{"id":7352,"date":"2026-09-26T16:15:14","date_gmt":"2026-09-26T16:15:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.fogolf.com\/us\/7352\/"},"modified":"2026-09-26T16:15:14","modified_gmt":"2026-09-26T16:15:14","slug":"wyndham-clark-survives-near-collapse-to-win-second-u-s-open-title-at-shinnecock-hills","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.fogolf.com\/us\/7352\/","title":{"rendered":"Wyndham Clark Survives Near-Collapse to Win Second U.S. Open Title at Shinnecock Hills"},"content":{"rendered":"

Wyndham Clark wins the 2026 U.S. Open at Shinnecock Hills in wire-to-wire fashion, holding off Sam Burns by one stroke after watching a six-shot final-round lead nearly disappear. <\/p>\n

Wyndham Clark walked onto the first tee Sunday at Shinnecock Hills with a six-shot lead and the look of a man ready to cruise. By the time he walked off the 18th green, he looked like a man who had survived a car wreck, clutching his second U.S. Open title by just a single stroke over Sam Burns.<\/p>\n

Clark\u2019s wire-to-wire victory was the first at the U.S. Open since Martin Kaymer ran away with it at Pinehurst in 2014. But there was nothing runaway about the final round. What began as a coronation turned into one of the more dramatic Sundays in recent major championship history.<\/p>\n

A Dominant Start<\/p>\n

Clark set the tone Thursday with a blistering 6-under 64 in the opening round, grabbing a three-shot lead on a Shinnecock Hills layout that historically eats golfers alive. Only four players have finished under par in the four U.S. Opens held at the venue since 1986, and Clark looked intent on rewriting that history from the jump.<\/p>\n

He never relinquished the lead. Through 54 holes, Clark sat at 7-under with a commanding six-shot cushion over a chasing pack that included world No. 1 Scottie Scheffler, Sahith Theegala, Tom Kim and Sam Burns. The comparisons to Greg Norman\u2019s infamous six-shot lead at the 1996 Masters were inevitable, and Clark was paired with Scheffler in the final group, just as Norman had been with Nick Faldo 30 years earlier.<\/p>\n

The Unraveling<\/p>\n

It didn\u2019t take long for the cushion to evaporate.<\/p>\n

Story continues below.<\/p>\n

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Clark made bogey on the par-5 fifth hole while Burns, playing two groups ahead, drained a 49-foot birdie putt on No. 8. Just like that, a six-shot lead was down to one. The Shinnecock galleries, already buzzing, erupted. <\/p>\n

The leaderboard was alive.<\/p>\n

Clark\u2019s final-round 73 was a grind from start to finish. Bogeys piled up, par saves became white-knuckle affairs, and the kind of freewheeling confidence that carried him through the first three rounds was replaced by something rawer: survival instinct.<\/p>\n

The Shot That Saved It<\/p>\n

The defining moment came on the par-5 16th hole. Clark\u2019s tee shot found the heavy fescue, the kind of lie that typically means damage control at best. <\/p>\n

Instead, Clark somehow manufactured a birdie, an improbable up-and-down that gave him breathing room at the exact moment the tournament threatened to slip away.<\/p>\n

\u201cToday is my day,\u201d Clark said afterward, visibly emotional.<\/p>\n

He made a clutch par save on 18 to close it out, finishing at 4-under for the championship. Burns, who fired a final-round 67, finished alone in second at 3-under. Tom Kim was the only other player to finish under par at 1-under, a testament to how brutally Shinnecock played on Sunday.<\/p>\n

A Redemption Arc<\/p>\n

Clark\u2019s second U.S. Open title comes three years after his first, a victory over Rory McIlroy at Los Angeles Country Club in 2023. The intervening years included some turbulent stretches, including what multiple reports described as \u201clocker room drama\u201d at Oakmont during the 2025 U.S. Open.<\/p>\n

But at Shinnecock, Clark answered every question. He entered the week ranked around 15th in the world, riding momentum from a victory at the CJ Cup Byron Nelson in May, where he fired a 60, nearly becoming the first player in PGA Tour history to break the number in an official event. A T-3 at the Memorial and T-11 at the Canadian Open followed, and by the time he arrived on Long Island, his game was dialed.<\/p>\n

The win is Clark\u2019s fifth on the PGA Tour and earns him $4.5 million in prize money. He becomes just the 24th player in history to win multiple U.S. Open titles, joining a list that includes Jack Nicklaus, Tiger Woods, Ben Hogan, Bobby Jones, and Brooks Koepka.<\/p>\n

What It Means<\/p>\n

Wire-to-wire wins at the U.S. Open are extraordinarily rare. Tiger Woods did it twice (2000, 2002). McIlroy did it at Congressional in 2011. Kaymer at Pinehurst in 2014. Now, Clark at Shinnecock in 2026.<\/p>\n

The difference is that none of those champions nearly gave it all back the way Clark did Sunday. His final round will be remembered not for its quality, but for its grit, a white-knuckle 73 that held up just long enough against a charging Burns and a Shinnecock Hills course that showed its teeth one last time.<\/p>\n

Clark didn\u2019t dominate the final round. He endured it. And sometimes, that\u2019s what winning a U.S. Open looks like.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Wyndham Clark wins the 2026 U.S. Open at Shinnecock Hills in wire-to-wire fashion, holding off Sam Burns by…","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":7353,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"csco_display_header_overlay":false,"csco_singular_sidebar":"","csco_page_header_type":"","csco_page_load_nextpost":"","csco_post_video_location":[],"csco_post_video_location_hash":"","csco_post_video_url":"","csco_post_video_bg_start_time":0,"csco_post_video_bg_end_time":0,"csco_post_video_bg_volume":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[66,959,310,68],"class_list":["post-7352","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york","tag-golf","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-golf","tag-wyndham-clark","cs-entry","cs-video-wrap"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/vive.im\/@fogolf\/117338238195063426","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fogolf.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7352","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fogolf.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fogolf.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fogolf.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fogolf.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7352"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.fogolf.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7352\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fogolf.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7353"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fogolf.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7352"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fogolf.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7352"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fogolf.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7352"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}