Jordan Spieth Walks We are unable to win the final fairway for Augusta National Golf Club. Fans scream, cheer, and scream for his name. The spices bend and tie the shoes as the sun slowly sets behind the Georgia pines.
Spieth was portraying this moment, and he dreamed of it forever. But he lived at the 2015 Masters and most wanted it to end.
“I was almost in a hurry, not milking it and doing a victory lap,” he says now. “You’d think you just want it to be the last one, but at that point, the stress of carrying the lead in that tournament from day one, I was ready to finish it all off.”
That’s what it looked like. Look at the final hole again: playing with his hair, Spice Figget. He made what CBS announcer Nick Faldo calls his “worst stroke of the week” with his second putt and pushed it from 5 feet. He taps and hugs his caddy, Michael Greller. Holding the embrace of his parents and his girlfriend and his grandfather (“I wanted to be here for this” and Spieth’s ears,” Spice hugs and hugs Greller again. His parents suggest that he kneels around the green for fun with the audience supporting him, so he turns around, applauds as he takes a few steps, getting a quarter around the 18th green circle, then zips.
Soon, it’s done. Spieth shakes hands with several caddies remaining outside the clubhouse. Then he’s scoring. And within minutes he’s been in Butler Cabin, sitting in a chair across from club president Billy Payne, telling the world his new goal is to become a two-time champion like 2014 winner Bubba Watson, who doesn’t slip a green jacket on Spieth’s shoulder.
Two-time champion. He was 21 years old and was a one-time champion in just 30 minutes.
Ten years later, Spieth is still a one-time master champion carrying physical and emotional scar tissue in a career that never fully developed the way everyone had hoped for. Looking back at that last hole, Spieth laughs softly at its speed.
“I hope there’s another opportunity for it,” says Spieth. “And maybe I’ll go with that differently.”
It’s hard to exaggerate How good Spieth was in 2015, and moreover, how much fun it was to watch him. Tiger Woods’ status as an elite golfer has been unraveled and, together with Rory McIlroy and Jason Day, was the main one filling the gap. The difference was that Spieth was four years younger than McIlroy and six years younger than a day. He was incredible. Like Woods, he projected as a once-generation genius.
It wasn’t just the outcome. Vijay Singh won nine times in 2004, but did not fascinate Spieth’s way of doing things. He didn’t shine. Part of Spieth’s appeal was how he moved the ball around the golf course. The fact was that he wasn’t a particularly long hitter from the tee, but not a very long hitter in the parts of the game that seemed particularly dazzling on TV.
He bent the approach shot above and below the branches. He drilled a hole from the bunker at the most dramatic moment. He regularly mixes the driver’s swings together and sends the balls left or right from the planet, but simply tracks them down with an eye-opening miracle recovery and a par putt slapped from behind the cup.
“Jordan Spieth Chips chips for more people than I’ve ever seen,” Curtis Strange, the two-time US Open champion, told reporters. “I was talking about Tom Watson and people would say, ‘Oh, he’s lucky,'” Strange said. “But when you do it every day, it’s not luck. He’s aiming for something.”
Two-time Masters champion and Spieth mentor Ben Crenshaw (both live in Texas) once told Spieth that his approach to the game at a young age reminded him of Wild West legend Wyatt Earp.
“He has a gunslinger mentality,” Crenshaw says. “I called him at once and he looked at me strangely and said, ‘Well, you’re bold, you take a chance.’ ”
It had a magnetism and charm to spice. He did something classy – when he missed the four-hole playoffs with a shot at the 2015 British Open and was stuck for an extra hour to shake hands with eventual champion Zach Johnson, but he was no bored either. At the tournament in Phoenix that year, he moved his friend Justin Thomas out of the player’s parking lot and pranked his friend Justin Thomas. Thomas was surprised to see his car was being towed downtown as the spices hit him. “He had had a panic attack for several hours, so it was worth it,” Spieth said.
In 2015, Spieth was on the money list. His comp was as good as the golfer wanted. His 2015 season is statistically ninth best by PGA Tour experts since 1983, according to Data Golf, the Golf Analytics website. Of his last eight seasons, only two had. Scotty Scheffler in 2024, and Sings in 2004 came from someone other than Woods.
“The spices started, but they were basically Tiger,” says Matt Courchen. He runs the Data Golf Site with his younger brother Will. “In fact, he was 22 at the end of 2015, so he was really ahead of Tiger’s pace at that point.
The Master was the gem of all of it. Spieth finished runner-up as a rookie a year ago and arrived for his second visit to either finishing runner-up in each of the past three tournaments. He opens 64-66 and sets a master record with a score of at least 36 holes, and symbolically remembers both his thinking and level at that point, Spieth says he remembers the most about its beginnings.
