THE US OPEN 2026

The difficulty with the U.S. Open is that every year, we convince ourselves it is a golf tournament when, in reality, it is an annual experiment conducted by the PGA to determine whether highly paid professional athletes can still be induced to cry in public.

This year’s championship begins at Shinnecock Hills, one of those rare venues that genuinely deserve the overused adjectives. It is not merely historic, difficult, windswept, strategic, brutal, exacting, or any of the other words that television commentators drag out. It is all of those things simultaneously. When the wind arrives off the Atlantic, as it usually does, the course acquires a distinctly malevolent personality.

Unlike Augusta, where genius can overwhelm the golf course, or the many PGA Championship venues where power increasingly dominates, the U.S. Open remains one of the last major championships where stubbornness, patience and emotional self-control are often more valuable than brilliance. The winner is frequently not the man who plays the most spectacular golf. It is the man who remains least irritated for four consecutive days.

That distinction matters because we arrive at Shinnecock with professional golf enjoying one of its strongest periods in years. There is no shortage of elite players. There is, however, a shortage of players whose statistical profile, temperament and major championship record suggest they can survive a U.S. Open examination.

Here are my eight against the field, and below is a small insight into the each-way terms of the major bookies.