Jordan Spieth, a 21-year-old all-American idol, looked so conspicuously young at a White House reception this year that even President Obama could not resist playing him for laughs. “Jordan told me that this is the first suit he has ever bought,” he said, before cracking another witticism about whether Spieth, only just of legal drinking age in the United States, would be able to order a beer at the bar.
When thrust this week into the Ryder Cup crucible he can, as the youngest American rookie for 85 years, anticipate similar ribbing, given he is not even half the age of Phil Mickelson, the team’s oldest player and its cheerleader-in-chief. Not since Horton Smith, the two‑Masters champion, received his Ryder Cup debut at 20 in 1929 has one so callow stepped on to so hallowed a stage. But Spieth, who since the blossoming of Rory McIlroy has shouldered the burden of being golf’s ‘next big thing’, possesses more than enough natural verve to cope.
This eerily confident son of Texas led the Masters after 54 holes, until the bludgeoning drives of Bubba Watson put paid to his ambitions. At just 16 he finished in the top 20 at the Byron Nelson Championship in Fort Worth, a more impressive result than even Tiger Woods enjoyed at a tour event as an amateur. There was a raw and glaring potential upon which Spieth, with nine top-10 finishes in his first season on tour – again, better than Woods – has emphatically made good.
From the game’s superstars has come a deluge of plaudits for his gifts. “He’s awesome,” Adam Scott says. “He is a very rare talent,” argues Mickelson, who all but begged Fred Couples to include this ‘phenom’ on America’s Presidents Cup team last year. Tom Watson, his Ryder Cup captain, did not have much choice in the matter, given that Spieth’s metronomic consistency ensured his qualification with four months to spare.
At least, despite his tender years, he can claim a close acquaintance with Gleneagles already. He played there in anger against Europe once before, representing the US in the 2010 Junior Ryder Cup on the PGA Centenary course. So, if we assumed that he would be intimidated at the prospect of playing in the middle of the Perthshire glens in September, we might like to know that he has endured the vicissitudes of a Scottish autumn before – when it was, by his own admission, “freezing”, forcing him one morning to tee off the snow.