HILTON HEAD ISLAND, SOUTH CAROLINA | There is an unpredictable joy to watching Jordan Spieth play golf.
And there is an equal and opposite unpredictable frustration to watching Spieth as well. That’s been his way since Spieth rocketed to the top of the golf world seven years ago when he was collecting major-championship trophies like kids collected Easter eggs on Sunday.
Patrick Cantlay can go about his business with the face of an accountant running through another stack of numbers in his office, but Spieth fidgets and fusses and finds ways to play the game by the seat of his pants and the size of his heart.
Among Spieth’s many gifts – including finding a way to sleep off the 18-inch putt he missed on the 18th green Saturday that seemed destined to haunt him – is the way he pulls us along with him like perhaps only Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy do.
There is an emotional investment with Spieth, committing to the ride whichever direction the rollercoaster twists, and in the course of 24 hours at Harbour Town, there was enough to send someone looking for the Dramamine.
Even Spieth seemed surprised he was wearing the red tartan jacket given to the winner of the RBC Heritage, considering all that had to happen for him to pick up his 13th PGA Tour victory.
That’s the way the game works sometimes. A player can get beat with his best and win with something less.
“I needed a lot of things to go right,” Spieth said early Sunday evening after shooting a closing 66 and then beating Cantlay with a par on the first extra hole after his opponent caught a miserable break when his approach shot buried in a greenside bunker.
“I was about as upset after the round (Saturday) as I’ve ever been in a golf tournament. There’s just no excuse for those kind of brain farts as a professional ..."
Jordan Spieth
To get to Sunday, Spieth first had to get through Saturday night.
On the cart ride in from the 18th green after the third round, Spieth was stewing, knowing how precious that extra stroke, the one barely longer than his shoe that spun out of the hole because he didn’t take his time, might be.
He wanted it to sting.
“I was about as upset after the round (Saturday) as I’ve ever been in a golf tournament,” Spieth said.
“There’s just no excuse for those kind of brain farts as a professional to myself, but also to Michael (Greller, Spieth’s caddie), who’s working his butt off, to go out there and do that that could potentially affect the outcome of a tournament. And I’ve done that a number of times on this stretch in the last four weeks.”
The week before the Masters, Spieth three-putted from 3 feet at the Valero Texas Open. It leaves a scar.
Annie Spieth, his wife, rarely talks to her husband about his golf game. He does enough talking about it for everyone. But she said something Saturday night.
“You need to take five seconds, if you miss a putt, before you hit your tap-in,” Spieth said his wife told him. “So I thought about it today. There was a couple times I was just going to rake it, and I was like, no, I’ve got to take five seconds.”
Since we’re on the subject of Spieth’s irritation with himself, let’s dial it back to the Masters, where he missed the cut. He was blindsided by it, particularly the way he putted. Spieth contends at Augusta. He had never missed the cut there in eight previous starts.
“I hated it. It was the worst feeling. It was the worst feeling as a golfer that I can remember,” Spieth said.
It wasn’t just that Spieth started the final round at Harbour Town three strokes behind leader Harold Varner III; it was how many players were gathered together near the top of the board. They each spent Sunday afternoon like drivers trying to find an opening on a crowded highway.
Two eagles in the first five holes – both on par-5s – jumped Spieth to the top of the leaderboard, and the galleries surged around him, many of them wearing their Easter colors. Spieth and Varner, who was chasing his first PGA Tour win, shared the noisy crowds who gave the event a holiday vibe.
Though he now has won on consecutive Easter Sundays, this isn’t Jordan Spieth 2015, when he won the Masters and U.S. Open among five victories. This is a different version of the same grinder, one who does an exaggerated rehearsal before every full swing and one who can’t trust his putter the way he once did because he’s spent so much time relearning his long swing.
“Close but far,” is how Spieth described where he is now compared to where he was when he was No. 1 in the world.
“I’ve been hitting the ball really, really well all spring, better than I did last year, and I just haven’t been scoring,” Spieth said. “I put in a lot of hours on the putting green this week, and to be honest, if it helped incrementally, it was just enough.
“I’ve got a lot more work to do. I’ve been putting a lot of work into my full swing, and that certainly takes away some of the time you put into other parts of your game, including putting.”
The great ones find a way, though. When Spieth was forced to play sideways from a greenside bunker on the par-4 ninth on Sunday, he didn’t let the bogey stay with him.
Spieth got the help he needed. Shane Lowry, two clear at one point, made a tournament-altering double bogey at the par-3 14th when his bunker shot rolled into the water. Cantlay birdied the 17th hole to pull even with Spieth, who finished nearly an hour before the final groups, but Cantlay couldn’t birdie the 18th for a fourth straight day. Varner thought his tying putt from 36½ feet on the last green was in, but it missed. Sepp Straka bogeyed the last after pulling into a tie with Spieth with a birdie on 17.
Back at the 18th hole for the playoff, Spieth (who made a birdie there on the 72nd hole) hit a brilliant bunker shot with one foot on the bank, setting up a tap-in par. Cantlay could do nothing but gouge his ball from its buried lie to near the back of the green and the boats in Calibogue Sound began their champion’s serenade.
It wasn’t the only chorus Spieth heard Sunday evening. When Spieth came out of the scoring trailer, a group of noisy youngsters was leaning on a fence begging him to sign for them.
Spieth apologized but had to prepare for an eventual playoff. He promised to come back.
An hour after the playoff ended, all of the photos having been taken in his red tartan jacket and with the interviews complete, Spieth hopped onto a golf cart and went back to the kids who were still chanting “We want Spieth! We want Spieth!” as darkness was gathering.
The new father with his wife, young son and grandfather nearby, walked to the kids, grabbed a Sharpie and smiled.
Top: Jordan Spieth blasts to within inches to make a par good enough to win the first playoff hole.
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