First, he believes that blew the hybrid over the green on Thursday at No. 15, and that he sacrificed a chance to actually shoot a 61 or 62.
Secondly, as the score was filtered late Friday afternoon and saw where he went on the weekend, Spieth felt clarity (if not inevitability) to wash him.
“Okay, well, this is mine now,” he says he thought that night before going to bed. “You know, it’s mine to go outside and win or lose.”
it was. He led by three shots after round one and five innings after round two. No. 70 on Saturday. That night he watched the comedy “Forget Sarah Marshall” – “One of the greatest films in the world” and according to Spieth – and prepared to make history.
On Sunday, Justin Rose bravely tried to inject some doubt into Spieth’s victory, but he wasn’t close. “It felt like he was leading the last month,” Rose said afterwards, and Spieth allowed him to rush for a final moment on the green and then to face the moment during the post-round press conference.
After answering dozens of questions about the day and week, Augusta National Moderator asked to finish off the piece by giving a typical birdie and bogey summary, which is the funny ending of many of these sessions. As the deadline approached, many journalists woke up and left the room.
But Spieth faithfully – and even more, he went through what he did in every hole in the final round, spending nearly 20 minutes, and, according to the transcript, he broke down 2,593 words accurately.
It was a coral coronal and seemed to last for a while. When Spieth won US Open that June at Chambers Bay, the story of the Grand Slam was pervasive and almost didn’t look irrational. He didn’t win the British Open or the PGA, but was tied up in the fourth and second. He finished the year with five victories, the FedEx Cup, all meaningful awards and strangleholds about the future of golf during the post-Tiger Woods era. Everyone in the game largely agrees that the course that suits him best is Augusta National, adding that he felt that it was almost impossible for him to not beat another master. In fact, I felt he was likely to win a couple.
That didn’t happen. And instead of continuing to rise, Spieth’s career has become a series of fluctuations, a series of unpleasant, awful swings, looking like a genius we respected, sometimes a magician who can’t do incredible tricks.
13th Spieth, a hole in the final round of the 2017 British Open, exploded his tee shot very offline. It bouncing off the heads of the audience and landed on the gentle dunes of Royal Burkdale. That seemed like a big mistake at the worst. This is a key moment when you drop Spice from your competition.
Spieth took a penalty drop and hit the ball on the green, saving Bogey and took Birdie Eagle by Diby Dee Run to win the tournament three times.
It was Spieth’s third major title, and although it wasn’t filled with as many trophies as in 2015, it was a statistically just as good a highlight of the season.
It was also the last time Spieth won the tournament in nearly four years.
Understanding exactly why Spieth slipped into a slump is impossible if it is the right word for something that lasts so long. Golf is crazy, and its history has been, for a long time, in the other world and filled with others, just to expire to something more deadly.
There are many theories about Spieth’s dip. Unlike top players who find themselves burning, Spieth hasn’t changed his caddy or the coach he’s worked with from Cameron McCormick on his junior day. However, according to McCormick, Spieth tinkered with his swing. He said that in 2019 the idea of Spieth rebutted McCormick’s preaching.
“I’ve become a more secondary instructor coach,” McCormick said on Claude Harmon’s podcast. “He wasn’t too focused on what made him great. It’s his ability to control the golf ball and make an impact.”
Spieth’s indecisiveness in ball strikes put pressure on the rest of his game. There was always some kind of dispersion in his driving, but his putting – which had been his rock for a long time – also began to slip, and more mental tension began to build up.
He was a consistent top 10 putter on the tour from 2015 to 2017, and he was ranked 123rd in putting, which earned strokes during the 2017-18 season, 101st, 79th and 155th in the past three seasons.
“Spieth is a scary short putter right now,” says golf statistics analyst Courthen. “I’m not saying it’s YIPS, but it shows that he’s clearly having problems.”
Was it a low score when you shot an 81 on the Riviera in 2019? One consecutive 12 months in the top 10 from 2020 to 2021? Losing his game in the middle of Friday’s match at the 2023 Ryder Cup? In fact, that doesn’t matter. Spieth won 10 times between 2015 and 2017, and only won twice since 2018. After spending 26 consecutive weeks at No. 1 in the world rankings, he fell 92nd lowest, currently ranked 65th, behind Alex Noren and Mackenzie Hughes.
“If you feel like you’re just a bit of a rut until you make it with golf, it’s really hard to fake it,” Spieth said.
According to Data Golf’s ranking points system, Spieth’s performance up to 2017 was far better than the average player, so as Courthen said, compared (and even surpassed) with everyone like Woods and McIlroy. Since then, Spieth’s production has coincided with players like Sungjae Im and Daniel Berger.
