On the night before he won the US Open for a second time, Bryson DeChambeau told a gallery of reporters that he had started washing his balls in Epsom salt. No matter how carefully golf balls are manufactured, you see, there will always be errors and imperfections in the mass production of a 1.68in-diameter urethane-covered sphere with 328 dimples. Since the heavy side of an out-of-balance ball will float to the bottom in a solution of Epsom salt and water, DeChambeau has begun marking the top of each ball with a dot to ensure it’s always rolling over itself. “For most golf balls that we get, it’s not really that big of a deal,” DeChambeau explained. “I just try to be as precise as possible, and it’s one more step that I do to make sure my golf ball flies as straight as it possibly can fly, because I’m not that great at hitting it that straight.”
Not that long ago DeChambeau, a math prodigy who took a physics degree from Southern Methodist University, might have bypassed the ELI5 version for an explanation steeped in jargon and inaccessible to the layman. Instead he served up a made-for-social anecdote lapped up by the media that added a fresh chapter to an eccentric lore that belies the central‑casting appearance of a protypical American Jock™️.
