Miles Russell has given this U.S. Open a very different kind of American weekend story.
Wyndham Clark still owns the top of the board at Shinnecock Hills, and rightly so. A 36-hole record at this place is the sort of achievement that bends a championship around one player. But beneath Clark’s command, Friday’s cut drew a harder and more revealing line: Russell, 17, is still here, while Bryson DeChambeau and Jon Rahm are not.
Russell Stays In The Fight
Russell finished the first two rounds at three over, good enough to make the weekend in his U.S. Open debut. NBC Sports reported that the Jacksonville Beach amateur is the second-youngest man to make a U.S. Open cut since the Second World War, behind only Beau Hossler in 2012.
That is not a novelty note. It is a performance marker. Shinnecock asks grown-up questions in a hurry, especially when the wind changes, the greens start exposing tentative strokes and the cut line turns ordinary pars into small acts of survival. Russell opened with a 72, briefly pushed himself into the top 15 on Friday, then absorbed the back-nine damage well enough to keep his week alive.
ReadGolf had already seen another amateur thread emerge in Ryder Cowan’s Shinnecock spark, but Russell’s achievement carries a slightly different weight because of his age and the company he has just outlasted.
The Names Missing From The Weekend
DeChambeau’s week changed sharply on Friday. After getting himself under par late Thursday and producing one of the more eye-catching driving moments of the championship, he signed for a second-round 75 and finished at five over, outside the projected cut. For a player whose game is built to make difficult golf look conquerable, Shinnecock found the weak point in approach play and punished it.
That gives extra context to the equipment and performance questions around DeChambeau’s driver change at Shinnecock. The power was still there. The control into the greens was not.
Rahm’s exit was just as jarring. He had opened with a bogey-free round, a rare thing at this venue, only for Friday’s back nine to pull him from contention into an early departure. When major champions of that class miss the weekend, a 17-year-old amateur surviving the same examination becomes more than a pleasant side story.
Why This Matters Beyond One Cut
There is always a temptation with teenage golf stories to race too far ahead. Russell does not need to be anointed as anything yet. He has enough time for all of that noise to arrive later.
What matters here is simpler and better: he has handled two rounds of U.S. Open golf at Shinnecock well enough to earn two more. He did it alongside Padraig Harrington, the oldest player in the field, in one of those pairings that makes golf’s timelines feel wonderfully strange. Harrington won majors before Russell was old enough to remember the sport in any meaningful way. This week, they have shared the same examination paper.
That is why the story cuts through for U.S. readers. Clark remains the man to catch, and his Shinnecock weekend chase is the central competitive fact. But Russell has given the championship another layer: a glimpse of the next American wave, tested on one of the game’s least forgiving stages before most players his age have even reached college golf.
Shinnecock has spent two days reminding famous names how quickly reputations can be roughed up. Russell leaves Friday with something more valuable than hype. He leaves it with a Saturday tee time.
