Spieth’s career forged with magic moments

DALLAS — Jordan Spieth’s roots in golf are a testament to the power of combining nature and nurture.

Take the son of two collegiate athletes and give him the right kind of supportive environment to grow up and foster his imagination and talents. The result is a superstar capable of rising to the top of the golf world and winning two majors at the age of 21.

Since Spieth settled on golf over all the other sports he played until age 12, his journey to Masters and U.S. Open champion reads like a one-way road map:

• Shot 62 to win a tournament at age 12

• Won the championship division in the statewide Starburst Junior Golf Classic when he was 13

• Finished 16th in a PGA Tour event at age 16

• Won an unprecedented three consecutive Texas state championships in the top high school classification

• Joined Tiger Woods as the only players to win multiple U.S. Junior Amateurs

• Led the Texas Longhorns to an NCAA title in his only collegiate season

• Became the youngest player in 82 years to win a PGA Tour event at age 19

• Became the second-youngest winner of the Masters a year after leading at Augusta National through 62 holes in his debut

• Won the U.S. Open three years after finishing low amateur

• Came within one stroke at the British Open of taking a Grand Slam quest to the PGA Championship

• Became the second-youngest player to reach No. 1 in the world

• Won a record $23 million in 2015 and became the world’s highest-paid golfer at age 22.

His combination of charm, manners, intelligence, fearlessness and skill has been heralded with all manner of hyperbole.

“The last time we had a child like this, there were three wise men and a donkey involved,” said David Feherty, the irreverent golf analyst.

A tad bit much, given that the reigning Masters champ had pretty much a normal childhood but grew up in a family that was hyper-competitive.

“There was no mercy in our house,” Spieth’s mom Chris said about the rivalry between Jordan and younger brother Steven.

To further stoke their competitive fires, the family joined Brookhave Country Club when Jordan was 8. Chris Spieth made her two sons participate with the swim team the first summer to get them out of bed and busy in the morning.

“Jordan saw the driving range from the pool that entire summer and asked if he could do that instead of swim team the next year,” his mother said. “We let him, and the rest is history.”

Spieth chose golf over swimming. It wouldn’t be the last time Spieth made such a decision that would eventually make him the golfer who rattled off a series of historical scoring records to win the 2015 Masters Tournament and make a run at the elusive Grand Slam.

THERE WAS NO Texas-sized tale like Byron Nelson and Ben Hogan digging their games from the dirt of a Fort Worth caddie yard.

Spieth received a set of plastic clubs when he was 18 months old as a present when his brother, Steven, was born. He was almost 5 when he started annually attending the hometown Byron Nelson tournament, promising Payne Stewart in 1998 that he and his little brother would be quiet and hold still when Stewart hit a ball that had rolled up to where they were sitting under the ropes on the 16th hole.

Before school, Jordan would mow a small corner of the yard and he and Steven would smash plastic balls at each other from 20 yards away until “someone ends up hurt and someone ends up in trouble.” There were occasional trips to the driving range with their father, mostly to get out of their mother’s hair. Then the family joined a club, and the swim team led a worn path to the golf course.

By then, the competitive impulse was already ingrained – as it should be for a young boy named after his father’s favorite basketball player, Michael Jordan. The young Jordan wanted to compete at everything, whether it was piano or board games. The victim was most often his little brother.

“The first time Steven could beat Jordan at anything was chess, and the board got thrown,” Chris Spieth said. “He’ll tell you today it’s because Steven was in chess club – he was only in second grade.”

His parents met as gym rats – his dad was a college baseball star at Lehigh and his mom played college basketball at Moravian.

“Sports took over his life at 4 years old on,” his mother said.

As with most kids, it started with soccer before advancing into basketball, baseball and football. Jor­dan was pretty good at all of them.

“We wanted him in team sports,” his mother said. “You read about gymnasts and prodigies who go off and do one thing and they don’t develop the social skills or the team camaraderie. My husband and I both played team sports. We wanted him to have a normal life and not a prodigy kind of life. Of course, we didn’t know he was a prodigy back then.”

Spieth was quarterback on a middle school team, but because it would end his summer golf season, he didn’t want to continue playing football – which in Texas is akin to heresy.

“These guys were like, ‘That’s a sissy sport; why are you playing that?’” his mother said of the teasing Jordan got from his athletic friends. “Jordan was very sensitive to all of that.”

Jordan didn’t sprout to 6-foot-6 like his brother, now a junior guard at Brown University who has been a starter since he arrived in Providence, R.I. Life as a shooting guard was cut short in eighth grade.

