Bryson DeChambeau reveals his masterplan to tame the elements at The Open - as he sheds light on little-known 'personal project'

Bryson DeChambeau has travelled through several incarnations in recent years: President Trump's best buddy, Rory McIlroy's worst enemy, the king of TikTok and the apostate of LIV Golf.

But as he sheltered from the elements at Royal Portrush on Tuesday and talked about the challenges that will be set by the Open, which begins here on Thursday, he went back to his roots. He became the Mad Scientist again.

DeChambeau, ranked 15th in the world, talked about the wind that blows in off the North Atlantic here and started getting carried away with his enthusiasm for the subject. It was like listening to Dennis Hopper's photojournalist in Apocalypse Now.

'This is dialectics,' Hopper's character says. 'It's very simple dialectics. One through nine. No maybes, no supposes, no fractions. You can't travel in space. You can't go out into space, you know, without like, you know, with fractions. What are you gonna land on?'

DeChambeau, the most famous physics student to come out of Southern Methodist University in Dallas, was short of that level of crazy as he turned his press conference into a lecture on the elements but then, as he once said: 'Crazy is a relative term, you know.'

By the time he had gone out on to the course for a practice round on Tuesday, spectators were huddled beneath umbrellas and something approaching a gale was blowing in off the ocean but DeChambeau, who is a diligent data analyst, attacked the subject as if it were an equation to be solved.

'When you're here,' he said, 'you're feeling the wind, how much it's coming into you and if it's off the left or right a lot more than normal. "OK, how do I feel? How do I turn this into the wind?"

'If you're going to try to ride the wind one time, how do I control it and make sure it doesn't go into a crazy place? Because once the ball goes into that wind, it's sayonara. That thing can go forever offline. It will turn east sometimes.

'We're doing some testing right now, going to continue to work on how different types of wind affect the golf balls. It's something I'm working on as a personal project, and it's going to take time to understand it.

'This is going to sound wild, but imagine a scenario where you've got a 400-yard tent, and you can just hit any type of shot with any wind with all the fans. Wouldn't it be cool to test in a massive wind tunnel? I'd love that. That's what I imagine, like in a hangar or something like that in a big stadium.

'But all I've really done is hit more half shots and try to play into the wind a lot more. If it's a left-to-right wind, I'll draw it. If it's a right-to-left wind, I'll try to cut it more often than not. If I try to play with the wind, sometimes I lose control of the golf ball. Whenever I had a right-to-left wind and I was trying to hit draws, man, that thing would go forever offline.'

Perhaps DeChambeau's obsession with the wind here stems from the fact that the best finish he has ever achieved at the Open is tied for eighth in 2022, when the tournament was held at St Andrews.

He has won a second US Open since then, taking advantage of a barrage of late mistakes by McIlroy to seal a famous victory at Pinehurst last year.

McIlroy got his revenge at Augusta in April when he faced down DeChambeau in the final group on Sunday to win his first Green Jacket.

Much was made of the fact that McIlroy did not speak to his playing partner for the entire round.

McIlroy may have missed the cut the last time the Open was played here but many see him as the man to beat this year and the idea of joining battle with the Northern Irishman again appeals to DeChambeau.

'I would love that,' said DeChambeau recently. 'I would love nothing more than that. I'd love to beat him, especially in front of his hometown crowd. It'd be great.'

First of all, though, there's that other enemy to conquer: the wind. Because you can't land on fractions.