Fog, wind and a dangerous Shinnecock setup turned the 126th U.S. Open into survival mode before Scottie Scheffler, Rory McIlroy and Brooks Koepka teed off cold.
The U.S. Open at Shinnecock Hills was supposed to open with wind, nerves and a bruising setup. Instead, the first round got swallowed by fog before Scottie Scheffler, Rory McIlroy and Brooks Koepka even had a chance to turn Thursday into a major-championship statement.
That’s the U.S. Open for you. It doesn’t always punch the way you expect.
Play at the 126th national championship was stopped at 7:05 a.m. ET after visibility became too shaky to continue.
What started as a brief hold quickly turned into a full two-hour delay, with the horn sending players back into wait mode and only a tiny slice of the 156-player field having made any real progress.
The restart came at 9:05 a.m. ET, but the interruption already changed the feel of the day. Rhythm matters at a major. Warmups matter. Patience matters.
And at Shinnecock, where the margins are already thin, losing two hours before the wind really starts talking can mess with more than a tee sheet.
The USGA had spent the lead-up bracing for a nastier enemy: heavy gusts and the threat of storms. The fear wasn’t just wet weather. It was Shinnecock getting too sharp, too fast, too close to that uncomfortable edge where good shots stop being rewarded.
To avoid that nightmare, officials had already softened the setup by backing off green speeds and choosing hole locations with survival in mind.
Then the fog rolled in and hijacked the whole operation.
Koepka, a two-time U.S. Open champion and the last man to win one at Shinnecock in 2018, was pushed to a 9:30 a.m. start.
McIlroy, still one of golf’s biggest weather-proof headliners, moved to 9:52. Scheffler, the world’s No. 1 player and a man chasing the career Grand Slam, slid to 10:14.
That trio didn’t lose strokes during the delay, but they absolutely lost control of the script.
This is where Shinnecock gets dangerous. A fog delay sounds harmless compared with lightning or sideways rain, but it can create a brutal split between morning calm and afternoon chaos.
The course was already expected to get louder as the day went on, with wind building and storms still lurking.
So yes, the U.S. Open started slowly.
But at Shinnecock Hills, slow doesn’t mean soft. It usually means the punishment is just warming up.
By sunset, anyone still near par could feel like they’d already stolen something from the course.