Baseball, in which he pitched and fielded first base or center field left-handed while batting as a natural righty, had more potential and was more difficult to let go. His father, who often coached him, thought his son’s ideal future would be as a pitcher who played golf between starts – like the Braves’ Hall of Fame rotation of Greg Maddux, Tom Glavine and John Smoltz.

“The hardest part for me was quitting baseball,” Spieth said. “I was starting high school, and my dad was a baseball player. So that was a tough one.”

The break was inevitable. Spieth’s golf swing was affecting his baseball swing as he slipped from leadoff and cleanup hitter to down in the batting order behind kids who were committed to baseball full time. And the schedules were conflicting too much.

“By that time, golf was by far my best sport,” Spieth said. “I’d seen success and loved it and knew that’s what I wanted to do. When you get to high school age, all seasons seem to overlap each other, so you really have to start specializing. I’m all for kids becoming athletes who love golf. Once you get into high school, you’ve got to figure out what you can do. I didn’t want to sacrifice my golf game just to keep on playing basketball for a little longer or baseball for a little longer. So I was perfectly content at that time just saying I was going to choose golf.”

His parents were willing to invest the time and money in pursuing his dream.

“He had to prove to us, to give up baseball, that he was really dedicated to this golf thing,” his mother said.

IT WAS NO secret early on that Spieth was pretty good at this golf thing. He posted a landslide win in his 12-year-old age group at the Star­burst tournament in Waco, Texas, shooting 62 on a regulation course with his father caddying.

“I came in, and several guys that had been around a lot of golf and just knew junior golf said, ‘Do you have any idea what he just did? Wow, that was special,’” said his father, Shawn. “But he was still young enough at 12 it was really too early to think about what that meant down the road.”

To prove himself, Spieth wanted to pass up his age group and compete the next year in the 54-hole championship division of the Starburst Junior Golf Classic against boys up to 18 years old on a championship-length course.

“Why don’t you want to win?” his parents asked him.

“I will win,” Spieth answered.

Spieth’s confidence grew, considering his closest competition in the final round were mostly fellow junior members at his home club.

“So by the time the final round I was like, I’m going to kick these guys’ butts,’” Spieth said. “I’ve got a mental edge on these guys because these are the ones who get beat down every week.”

He closed with two birdies to finish 2-under 212, five strokes ahead of defending champion Key Young, an older Brookhaven junior whom Spieth had been measuring his progress against for years.

“If he wasn’t known before, he is now,” Young told the Waco newspaper after the tournament.

Spieth quickly became nationally known. He was a three-time American Junior Golf Association first-team all-American from 2008-10, including player of the year in 2009, when he won his first U.S. Junior Amateur at age 15.

“Made it to semis the year before and went back and won it, and it was then that I knew I really wanted to do this and believed that I can be the best player,” Spieth said. “I had reached No. 1 junior, and that’s when I said I wanted to be the No. 1-ranked amateur next and wanted to be No. 1 in the world as a professional.”

Within six years, he was.

CAMERON MCCORMICK WAS teaching lessons at Brook Hollow Golf Club when a 12-year-old who had just shot 62 showed up looking for guidance. He fit the Spieths’ modest budget, but more important, he fit the young talent’s temperament.

“It wasn’t hard to resonate with the young man who all he wanted to do was win,” McCormick said.

A native of Melbourne, Austra­lia, McCormick came to America to play golf – first at Butler Community College in Kansas and then Texas Tech from 1994-97. When his game didn’t advance to the next level, he turned to teaching.

Spieth – mostly self-taught other than some group lessons as a beginner – was not the most coachable kid.

“If it wasn’t improvement in a matter of three swings it wasn’t what Jordan was looking for,” McCormick said.

They bonded through competition. Closest to the hole got a hat.

“By golly, Jordan was going to win that hat,” his mother said.

Like breaking a spirited colt, McCormick slowly got Spieth to harness his intensity and kinetic energy into a formulated plan.

“The more challenging part was to increase desire to win with a measure of patience and recognizing that certain things take time,” McCormick said. “With the help of his parents, who did the large part of that work, Jordan became tolerant of evolving a little bit more over time and being patient and taking a really diligent long-term or
medium-term focus to his improvement.”

For the first three months they did little but work on Spieth’s putting, which was the worst part of his game. At Spieth’s own suggestion, he converted to a left-hand, low style. Eventually they “started working to expand his skill set and morph his technique ever so slightly over time,” McCormick said.

