WHEN HE LOST THE LEAD HE REGAINED HIS MIND
MARTIN SAMUEL
JORDAN SPIETH stalked off the back of the ninth green, his caddie clearing up behind, momentarily alone with his thoughts. ‘Really?’ he asked himself, aloud. ‘Really?’ Spieth, popularly accepted as the best putter in the world right now, had just lipped out trying to make a very routine par. He was three shots over for the day, and now tied for the lead with Matt Kuchar, who was playing no more than par golf. The choke was on.
Far from duelling in the sun, Spieth and Kuchar were bickering in the shade. Pressure had got to them both. Pressure had got to almost every figure on the leaderboard at Royal Birkdale, the likes of Haotong Li and Matthew Southgate aside. Bolters from out of the blue had breezed around these links. For those presumed to set the pace, it was a different story.
Fast forward to the 15th, and Spieth was yabbering again, this time pointing to the hole, his face still dark as thunder, but vindicated. ‘Go get it,’ he told his caddie Michael. He was referring to the ball, sunk from across the green, for an eagle and a two-shot lead.
The route taken to that point was scarcely believable. Few sports have the ability to bring out the crazy like golf. Even those, like Spieth, who appear at face value so well adjusted are not immune.
We have been spoiled by the sport’s greatest names, in essence. Tiger Woods made converting a 54-hole lead look easy. Nick Faldo knew how to keep an opponent at arm’s length when it mattered. Even Rory McIlroy, Augusta nightmare aside, has been an emphatic major winner, given clear sight of the finish line. And we thought Spieth was going to be, too.
After back-to-back victories at the Masters and US Open in 2015, he was considered the calm, collected future of his sport. Ice in his veins, all the old cliches. Then he lost a five-shot lead at the Masters in 2016. Then this.
At first sight, there appeared shades of Jean van de Velde in Spieth’s unravelling at the 13th here, farce hand in hand with misery. At times we seemed to be entering the realms of madness, too. Van de Velde took off his shoes and socks and stood in Barry Burn weighing up whether to take a drop or try a watery rescue shot.
Spieth headed off to the driving range after taking an unplayable lie, to give himself a crack at the green, disturbing the practice of six-under-par Li as he did so. He was lucky the area was not out of bounds, as is often the case in competition. Even then, by the time the deliberations over rules, line and club had finished, there were 20 minutes between Spieth’s wayward tee shot and his recovery second. Kuchar waited 26 minutes between firing one into the green and putting.
At which point Spieth lost the lead but regained his mind. What at first appeared the nadir, proved the turning point. Maybe, in those moments when Spieth left the course for the range, he was actually putting it back together again.
The truly scrambled decision would have been to try to play from the bottom of a giant hill in appalling heavy rough. All the time he was walking farther and farther back, off the course in the opposite direction to the hole, Spieth was actually the clearest thinker on the course.
He took a penalty, but ended up with his best line to the green. He used the rules with great clarity. And then, on the next hole, he furthered that resolve by making birdie for the first time since the fifth. Then he made eagle.
Then he made birdie again. He blew nice guy Kuchar away down those final holes. That is what pressure does. It brings out extremes of emotion. Joy and despair. That is why there is no such thing as a fourth-day procession. As the psychiatrist says of Basil in that episode of Fawlty
Towers: ‘There’s enough here for an entire convention.’
Thinking time is what makes golf different. All that useless space between shots to analyse, to contemplate, to replay where it all went wrong and what might have been. Tennis players live off their wits, off split-second reactions. Thinking kills. It is no coincidence that Marin Cilic broke down during this year’s Wimbledon final at a change of ends, when he finally had a moment to sit and consider his blisters, his opponent Roger Federer and impending defeat.
There were those who thought Spieth had been left mentally scarred by his collapse at Augusta. That it had still not left his system. The overwhelming majority of golfers lose every week. Few sports condition their participants for disappointment so regularly.
Yet there is losing and there is the choke. Was Greg Norman ever the same again after his collapse at the 1996 Masters? Doug Sanders missed a three-foot putt to win the 1970 Open at St Andrews. ‘I rarely think about it,’ he said, many years later. ‘Sometimes I can go a whole 10 minutes and it doesn’t enter my mind.’
Had Spieth not recovered here, would that have been his fate, too? Would he, at 23, have been forever racked by insecurity? They would have been big leads to surrender; five at the Masters, three here. His body language at the moment he went so hugely right on the 13th said it all.
He hopped around, a picture of nervous tension, clasping his hat with both hands and raising it above his head, like Stan Laurel, before frantically signalling to spectators to take cover. He was too wide, even for them, this time. In other moments, he went around Birkdale as if he had a grudge against the locals. He hit two of them, and also took a handy rebound off a child’s rucksack.
Only in those last exchanges did the Spieth of 2015 show his face. Until then, he seemed almost needy. ‘Are you sure, Michael? Are you sure?’ he asked his caddie before a straightforward putt. ‘One hundred per cent,’ Michael replied. He seemed the cooler of the two. Maybe it helps to be the man with the bag, not the club.
It helped, too, that Kuchar was the player Spieth might have picked to partner, had he been given an option before the day began. Kuchar has won $40m playing golf but no majors, and this may be why. He never treated their match as gladiatorial, he appeared to regard Spieth as friend not foe.
