SOUTHAMPTON, N.Y. — William Mouw had one of those brutal moments where a good shot produced a bad result, his approach on No. 16 at Shinnecock Hills Golf Club hitting the flagstick and spinning back into a bunker.
Tied for second at the U.S. Open at the time, he ended up with a double-bogey 7 that quickly dropped him out of the top 10 on. the leaderboard. Mouw recovered nicely with pars on his final two holes Friday to finish with his second straight par round of 70, and he said afterward players sometimes have to accept bad breaks and keep fighting.
Mouw, a 25-year-old Californian, is among the many players at the U.S. Open for whom such lessons didn’t start at Shinnecock Hills. It began with surviving sectional qualifying just to make it there, and he was one of 43 in the field who earned their way in on June 8. He needed to advance from a playoff in Canada where eight players were competing for three spots.
“I think it would have been obviously nice to not have to qualify, but it gives you an opportunity to compete and gain some momentum and confidence,” Mouw said. “I put up two good scores in Canada and made two very big putts on my 36th hole and the playoff hole to get in. It gave me a lot of confidence and carried it into this week.”
He was tied for 11th and joined by 21-year-old amateur Ryder Cowan, who briefly held the lead in the first round and followed his 2-under 68 with a 72 on Friday. Max Greyserman and Ben James, who both made it from a New York qualifier, shot 69s in the first round that had them in the top 10 when they started their second rounds, but they dropped back after James shot a 72 and Greyserman a 73.
Cowan, who will be a senior at the University of Oklahoma in the 2026-27 school yer, also had to deal with even more than 36 holes when his qualifier in Florida required a three-man playoff for two spots.
“I mean, they call it the longest day in golf for a reason. It’s a long day, and you have like a week to prepare for the U.S. Open, maybe one of the most prestigious tournaments in golf,” Cowan said. “It’s hard, because you come off of qualifying, you’re tired, you’re exhausted, and you don’t want to play.”
He remained in Florida and did play the next day, then flew home and took a day off to rest and recover.
Mouw missed the cut in his U.S. Open debut in 2022, a year after helping Pepperdine win the NCAA Division I men’s golf title. He turned pro in 2023 and picked up his first PGA Tour victory last July at the ISCO Championship, when his 9-under 61 in the final round allowed him to make up a seven-shot deficit.
That got him a spot in this year’s PGA Championship, where he made the cut, but his spot in the Official World Golf Ranking wasn’t high enough for an automatic entry into the U.S. Open. So he went out and earned one.
And he certainly showed a major championship mindset when he bounced back from his bad break on No. 16 at Shinnecock Hills.
“I would like to be under par, but I’m happy with two pars on the last two holes,” Mouw said. “Golf is a game of inches, and sometimes the breaks fall your way, sometimes they don’t. I’ve accepted that for today. I did get some good breaks today, too, so you can’t just look at the bad breaks. So I just took that.”