The result was a tool box that proved resistant to failure. A decade later, Spieth has complete trust in McCormick’s advice and McCormick marvels at Spieth’s abilities.

“He’s an all-rounder, most definitely,” Mc­Cormick said. “In other sporting terms, he’s a five-tool baseball player who can do everything world class. So he doesn’t need to rely on one skill set to harvest a good score. If one’s not firing, he’s got four other tools he can rely on to get the job done, that job being low scoring. Whereas, if you’re a player that relies on one or two strong sets on the course you can be found wanting and have some off weeks. Which is why Jordan week in week out is such a great competitor and puts out results week in week out.”

THE SPECIAL INGREDIENT to Spieth’s success is the support from his family.

Having two sons pursuing different athletic muses and a special-needs daughter is a lot for two working parents to juggle. What made it work was understanding that each child had individual needs. Jordan’s needs were treated as no bigger or smaller than Steven’s or Ellie’s, even if they might hold more lucrative long-range promise. There were no pedestals in the Spieth household.

“Everyone who has kids understands they all have gifts to give,” Chris Spieth said. “Jor­dan just happens to have a gift that the whole world sees. His brother, sister, their friends all have gifts to contribute.”

The boys’ lives weren’t interrupted when Ellie was born prematurely with a neurological condition that left her in neonatal intensive care for months when Jordan was 8. The parents employed a constant strategy of “divide and conquer.” They each took shifts at the hospital with Ellie while the other shuttled the boys to whatever they had going on.

“Mostly, my husband would go with Jordan for golf,” Chris said. “I wasn’t there for either one of the Junior Amateurs. It was summer, and Steven was in big basketball tournaments here in Dallas. That was just as important to him as this was to Jordan. So in the scheme of things, both should be just as important to us, too. Jordan understood that and still to this day does.”

The strategy hasn’t changed. Some weekends are spent at home with Ellie, some in Rhode Island or wherever Steven is playing for Brown, and some at tournaments where Jordan is competing.

At home it was equal opportunity. They grew up with the only television being in the family room – first come, first served on the viewing options. It was almost always tuned to sports unless Ellie had on her Disney shows.

“We didn’t want them to go to different parts of the house,” their mother said. “So if Jordan got to the TV first on Saturday, it was golf. Steven would walk in and scream ‘Nooooo!’ Sorry, you’ve got to watch golf. He got there first.”

When Jordan visits today, nothing changes.

That’s the way Jordan likes it – even if he has his own massive house to get away to.

“When I’m at home with my parents and my sister, I still could be 14 years old and you wouldn’t know the difference other than I don’t live with them anymore,” Spieth said.

CATHY MARINO KNEW Spieth was going to set the world on fire the moment he joined her golf team at Jesuit College Preparatory School.

“There were just moments when he was with the team and it would hit me and I’d kind of start laughing, ‘These guys don’t realize who they’re playing with,’” Marino said. “Because I honestly thought that he had the chance to be one of the best players ever. I had never seen anyone shoot the low scores he was shooting in high school all the time.”

Marino is no ordinary high school golf coach. She played 10 years on the LPGA Tour until 1993, three times finishing runner-up. Her best friend is Hall of Famer Juli Inkster, who invited Marino to help with last year’s Solheim Cup team. She coached the SMU women’s golf team for six years before taking over the Jesuit program where her son played. She’d never seen anyone like Spieth, who won 22 high school tournaments, including three consecutive state championships.

“I’m appreciative of good golf and know when I see good golf and when I see someone like Jordan who’s possibly a once-in-a-lifetime player to come along,” Marino said. “What I liked as a player was not a lot of overcoaching. My golf coaches were terrific at making me feel like a really good player and being extremely excited about a good score. Along the way I think I had the ability to write (Jordan) notes telling him how good he could be and how special a player I thought he was.”

Spieth illustrated that often with clutch putts and hole-outs that have now become routine for him. Marino actually typed up a list of his achievements to give to Spieth so he wouldn’t forget them.

As a freshman, he rallied from six back in the district championship, sinking a 40-footer on the last hole to tie for the individual title before draining a 20-footer on the first playoff hole to win. At regionals in Lubbock, the wind blew his ball off the last green into the water, but Spieth got up-and-down for bogey to win by a shot and send the Jesuit team to the state championship for the only time in his career.

As a sophomore, he had to make a 5-footer for birdie on greens bumpier than Chambers Bay to get into a playoff at regionals, where he made a 30-footer on the first extra hole to win and earn his spot in the first of three consecutive state championships he won.