Whatever the cause of liability, the outcome is clear. Spieth was simply average. Winning three majors and 10 tournaments in your first five years as a full-time professional, the average can feel like an undeniable shortfall.
“I’ll go and see his strokes that I won in total from 2013 to 2017, and his strokes have now been won in total.
“It’s not forgetting on long stretches, but there’s a considerable difference when you win majors, burn the world and win where he’s here for now.”
Spieth is not embarrassed by its traits. He is very aware that the scattered victories at Valero Texas Open or Heritage Classic aren’t coming close to delivering what was promised in 2015. He has not won a PGA Tour event in three years.
“If I told me what my admiration was or where I was (10 years later), at the end of that year,” says Spieth, “that’s not what I was looking for.”
Nevertheless, even if you try stretch pieces, your faith in the ability to save with Masters continues. Every spring, April arrives with the same gust of winds in pre-match conversations of the same story. Regardless of Spieth’s struggle, Masters remains the reset button on Spieth Believers. This is an annual expression of authentic faith that is objectively unparalleled when compared to other players of Spieth’s level or height.
All of this raises another appropriate seasonal question, as if you were to step into the first tea of the spices-again-August National.
Why is this year different from all other years?
There’s a rip When he talks about Augusta National, Spieth’s voice has warmth and a comfortable familiarity. That makes sense – most of us probably sound similar when we fall into the formative classrooms, fields and gyms of college. (Remember, don’t forget that he was the second-bound 20-year-old.)
“I have a good feeling about the place because I know I don’t have to have my best to play well,” he says. “I made birdies in every hole there.”
After all, that claim is not entirely true (at least not in tournament play). Through the 40-man master round, Spieth hasn’t actually birded hole 11 yet. But the feelings are fair enough. This is where he saw and lived.
Of course, there are some nightmares. 75 of the final round of 2017 was a throw of hope, the opening tip that sent him towards the first round of 79 last year was unpleasantly uncomfortable, and the 2016 meltdown cried out disaster as Faldo squealed as he put two balls in the water on the 12th day and blew the five-shot lead on Sunday.
However, even with these low moments, it is statistically true (so far) that Spieth is over-performing in Augusta, and data golf calculations show that Spice scores better on Master than the model expects. His historic player profile – as someone who shines around the iron play and the green – also matches the best data golf for the course.
The question is whether Spieth can actually do it on that profile.
Do you have any doubts? Point to the cuts that were missed last year and 2022. Do you want to believe it? He sandwiched those MCs in a tie that came in third in 2021 and fourth in 2023. Spieth also asserted that the end of last season first bothered him in 2018 and dealt with a wrist injury that worsened again in 2023.
Spieth had not hit the ball for about three months since the procedure. He didn’t do the full round until another month afterwards. Instead, he tried to go back to the idea of the swing that carried him when he was young. “I’m not calling this swing a change,” he told The Associated Press in January. “These are just reset to some of the things I did, and it was my DNA.
Now Spieth says he is healthy. He’s confident. He is 31 years old. He also knows not only Augusta National, but everyone.
Justin Ray, head of content at sports intelligence and analytics firm Twenty First Group, says he’s as “gentle as long-time tenants” as Masters. So, given his success with the Masters early in Spieth’s career, Spieth “is the guy who tries to think about every April before he doesn’t play golf anymore,” says Ray, regardless of his level anywhere else.
And why? The Fred Couples led after 36 holes in their 50s and made the cut at the age of 63 last year. Jack Nicklaus was tied to sixth place when he was 58 years old. The four players have won the Green Jacket, which is more than a decade away.
Spieth recognizes the 11-year gap between Crenshaw’s titles, a reminder that he and the people around him have not necessarily done it yet.
Former Proturned Square Smiley Kaufman went through his own battle with injuries (and YIP) before retiring early and moving to television. He and Spieth often talk about how to counter the mental tension of hardship.
“I texted him the other day and said, “This second act of your career isn’t over yet. It’s not over. And I think the world is waiting for you to see what you can achieve,” Kaufman said.
One day, Spieth says he will tell his children – Sammy, 3; Sophie, 1; the third person scheduled for July – everything about his first act. The feeling of about 2015, and that Sunday, and the sequence he always imagined, was a rush of living up to now.
But every time he walks through the grounds of Augusta National, his hope is that they will be there to see something even more special in the end. Share with him the moment he stops and enjoys, soaks as long as possible.
“There are bad things that I remember very clearly, and a lot of good things that I remember very clearly,” says Spieth. “And then, ‘OK, this is still my favorite tournament in the world. How can I make more memories here?”