AMAZING GRACE
South Africa’s Branden Grace takes advantage of perfect conditions at Royal Birkdale to become first male golfer to shoot 62 in a major tournament,
Aggressive Spieth pulls away after Grace’s record 62
SOUTHPORT, ENGLAND— Poor, poor Royal Birkdale. Somebody switched off its wind in the wee hours of Saturday. Its fairways and greens lay softened and incapable of proper rudeness. The vile vegetation of its rough, fattened up with the blankets of rain that came Friday, lacked golf balls to devour, so true were so many of the unburdened shots. “Royal Birkdale, notoriously difficult, had just become one of the easier golf courses that we play for one round of the year,” said a morning TV viewer named Spieth.
By the time this Jordan Spieth finished on Saturday, the 123-year-old course, one day after a bonanza of brutality, would reel with the first 62 in the 442-event history of men’s major golf — by 29-yearold South African Branden Grace — as well as a 64, five 65s, eight 66s, seven 67s, eight 68s and 13 69s. This robbed Spieth of the option of safety and presented him with complication. He solved that com- plication with a suitably aggressive 65, and he reshaped the tenor of the 146th British Open.
Now it might serve as another peg in identifying the next great American golfer. If Spieth — whose 11-under-par 199 after 54 holes left him three shots ahead of Matt Kuchar and six up on both U.S. Open champion Brooks Koepka and Canadian dual citizen Austin Connelly — can prevail, he will turn the lens all the way back to 1963. On July 21 of that year, Jack Nicklaus won his third major cham- pionship, and third different one, at 22 years and six months old, at the Dallas Athletic Club.
Now comes a Dallas golfer, Spieth, who won’t turn 24 until Thursday and would become the youngest since Nicklaus all those 54 years ago with three majors and three-quarters of the career Grand Slam, surpassing Tiger Woods, who was 24 years and almost six months old when he won the 2000 U.S. Open at Pebble Beach. Further, Spieth could put the best salve yet on his foremost career boo-boo, his inconceivable collapse from a five-shot lead with nine holes to play at the 2016 Masters. In the five majors between then and now, he entered Sunday 16 shots behind, 17 behind, eight behind, two behind and 16 behind.
Now he operates from a week-long command.
“I think I’m in a position where it can be very advantageous, just everything I’ve gone through, the good, the bad and everything in the middle,” he said. “I understand that leads can be squandered quickly, and I also understand how you can keep on rolling on one. So it was a humbling experience that I thought at the time could serve me well going forward.”
He predicted a “day that will be emotionally draining and difficult to stay very neutral in the head,” but noted he has “conserved energy in two of the three rounds” here and that he knows “how draining it can be and how important it is to conserve it.” He will tote along an 8-1 record in the last nine tournaments he’s led after 54 holes, with that Masters the oddball in the bunch.
He will spring from a Saturday he mastered with five birdies and zero bogeys, a Saturday with gaudy early scoring that made it “pretty tough mentally,” he said, because it mandated aggression.
With his sturdy brain and all- around game, he had wound up atop a mountain of his colleagues’ feats. It was five groups before Grace when Jason Day walked off with his 65 and said, “I think this is a good formula to see maybe the first 62 in a major championship.” As Day spoke, Grace, with his four top-five finishes in the last nine majors, went about soaring while unaware what it meant. “Whether you guys believe me or not, I honestly didn’t know” the significance, Grace said.
That significance, he would learn just after his three-foot par putt on No. 18 plunked down, from his accomplished caddie Zack Rasego, who bagged the 2010 claret jug at St. Andrews with Louis Oosthuizen.
Thirty-one times, men had shot 63s at major tournaments. Those included arguably the greatest round ever played, Johnny Miller’s closing 63 at the diabolical Oakmont near Pittsburgh in the 1973 U.S. Open. They included the 63 that 24-year-old Justin Thomas just shot last month in the U.S. Open in Wisconsin, which was 9 under par to Grace’s 8 under. They included some of the storied names of the sport, from Nicklaus to Woods with Gary Player, Raymond Floyd, Nick Price, Greg Norman, Payne Stewart, Nick Faldo, Vijay Singh, Phil Mickelson and Rory McIlroy to boot.
Suddenly, a five-foot-10 29-year-old born in Pretoria had shoved them all aside, at least numerically. Then he claimed to have dwelled “in the zone,” said he had concerned himself with trying “to shoot a number to get myself back in there” and zoomed from 45th place to third before ending up tied for fifth, seven shots behind Spieth. “You still have to do it out there” even on a forgiving course, Grace said, and added, “There’s a lot of spots you want to keep out of on this golf course, and I did it today.”