By Brody Miller,The Athletic
Jordan Spieth woke up on just two hours of sleep. He had flown overnight across the Atlantic, passing around the Claret Jug full of booze with friends and family. He was a few days away from turning 23. He wouldn’t be married for another year. Being a father was still a dream. Golf’s next big thing had just won his third major championship in one of the most eccentric ways possible. Nothing but good times in front of him.
So, lying in bed in his Dallas home, sleep was not in the cards. Not on adrenaline like this.
He texted his caddie, Michael Greller, who was sleeping in his guest room before a flight back to Seattle that afternoon.
“Can you sleep?” Spieth asked.
“No.”
“Do you want to watch it?”
It being that tournament less than 24 hours prior. Over in Southport, England, just north of Liverpool. The 2017 Open Championship, which Spieth won despite — perhaps because of — a 22-minute ordeal of confusion, patience and a whole lot of running up and down a steep hill of thick, shrubby dune grass. That sequence would be remembered as one of the more famous, hilarious stretches in recent golf history, maybe even the core memory of Spieth’s ever-entertaining prime. An errant tee shot. A lengthy ruling and deliberation. One hell of a bogey save from the driving range.
Spieth and Greller had never rewatched a tournament together. Nor had they ever watched one alone. Even with the Open returning to Royal Birkdale this week, Spieth said he still hasn’t made it a point to watch again since that Monday morning. That impulse was as unusual as the day that had preceded it.
“I don’t even think I will for another 20-something years,” Spieth told The Athletic as he revisited that epic Sunday in Southport.
But just that once, Spieth and Greller knew they had lived through something wild. They sat on the couch and watched through the lens of “what just happened?” They remembered few details of what they said to each other. Greller confessed he fibbed about a crucial yardage to get the correct play. He lied about a motivational quote, too.
And, of course, they tried watching that famous hole.
“I had to fast-forward through the 13th hole,” Spieth said. “I couldn’t watch it. It was taking way too long.”
On the other hand, he learned from watching just how absurd this scene was to viewers at home.
“The aerial views were nuts. I was like, man, if I could have just had a drone, I’d have made this go a lot faster.”
What he rewatched that morning was what the world saw on TV: A surreal scene featuring Spieth standing and pointing atop the steep hill like a conquering general and maneuvering through equipment trucks on the driving range to establish a makeshift drop zone. All while the other competitor in the arena, Matt Kuchar, stood and waited, with the biggest round of his life on the line. So, before the Open tees off Thursday for the final major championship of the year, let’s relive that 13th hole with the help of the man himself.
Spieth sat down Saturday evening with a three-shot lead, a game in control and the sporting world still wondering if he’d blow it. Five of the 11 questions reporters asked Spieth that night centered around handling a lead. They asked if he could close. They wondered if he’d gotten over past failures.
Let’s be honest. They were asking about the 2016 Masters.
It was just 14 months earlier that Spieth, the best player in the world and defending champ, had a five-shot lead on the back nine at Augusta National, and he collapsed. Fell apart. Choked. Bogey, bogey, quadruple bogey with two in the water on No. 12 to seal his defeat. He played solidly the rest of the year, but it was a clear dip from his all-time 2015 run. He was the golden boy, the next one-name star, and the difficult part about everybody willing you to win is facing their disappointment when you don’t meet their expectations.
Spieth said the anticipation at Augusta National was what killed him. Contrary to what you might assume, he believes playing when you have your A-game is far more stressful than when you don’t. When you’re not swinging it well, expectations are lower. Just make it work.
“But when you have it, your own expectations go through the roof, right?” he said. “’Cause you’re like, I know that I have this, and so this is definitely mine to win.”
And he had to wait at Royal Birkdale. From 7 a.m. until he went to the course in the afternoon, he sat in the rental house with his buddy Justin Thomas and watched the early coverage. How was the course playing? What was the wind like? That anticipation got to him a little. He kept worrying about the first tee shot. The wind would be pumping off the left all day, and he couldn’t hit driver because there was out of bounds on the right. He knew if he could just nail that first tee shot, he’d be out of trouble until the sixth hole.
He had this “high toe power draw” with his 3-wood he loved at the time, where he turned down the face a little at address. He had full command of it. And with all the nerves, he hit it perfectly. What a relief.
Wrong.
Instead of bouncing off the side slope left of the fairway, it missed by maybe two yards and stuck.
“I waited all day for that shot,” Spieth said. “I hit it exactly how I wanted to, and I thought I was gonna kind of get paid off for it, and it kind of stuck in the side rough and I ended up making bogey.”
That set the tempo. Bogey. Par. Bogey. Bogey. Birdie. Three more pars and a bogey to enter the back nine tied with Kuchar, who was seeking his first major championship. Nobody else was within four shots. The winner of the Open would be one of the two.
“People think about kind of 13 on, but that front nine was a big-time roller coaster,” Spieth said. “I had lost the lead, tried to get it back. Got it back a little, lost it again, and all of a sudden we made the turn, and it was like, man, what just happened?”
Spieth and Kuchar remained tied at 8-under as they approached 13.
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