What do you do after you …
Fill up on dessert before dinner?
Hit a walk-off grand slam on the first pitch you see?
Win the lottery with your first ticket?
Marry your childhood sweetheart?
Forge a Hall-of-Fame career before your 24th birthday?
Have nowhere to go but … down?
You call yourself Jordan Spieth, that’s what you do.
The face of Dallas golf shrugged off the “slump” narrative at last weekend’s PGA, fighting the wind, demandingly long course and his critics to finish in a tie for third place and only six shots behind champion Brooks Koepka. If there ever truly was a Spieth Slump, it looks defanged as he comes to this week’s Charles Schwab Challenge at Colonial.
Spieth won in Fort Worth in 2016 and, with momentum earned in New York, expects to compete again against a strong field led by world No. 2 and defending champion Justin Rose, Rickie Fowler, Jon Rahm and SMU’s Bryson DeChambeau.
“This is the best I’ve felt in quite a while. I’m very happy,” Spieth said after Sunday’s relatively strong 1-over vaulted to his first Top 5 finish in almost a year. “I have full belief in our team. I have full belief in my process, my mentality, my selfishness and my work ethic. That said, I’ve got work to do.”
Let’s be honest, the real problem with Spieth’s pedestrian present is his prodigious past.
I first wrote about him in 2008, when he took second place in the British Amateur as a 14-year-old sophomore at Jesuit High School. He learned the game at Brookhaven Country Club and polished it at Texas, where he was college Player of the Year as a freshman while leading the Longhorns to the national championship. He joined Tiger Woods as the only players to win the U.S. Amateur twice, and announced his “arrival” in 2010 at the Byron Nelson when, as a 16-year-old, he made the cut on a sponsor’s exemption.
As a pro, he was the PGA’s Rookie of the Year in 2013. He led the final round of the Masters in 2014 before finishing second. And in 2015, at 21, he dominated golf.
He won at Augusta, tying Tiger’s 72-hole scoring record. He won the U.S. Open, becoming the youngest champion since Bobby Jones in 1923. He won the FedEx Cup and the sport’s No. 1 ranking.
At a time when most of us were waiting tables and celebrating the ability to buy a beer, Spieth was already the best in the world at his chosen profession.
His future arrived prematurely, accented by a neon-lit bar of irrational expectations.
“I don’t want to use the word ‘negativity,’ but the questioning and the wording that’s used to describe me by media or whatever over the past year has only come up because of the amount of success I’ve had,” Spieth said before the start of last week’s PGA Championship in New York. “So it actually could be looked at positively, because if I didn’t have the success then, first of all, I wouldn’t be in here right now. Second of all, it would be: ‘Oh, his game is progressing nicely.’ You’d be actually looking at the progression of the game instead of the comparisons constantly to when someone is at their best, which I think is unfair to anybody in any field.”
In 2016, sure enough, Spieth’s X-ray vision deteriorated into bulky, black spectacles. Clark Kent played through Superman.
He led Sunday at the 2016 Masters by five shots on the 10th tee but historically crumbled, going bogey-bogey-quad, lowlighted by infamously depositing two balls in the pond on 12. He finished second.
But while some got busy constructing the dramatic narrative that Spieth would never recover from that 12th hole, Spieth won Colonial a month later by birdieing six of his final nine holes. Later that year, Time named him one of the 100 Most Influential People, writing that Spieth “exemplifies everything that’s great about sports.”
He was a member of the United States’ winning Ryder Cup team, and then in July 2017 won his third major – the British Open – with a remarkable bogey from the car park and then birdie-eagle-birdie-birdie.
He hasn’t won since.
Not only is Spieth now winless in his last 42 starts, he hasn’t really sniffed a win. Sunday was his first Top 20 this season.
Close to completing his intricate puzzle, he somehow overturned the table and scattered every piece. At a tournament earlier this season, he shot 64 in the first round but 81 in the final. In March at the elite Players Championship he missed the cut, and finally admitted frustration.
Said Spieth then, “I’m getting tired of it now.”
It, of course, was a bonafide – albeit relative – slump.
During his sizzling start, Spieth made the game look as simple as Michael Jordan sinking free throws with his eyes closed. He was the best long putter in the history of the game. He made 5-footers looking at the ball, looking at the hole and looking like he’d never miss.
But golf has a way of humbling you. It’s a series of catastrophes, they say, camouflaged by the occasional miracle. It can never be mastered, much less perfected.
Quipped legendary Texan Lee Trevino about the sport, “The older I get, the better I used to be.”
Spieth has dipped in every facet. Tinkered with his swing mechanics with coach Cameron McCormick. Lost confidence putting. Emotional outbursts at the slightest misses. Even something wonky going on between the ears.
This year’s daily scoring-average ranks: Thursday 35th, Friday 3rd, Saturday 193rd and Sunday 208th.
His ranking (39th) and reputation (50-1 longshot to win the PGA) have suffered. His belief – justifiably so – has yet to rot.
“As you’re in this bit of a slump … “ the question began from a reporter before the PGA.
“Was,” interrupted Spieth.
Remember, Tiger went two years between his first and second major and endured a three-year winless gap in the middle of his career. During his void, Spieth’s scoring average slid just a half-a-shot from 2015.
“I didn’t go away from the game for five years,” Spieth said. “I just happened to not win in the last year and a half or so.”
Buoyed by Bethpage Black, there are signs of resurrection.
“I’m 100 percent not hitting it as well as I did a couple years ago, but I’m hitting it a lot better than I did the end of last year and the beginning of this year,” he admits. “But putting’s back. It’s very close to being top of the world again.”
Spieth fired a 66 in the second round to put himself in the final group on Saturday, but then toe-hooked his way to a 2-over that reminded us he’s close, but not all the way back. Colonial will prove if Sunday’s 71 was testament to a turnaround or merely a tease.
Spieth has been chasing the final piece to a career Grand Slam since he was 23. He is only 25.
“That would be a dream come true for me,” he said. “I recognize that if I continue to stay healthy and play well, I’ll have, I don’t know, 30 chances at it. One of them is bound to go my way, right?”
Spieth’s blinding star has temporarily faded. But it certainly hasn’t permanently disappeared into a black hole.
He will win golf’s career Grand Slam. Who knows, maybe even twice?
We should all slump this spectacularly.
