For at least one golfer at this week’s US Open, just making the field is a massive victory.
Because the last time JB Holmes played a major championship round, it was an abject disaster.
But the US Open has done it again, building a field of deserving qualifiers, many with bright futures, others with checkered pasts. Enter Holmes, who spoke softly and carried a big club for the better part of two decades on Tour. What about the latest chapter of his major league career? It’s worth detailing how miserable things were on his last page, how sour the taste must be in his mouth, to understand why he spares a time THIS The week — at Shinnecock Hills, at the big, bad US Open — is so cool and meaningful.
In that round, then. It was the Sunday of the 2019 Open Championship at Royal Portrush and Holmes set it up with a real chance of winning. He finished tied for third on Sunday, six shots off the pace of leader Shane Lowry, who would go into the penultimate pairing with world No. 1 Brooks Koepka.
“It’s hard to finish a major. It’s a tough test,” Holmes said after that third round. “So we’ll see what (Lowry) does tomorrow and I can go out and hopefully put the number up and give him something to look at.”
Although he was past the Ryder Cup form of his previous career (Holmes was part of the 2008 US team that dominated Valhalla), there was reason to believe 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 had been a mainstay on the Tour for more than a decade, hanging on multiple brain surgeries and a number of complications.
It was just the latest in a winding path for Holmes, whose background was one of tall tales: Growing up in Campbellsville, Ky., he made the Taylor County High School golf team as an eight-year-old in the third grade.
“I’ve been writing letters for 10 years,” he said in an interview in Portrush. “I don’t know if that’s a record.”
He seemed on the verge of a breakthrough.
Can you tell which high school golfer is eight-year-old JB Holmes?
However, instead, Holmes’ number to see it became important for an entirely different reason. He hit his opening ball 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 racked up six bogeys, four doubles and a triple against just a single birdie, shooting 41 on the front nine and 46 on the back nine and signing for 87, the worst round of the day by seven. worst final round in the Open in more than 50 years. He dropped from third to T67, costing himself hundreds of thousands of dollars and valuable ranking points in the process.
Holmes didn’t speak to reporters after the round, understandably, but he left it to Koepka, who was on a slow-play crusade at the time and spent the day frustrated by Holmes’ slow pace, after his single death. (In his defense, it’s hard to shoot 87 at any real speed.)
“It’s not like 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 here,” Koepka said before adding the final compliment: “It was slow, but it wasn’t too bad for his usual pace. I thought it was relatively quick for what he usually does.”
So we hailed Holmes’ big chance: as a slow, expensive sideshow. But the worst thing about Holmes’ no-good, very-bad Sunday is that he never got a chance at redemption. One of the great things about competitive golf is that there’s always another tournament where you start with a tie in your pocket – but Holmes never got another. After playing 20 championships between 2014 and 2019, his world ranking dropped as he struggled with injuries and poor form. That major round seemed destined to be his last.
Until now.
That’s because last week Holmes, now 44, made it through the final qualifier at The Lakes Golf and Country Club in Ohio, surviving a four-for-three playoff to advance to what will be his 10th US Open.
The start will be his first on the PGA Tour – or any tournament, as far as I can tell – since July of last year, when he missed the cut at ISCO in his home state of Kentucky. He made 21 Tour starts from 2021-2024 and made just three cuts. It’s been more than six years since his last 20. In other words, there really shouldn’t be any expectations for Holmes.
So what THERE has he been up? Our best clue comes from his ISCO press conference last year.
“I’ve mostly been hanging out with the boys, my two young sons and just being a dad,” he said, referring to his three- and seven-year-old sons, Beckett and Tucker. “It’s not necessarily the golf part, it’s more that I don’t want to not be there for them. They’re only kids once, they’re learning a lot at this age and I want to be there for that and try to raise good human beings.”
But his sons will no doubt be proud of their father, who, 20 years after his rookie PGA Tour season, will make it to his national championship.
It’s not that he THERE to go down. Defining success solely by his results at Shinnecock Hills — a famously brutal US Open site — would miss the point. Holmes is a mega longshot to even make the cut. We don’t know what to expect from his golf game. He probably doesn’t either.
But we know he’s already earned a dose of redemption. He has earned the right to make more important memories.
And if you are teaching your children life lessons, persistence seems like a worthy one to tell them firsthand.
;)
