was penalised two shots and there were doubts over whether he would show up for the weekend<\/a>. The extraordinary late-evening scenes also delayed the release of the tee times for the third round.<\/p>\n“I won’t pretend to be up here and defend Bryson,” McIlroy told reporters after shooting a 1-under 69 in the third round.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“I’m not particularly fond of him. I think a lot of it is performative. I think a lot of it’s for attention.<\/p>\n
“To hold the tournament hostage like that and to have all of us \u2014 players, volunteers, everyone \u2014 waiting on him to depart, I didn’t feel like it was a great look.”<\/p>\n
McIlroy said he watched the initial incident live with a few other players and felt DeChambeau’s actions “didn’t seem right”.<\/p>\n
“I think there’s no doubt that he improved the line of his backswing,” McIlroy said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“Again, it’s like, whether it was careless or whether it was intentional, I don’t think it matters. Hopefully it was careless, but I think the two-shot penalty was justified, for sure.”<\/p>\n
Other players were more diplomatic when discussing the incident.<\/p>\n
“If I was in that position, I’d just be very careful where I’m standing and how I get into the ball and make sure I don’t improve my lie,” said English player Marco Penge, who was among the golfers to post on X late Friday about his frustrations about the tee times being published so late.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“Yeah, I would never want anyone to think I was doing that. That’s how I would deal with it.”<\/p>\n
Former Open champion Xander Schauffele said DeChambeau could have been given “the benefit of the doubt”.<\/p>\n
“He said he didn’t do it intentionally and it’s unfortunate that he got penalised because he was playing incredibly well and obviously he’s still playing incredibly well,” Schauffele said.<\/p>\n
“So he’s obviously going to have something to prove these next two days.”<\/p>\n
DeChambeau currently sits equal-sixth, four shots off the lead.<\/p>\n
AP<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Rory McIlroy saved one of his best shots at The Open on Saturday for Bryson DeChambeau. The world…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":809103,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[566],"tags":[64,63,759,6933,755,151960,43673,756,85,6953,1742,9582],"class_list":["post-809102","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-golf","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-british-open","tag-bryson-dechambeau","tag-golf","tag-marco-penge","tag-penalty","tag-rory-mcilroy","tag-sports","tag-tee-times","tag-the-open","tag-xander-schauffele"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/809102","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=809102"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/809102\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/809103"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=809102"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=809102"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=809102"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}