Justin Rose wins the US Open at Merion

A major championship is rarely won by the closing-eighteenth-hole 4-iron approach-shot on the elevated difficult downhill-fairway lie. The Merion Golf Club East Course is the classic-1912-Hugh-Wilson-designed eastern-Pennsylvania major-championship-venue (the 113th US Open was the fifth US-Open held at Merion, the first since the Olin Dutra-and-Gene-Sarazen 1934 US Open). The closing-eighteenth-hole at Merion is the 463-yard par-four uphill-fairway-with-quarry-and-elevated-green approach. Rose hit the classic 4-iron approach into the fifteen-feet-from-the-pin up-on-the-green position at the close of his Father's Day round.

THE JOHANNESBURG-AND-HAMPSHIRE BOY

Justin Peter Rose was born at the Sandton Clinic in Johannesburg in South Africa on the thirtieth of July 1980, only son of Ken Rose, a South-African-of-English-extraction-Rose-family junior-mining-engineer at the Gold Fields of South Africa mining-company, and Annie Charlton. The Rose family emigrated to England in 1985 in Justin's fifth year on the father's-job-relocation to the English insurance-and-financial-services industry, and Justin was raised at North Baddesley in the Test Valley of central Hampshire from his fifth year through his school-years. He took up golf at four on the Knightwood Golf Club in Southampton, took the junior-Hampshire-and-England junior-golf-circuit competitive results across the 1990s, and took the English Amateur Strokeplay Championship in 1997 at sixteen.

He turned professional in July 1998 in his eighteenth year on the day after the 1998 Open Championship at Royal Birkdale (the 1998 Open Championship where Rose, then still an amateur, took the fourth-place finish on the strength of the final-hole chip-in for birdie on the 18th green at Royal Birkdale, the youngest amateur top-five finish in the Open Championship in modern golf-history), and across the 1998-to-2002 early-professional period struggled with the difficult professional-transition (Rose missed twenty-one consecutive PGA-European-Tour cuts across the 1998-99 period, the longest missed-cut-streak by any debut-professional in the European-Tour history). He took the first professional victory at the 2002 Dunhill Championship at the Houghton Country Club outside Johannesburg in his twenty-second year, and across the next decade took the systematic European-Tour-and-PGA-Tour victory-and-major-championship-top-10 record that brought him to the second-seeded position at the 2013 US Open at Merion.

THE FATHER'S DAY SUNDAY

The 2013 US Open at Merion opened on the thirteenth of June 2013 with the 156-player USGA-qualified field. Rose was at the eighteenth in the world-rankings at the tournament-opening, was the third-seeded player on the USGA-bookmaker odds at the tournament-opening, and was the one-of-five-Englishmen in the 156-player field. The weather across the four-day tournament was the classic Hugh-Wilson-Merion-difficult rain-and-wind-and-soft-green-conditions; the course-setup was the classic narrow-fairway-and-thick-rough USGA Merion-setup.

Rose finished the first round on the thirteenth of June at the 73 (one-over-par), the second round on the fourteenth of June at the 69 (one-under-par), the third round on the fifteenth of June at the 71 (one-over-par), and the fourth round on the Father's Day sixteenth of June at the 70 (level-par). The four-round total at one-over-par-281 took the tournament by two strokes over the second-place Phil Mickelson (the second-runner-up finish for Mickelson at the US Open after the 2002, 2004, 2006, 2009 US Open runner-up finishes) and the third-place Jason Day (the third-place finish for Day at the second major-championship-final of his career).

The closing-eighteenth-hole 4-iron approach-shot on the Father's Day late-afternoon was the central single moment of the Rose victory. Rose hit the classic 4-iron from the 228-yards-out fairway lie to the fifteen-feet-from-the-pin up-on-the-green elevated eighteenth-hole green-position, took the two-putt-from-fifteen-feet par on the closing-hole, and closed the tournament with the final-round-of-74. The Sunday walk-up-the-eighteenth-fairway with the applauding-Merion-gallery and the on-camera Rose-pointing-to-the-sky gesture (the father-tribute gesture to Rose's father-Ken-Rose who had died of leukaemia in 2002 in his twenty-second year, the Father's-Day-coincidence the tournament-week-press had identified across the Saturday-afternoon-press-conferences) became the iconic single-image of the 2013 US Open closing-ceremony.

THE STANDING SUBSEQUENT CAREER

Rose extended the 2013 US Open major-championship-win across the subsequent decade-of-his-career: the 2014 Scottish Open, the 2017 World Golf Championships-HSBC Champions, the 2018 BMW Championship-and-Fort Worth Invitational. He took the first Olympic Gold Medal in golf at the Rio Olympics 2016 (the 2016 Rio Olympic Golf Course on the final-round-of-67 three-stroke victory over the runner-up Henrik Stenson, the first Olympic-Gold-Medal in golf since the 1904 St Louis Games on the 112-year golf-Olympic-readmission). He took the world-Number-One ranking on the 16 September 2018 (the first world-Number-One ranking by an English-born player since the Lee Westwood 2010-2011 position).

He took the 2024 Open Championship runner-up finish at Royal Troon on the 21 July 2024 in his forty-fourth year, the eighteenth major-championship top-ten-finish of his twenty-six-year professional career. He continues at the active PGA-Tour-and-DP-World-Tour competitive position. He was awarded the MBE in the 2019 New Year Honours List on the strength of his Olympic-Gold-Medal recognition. The Rose name in modern English-golf carries the weight of the Father's Day evening at Merion on the sixteenth of June 2013.