When the young man finally arrived on the 13th green after his trauma from the tee, Kuchar gave him a reassuring fist bump on the shoulder. ‘Well done, pal,’ he seemed to be implying, ‘you got here in the end.’
Spieth at least had the decency to apologise, but imagine a professional with Faldo or Woods’s single-mindedness in similar circumstances. There would have been no camaraderie for a struggling competitor. Spieth would have been utterly alone with his demons.
Instead, he is a PGA Championship win away from a career Slam, and who knows where he may go from here. Woods would have let him implode. Kuchar allowed him to work it through. Spieth will surely thank him; his fellow professionals, not so much, if he now delivers on so much promise.
3 SPIETH hit three bogeys in his opening four holes yesterday — in his previous 54 holes at this week’s Open, he only dropped four shots, and hit no bogeys on Thursday or Saturday.
TWO weeks before Jordan.the start of the 146th Open, Jordan Spieth had his photograph taken with the greatest Olympian Michael Phelps and basketball legend Michael
Now, following an afternoon of stupendous drama at Royal Birkdale, the 23-year-old Texan has his own extraordinary comeback tale to tell that might just rival anything achieved by the illustrious pair.
The leaderboard tells us Spieth won the Claret Jug by the same three-shot margin with which he began the final day but goodness, this was as far from the procession predicted as can possibly be imagined.
Down and out after hitting a drive 100 yards off line at the 13th it looked as if he was experiencing a choke to make his collapse at the Masters last year seem routine by comparison.
It was at his lowest point, however, that Spieth summoned reserves of sheer will and skill that almost defied comprehension. ‘Remember that photo and I want you to believe you’re the same calibre of athlete,’ his caddie Michael Greller told him. And that’s exactly what Spieth did.
Three over par after 13 holes, he played the last five in five under to snatch victory from the jaws of oblivion.
This is his third major championship victory and he becomes only the second player after Jack Nicklaus to achieve it before his 24th birthday, which falls on Thursday. He will go to the US PGA Championship next month with the chance to become only the sixth player to complete the career Grand Slam, and at a far younger age than any of the other five.
Forty-six years after Mr Lu from Taiwan finished runner-up at this course, Mr Li from China — or Haotong Li, to give him his proper name — claimed a distant third following a brilliant 63, with Rory McIlroy fourth after a 67.
This day, however, was all about two players — and what happened at the 13th has already entered the realm of golf lore. So far off line was Spieth’s tee shot that a seven was a more likely score than the five he eventually recorded.
As soon as he hit it, he held his head in his hands and the fact that it was found at all was a result in itself. Spieth took an unplayable lie and that’s when the fun — or the farce, depending on your view — began. The option he chose under the rules for taking a penalty shot was to go back as far as he liked. As it turned out, Spieth went back so far to find solid ground that he ended up on the practice area.
Now the stewards had the problem of clearing the enormous crowd. The rules officials had to determine a straight line to the hole from where his ball had originally finished, a task made difficult by the gigantic dune that blocked their view.
Near the green, Kuchar, who had played a wonderful second shot, knelt and waited. And waited. After 15 minutes of waiting, he put on an extra sweater. Still no sign of Spieth. Eventually Spieth played a third shot near to the green and got up and down for his bogey five. The par that Kuchar made meant he was in front for the first time.
It is truly amazing how psychology works in golf. You’d think Spieth would have been devastated losing the lead but it clearly acted as a release.
It was the same 25 years ago when Nick Faldo lost a four-shot lead, gathered himself, and played four of the best holes of his life. Now it was Spieth’s turn to regroup and turn in golf of extraordinary quality.
At the par-three 14th he almost holed his tee shot to draw level with a tap-in birdie. At the 15th he poured in a 40ft eagle putt to take a one-stroke lead. At the 16th he holed from 30ft to go two in front. At the par five 17th he matched the birdie managed by Kuchar, and then extended his lead with a par down the last. What a game.
And so for the second year running two players separated themselves at the top of the leaderboard but there the comparison with the shootout at Royal Troon between Henrik Stenson and Phil Mickelson ends. Sequels are never as good as the original, are they? For 13 holes this one, quite honestly, was a stinker but fair play, they did come up with a gripping ending no-one could have foreseen. The tone for the litany of mistakes early on was set by the world’s top two players who both began on the fringes of contention. Dustin Johnson was looking to build on his 64 on Saturday but his challenge never got beyond the first hole, as he opened with a double bogey six.
The reputation of this hole as the hardest on the Open rota was confirmed by Hideki Matsuyama, playing in the next group. A battalion of Japanese media had gathered, all with excited looks on their faces. Moments later there was a collective slump of the shoulders as Matsuyama’s opening tee shot headed right and finished out of bounds. One television representative looked forlornly into the camera and spoke two words to reveal that one golf term has a universal language: ‘OB. OB.’
The large grandstands at the
18th were filled to capacity long before Spieth and Kuchar even made it to the first tee.
The spectators gathered there must have watched in disbelief as the iconic yellow scoreboard recorded Spieth’s alarming collapse, as he demonstrated all too graphically that in golf there is nothing harder than trying to protect a lead.
Perhaps it wasn’t all that surprising that his driver, by some distance the weakest club in his bag, stopped functioning. What was truly astonishing was his meltdown on the greens, as he missed a succession of short putts.
But he got there in the end, and underlined the greatness within. The two golf-mad Michaels, Phelps and Jordan, were surely smiling to themselves, somewhere.