2021 Open Heroes: Ben Schomin
Coming into this year's Open not many of us even knew the name. Schomin is Cobra’s tour operations manager and he stood in as Bryson DeChambeau’s caddy at the recent Rocket Mortgage Classic when the American parted ways with Tim Tucker.
Then he really hit the headlines when he stood up for the brand and put DeChambeau firmly in his place. The 2020 US Open champion, after hitting just four fairways on Thursday, said: “With the driver right now, the driver sucks. It's not a good face for me and we're still trying to figure out how to make it good on the mis-hits. I'm living on the razor's edge, like I've told people for a long time. It's literally the physics and the way that they build heads now. It's not the right design, unfortunately, and we've been trying to fix it, just haven't had the results yet."
Here’s the other side of the argument, from Schomin, which quickly brought about an apology from DeChambeau and more platitudes about the brand.
“Everybody is bending over backwards. We’ve got multiple guys in R&D who are CAD’ing (computer-aided design) this and CAD-ing that, trying to get this and that into the pipeline faster. (Bryson) knows it. It’s just really, really painful when he says something that stupid.”
And if that wasn’t enough….
“It’s like an 8-year-old that gets mad at you. They might fly off the handle and say, ‘I hate you.’ But then you go. ‘Whoa, no you don’t.’ We know as adults that they really don’t mean that and I know that if I got him cornered right now and said, ‘What the hell did you say that for,’ he would say that he was mad. He didn’t really mean to say it that harshly. He knows how much everyone bends over backwards for him, but it’s still not cool.”