Dustin Johnson’s search might be ending at perfect moment

Dustin Johnson hasn’t had the year he feels his game deserved. But that’s golf. That’s the search.

The two-time major champion has yet to win on LIV this season and has missed the cut in all three majors so far this season. Next week’s 153rd Open Championship at Royal Portrush will be the final start of his major exemptions for his 2020 Masters win.

The 40-year-old Johnson hasn’t had a top-10 in a major since the 2023 U.S. Open at Los Angeles Country Club and has missed the cut in six of his last eight major starts. He believes he has six good years of golf, but the results have not been there. The shadows appear to be much longer than he believes.

But in golf, things can feel much closer than they appear. Despite the sometimes bloated scores on his card, Johnson has maintained that he is close. He can feel it. And sometimes all it takes is one swing, one round or one tournament for everything to click.

After a long time searching, things might finally be starting to come together for Johnson this week at LIV Andalucia.

At least, it looked that way Saturday.

After a scratchy first round that saw him shoot 4 over in brutal conditions, Johnson made seven birdies in the second round to shoot a sizzling 64 and vault into second place at 3 under, just four shots behind two-day leader Talor Gooch.

“It definitely gets frustrating when you feel like you’re playing really good golf,” Johnson said on Saturday at Valderrama. “You’re just not getting the results that you think you should be getting with the way you’re playing and the way you’re swinging at it. It was a little bit frustrating, but I’ve been working on it. I feel like the game, the swing is really good. I’m seeing a lot of — hitting a lot of really good shots. It just seems like every time I miss one, it was just always in the wrong spot or at the wrong time. Today finally I didn’t hit every shot great, but my misses were in the right spots, and I gave myself opportunities to get up-and-down or save pars.”

Johnson still looks the same. He still saunters with the same swagger that waltzed through the PGA Tour for 16 seasons. He still effortlessly blasts the ball through the sky. Other than the gray in his beard and the 4Aces logo on his hat, he still looks like Dustin Johnson.

But the results haven’t been Dustin Johnson-esque for some time.

At first, it seemed like a dip, the same kind that plagues almost everyone in pro golf at one point or another. But as the non-competitiveness at major championships continued, the questions about whether or not Dustin Johnson will ever be Dustin Johnson again continued to grow louder.

“Golf is a strange sport,” Johnson said ahead of this year’s U.S. Open at Oakmont. “I don’t feel like I’ve slipped any. My scores haven’t reflected, but it is a really fine line. I remember a few years ago, I missed two cuts in a row. I think I shot 80-80, and then I won the next week. For me, it’s always really close to being good, but just getting back there and keeping it consistent which over the last couple months I’m starting to see a lot of patterns and the game feels like it’s coming back into good form.”

On Saturday, on a tough Valderrama track, Dustin Johnson finally started to see the results, and the glimmer that had faded over the past few seasons started to return.

He’ll have a chance to win Sunday and enter Open Championship week feeling as good as he has in a while. But win or lose on Sunday at Valderrama, Johnson knows that what matters comes next week, where he’ll look to make his first cut at a major since last year’s Open Championship and hope to put himself in real contention for the first time since the 2022 Open Championship at St. Andrews. His hope is that his “frustrating” search is finally ending, and that he can ride a good week in Spain into a top-10 finish at Portrush which would guarantee him a trip back to golf’s oldest major next summer.

If he can do that, then perhaps Dustin Johnson can show he’s still got more sand left in the hourglass than many believe.