In a 36-hole tournament Jesuit held at Brookhaven, Spieth triple-bogeyed the 16th hole and was en route to his worst prep round when he holed out a 7-iron from 160 yards on the last hole for a one-shot team victory.

“He didn’t know it was to win, but once it was on the board I was like ‘Are you kidding me?’” Marino said. “He was so pumped.”

His senior year at state, Spieth shot 68-64, finishing his prep career with a bogey-free final round to win by two shots.

“I just told him, ‘That was perfection,’” Ma­ri­no said. “It was just special. So to see that he’s still doing this on the tour is really exciting.”

SPIETH’S MOST FAMOUS high school moment came on the PGA Tour. At 16, the reigning U.S. Junior Amateur champion was invited to play in his hometown event at the 2010 Byron Nelson Championship. Tiger Woods played the same event as a 17-year-old in 1993, missing the cut as he did in all six other tour events he played as a high school kid.

“Nobody that’s here enters a tournament if they don’t think they can win, at least in their own minds think they can win,” the 16-year-old Spieth said on the eve of the tournament before going back to school for a physics presentation. “And obviously I know the percentage chances of me winning an event like this right now, but anything can happen.”

Playing in front of galleries he had seen before only as a fan, Spieth offered a glimpse of his potential. He shot 68-69-67 to enter Sun­day’s final round tied for seventh. He shot 72 on Sunday to tie for 16th, six shots behind winner Jason Day.

“He had just a huge gallery from day one,” said Steve Koch, Jesuit’s director of athletics. “That’s all anyone was talking about, at least around here. Kids found a way to sneak out of school or get notes to get out. Half the school was out there and it was, wow, under this pressure at that age he could get out there and compete and keep his focus with all of his classmates right there. If you were ever going to not be able to handle the pressure, that was an early sign that he did it so well.”

The galleries following their hometown son swelled on the weekend with Spieth in contention.

“It was fun and the support from the community was a little bit overwhelming,” his father said. “I didn’t know he would have that kind of support out there. Thousands, especially as the week went on. It went from friends and family to most of the gallery.”

The message Spieth’s performance conveyed was unmistakable.

“That’s the week when he knew he was going to be a successful professional some day,” his father said. “He knew that’s what he wanted to do, but that week validated that not only was he going to do it but he was going to have success at it.”

Said Spieth: “In 2010 at the Byron Nelson, I realized that I could at that time play on tour and compete with those guys.”

SPIETH WENT TO college with a simple mission.

“When I committed I told (head) coach (John Fields), ‘I have one goal, one main goal here. That’s to accomplish a team national championship for the University of Texas,’” Spieth said on the day he left the program 18 months after arriving.

As usual, Spieth achieved his goal. As a freshman, he led a talented Texas team to its first NCAA title in 40 years since Ben Cren­shaw and Tom Kite starred for the Longhorns.

Naturally, he did it with what had become typical flair. In the marquee match-up against his friend and rival Justin Thomas, of Alabama – who edged Spieth out for honors as the top freshman and overall collegiate golfer – Spieth holed his second shot on the 15th hole at Riviera to go three up in a match he closed out on the next hole. That set up teammate Dylan Frittelli’s 30-foot putt on the 18th to clinch the title.

In December 2012 – after making five cuts in seven PGA Tour starts as an amateur – Spieth left school to turn pro.

“I feel ready,” he said.

His friends had no doubts he was ready.

“Freshman year in college, he let me caddie for him in Tiger’s tournament at Congres­sional and I told him, ‘If you want me to caddie I will drop out of college – that’s how much I believe in you,’” said friend and high school teammate Eric Leyendecker. “He jokes about it all the time, ‘Eric could be a millionaire now.’”

Still, making the transition from college sophomore to professional golfer with no official status on any tour is daunting.

“It was scary,” Spieth’s mother said. “He kept an apartment (in Austin), and he would go down every chance he’d get. He missed the social part of it, not the school part. That was true in high school; he was always behind the eight ball in classes. He just wanted to play golf. That’s all he wanted to do for the rest of his life, so why should he sit in a classroom?

“I don’t think he regrets leaving, but he knows he missed out on some things.”

Being 19 with a flush bank account thanks to Under Armour wasn’t all it might seem to be. Spieth first shared an apartment in a downtown Dallas high-rise with former teammate Alex Myers.

“As soon as he moved in, he hated it,” his mother said. “Hated parking on the curb and having to take the elevator up to the 16th floor. It lasted six months.”

