Jon DeChambeau told his son, Bryson, he was going to be fine; a month later, an ambulance was called over his heart. When Bryson flew out to see him, he understood at the bedside that the man there was not the father he had left, which sent him back through two decades of a body failing in stages. He recalled the details when Raj Shamani asked him on Figuring Out what happened when his father died. The reply ran six minutes before it reached a heartbreaking detail that explained the end.
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“He had seven heart attacks.” He then listed the damage that came before — a triple bypass, a back fused more than once, over 20 surgeries on his eyes, a double foot amputation, a below-the-knee amputation, a kidney transplant, and two ribs removed by mistake. “I saved him, but he lost his mind,” he told Shamani, describing gray matter developing as the point where “you lose your mind.”
Most of it went back to type 2 diabetes, which he traced to roughly the year his parents married and had him. He named the cause without softening it, “just drinking Diet Cokes and Oreos,” and the consequence with the same flatness: dialysis from 2014, four hours a session, three times a week. Ron Bankofier, a high-school teammate his father had reconnected with in Winnemucca, Nevada, gave him a kidney in 2017, and it worked for five years before the rest of him gave out.
When DeChambeau saw him after the second hospital stay, he decided on sight that there was nothing left to hope for. His father spoke to him in gibberish, and the only clear thing he managed was “Hey, Bryson,” before he dozed off without registering that his son was standing there. “It was like he was in a whole other world,” he said.
Bryson flew to the Bahamas the following week for filming and golf work, unsure whether he was leaving for good. One morning, he woke up already certain, felt the chills in the shower, and learned from his mother’s text — sent at 8 a.m. East Coast time, 5 a.m. where he was — that his father had gone on a ventilator. Jon died on Nov. 4, 2022, at 63.
He did not wait for the formal declaration to say what he needed to say. He described a 30-minute conversation “with him personally in the sky,” ending with the two of them making peace, and he told Shamani about it without hedging or embarrassment. He was equally unsentimental about the cause, saying his father would have admitted, “I wish I would have taken it more seriously.”
The U.S. Open arrived nineteen months later, at Pinehurst on Father’s Day, and Bryson opened his winner’s press conference with “This one is for him.” He added on the podcast that the reconciliation had already happened in November 2022, in his own head, rather than at a trophy presentation. Shamani had asked what happened next, and the answer suggested the part that mattered had come first.
The segment ended without a moral attached, and Shamani let it stand. What DeChambeau could reproduce precisely four years later was not the grief but the medical record—the dialysis chair, the amputations, the seven heart attacks, the hour of his mother’s text. Reciting it in order, on a podcast set, said more about the years he spent watching than any single line he offered about missing his father.