Koepka said before adding a big compliment: “It was slow, but not that bad for his normal speed. I thought it was too fast for what he’s used to.”
So that’s how we proposed Holmes’s biggest opportunity: as a slow, expensive sideshow. But the worst part of Holmes’ bad, bad Sunday is that he never got a chance to be redeemed. One of the great things about competitive golf is that there’s always another tournament where you start with an even number, an empty scorecard in your pocket – but Holmes never got another. After playing 20 majors between 2014 and 2019, his world ranking declined as he struggled with injuries and poor form. That big round seemed to be the last one.
Until now.
That’s because last week Holmes, now 44, won the Final Qualifying at The Lakes Golf and Country Club in Ohio, surviving a 4/3 tournament to advance to what will be his 10th US Open.
The start will be the first on the PGA Tour – or anywhere tour, as far as I know – since July of last year, when he missed the cut at ISCO in his hometown of Kentucky. He made 21 starts on Tour from 2021-2024 and made just three cuts. More than six years have passed since he last turned 20. In other words, there should be no expectations for Holmes.
Now you have was he there? Our best pointers come from his press conference at last year’s ISCO.
“A lot of times I’ve been hanging out with the boys, my two boys and being a dad,” he said, referring to his three- and seven-year-old sons, Beckett and Tucker. “It’s not the golf part of it, more than that I don’t want to be away from them. They’re only kids once, they learn a lot in these years and I want to be there and try to raise good people.”
But his sons will no doubt be proud of their father, who, 20 years after his rookie PGA Tour season, will play in his national championship.
It’s not that he you have to go down. To define success solely by his scores at Shinnecock Hills – a popular US Open site – would miss the point. Holmes is a mega picture long to make the cut. We don’t know what to expect from his golf game. He probably doesn’t either.
But we know that he has already achieved a measure of redemption. You have earned the right to make great memories.
And if you teach your children life lessons, patience it seems worth showing them in person.
Dylan Dethier welcomes your comments at dylan_dethier@golf.com.
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