He bought a three-story condo in the popular Uptown district within walking distance of all the bars and restaurants popular with young college graduates.

“Unfortunately, he was 19 so he couldn’t go out,” his mother said. “Lasted a year in that.”

Spieth ended up buying a big house for security and privacy down the street from where he went to elementary school. He has since moved into Hunter Mahan’s old house, which includes an indoor basketball court and a garage with a massive painted mural of Magnolia Lane.

JAY DANZI MET Spieth shortly after he’d won his first U.S. Junior Amateur. Scouting young talent to represent down the road is part of an agent’s job, and there are no guarantees that success will translate to the highest level.

Danzi knows that well, considering one of his first clients was teenage phenom Ty Tryon, whose star rose and fell before he was old enough to drink.

Spieth, however, was something unique.

“You could tell right away,” Danzi said. “Certainly on the golf course he had a lot of golf talent, but even more so off the course. … When he wasn’t playing, unbelievably polite, intelligent, good looking, well-spoken – just a wonderful young man. You could tell he had all the intangibles both on and off.”

What struck Danzi most was Spieth’s fearlessness in any environment, whether it was on the first tee in front of a gallery, the press room packed with prying media or a corporate setting surrounded by CEOs. Spieth owned the room like he owned his golf swing.

“Every company in the world wanted to sign Jordan Spieth just like every management company because everybody saw that unbelievable talent and ability to be an unbelievable corporate spokesperson,” Danzi said.

Spieth started with a sponsor’s agreement with Under Armour, which wanted a new face for its emerging golf apparel division. The company hoped Spieth could do for them what Tiger did for Nike.

Promised that Spieth was a “can’t miss” and “the Bryce Harper of golf,” Under Ar­mour founder and CEO Kevin Plank hitched his brand to the unproven pro.

Two weeks after signing, Spieth failed to advance to the final stage of Q School.

“Under Armour was the perfect fit at the perfect time,” said Danzi, who has since added AT&T and Coca-Cola to Spieth’s blue-chip portfolio. “It was something he believed in. They were looking for a face of the brand and somebody that could deliver what they were launching globally. They made a major bet on Jordan and he’s proven it, and we made a major bet with them.”

PLAYING ON SPONSOR exemptions in 2013, Spieth finished second in his third professional start in Puerto Rico and seventh in Tampa a week later to earn special temporary membership on the PGA Tour.

It was at the John Deere Classic where all of his experience in the clutch came together in a shot that accelerated his ascent. From the sand right of the 72nd green with water behind the flag, Spieth’s bunker shot from 44 feet hopped once and dived into the hole to tie for the lead.

“I was standing in my living room saying, ‘He’s going to sink this,’” Marino said. “Half of me was then thinking, that’s ridiculous, but then he slam-dunked it. I saw it enough in high school.”

Spieth ended up winning the playoff with Zach Johnson and David Hearn 10 days before his 20th birthday. He was the youngest PGA Tour winner since Ralph Guldahl in 1931.

“He got lucky on that bunker shot,” his mom said. “He got lucky staying in the playoff. He’ll be the first one to say there’s a lot of luck involved in winning a PGA Tour event.”

That stroke of luck changed everything. He earned his full-time exemption and a spot in the 2014 Masters. It launched him on a season that included nine top-10 finishes in 23 starts, including runner-up in the Tour Championship that left him seventh on the PGA Tour’s season-long points race. And it helped earn him a captain’s pick onto the Presidents Cup team.

In Spieth’s mind, his extraordinary 2015 season doesn’t happen without that perfect shot in Illinois.

“If that (bunker shot) doesn’t go in I don’t think I am at the 2014 Masters,” Spieth said. “I don’t get the exemption from the win to get in the Tour Championship, the Presidents Cup. Without those I’m not in the 2014 Masters, and the 2014 Masters gets me onto the next Ryder Cup team.

“These experiences are what shaped me into having a year like I had this year. So sure, something like this year would have been possible, but without the John Deere win in 2013 I think it would have been pushed back. It just got sped up. I have enough faith and confidence in my game to say this would have happened, it just might have taken a little longer.”

Of all the stories on Spieth’s fast lane to a green jacket, No. 1 ranking and whatever lies ahead, that sand shot that signaled his arrival might prove to be the most significant.

“A true dream of mine is to be a Hall of Famer,” Spieth said. “In Hall of Fame accolades, that 2013 John Deere win would be listed as just another win. But for me it will always be a little bit bigger.”