The open mouth of a Hoover washing machine is as good a place to start as any. On a piece of old videotape nine-year-old Rory McIlroy can be seen pitching golf balls into one on a television talk show set, something he’d been doing in his home in Holywood, Northern Ireland, since the time he was roughly the height of the machine itself. He was a boy with recognizable gifts, and his parents, Gerry and Rosie, were clever enough to recognize them. In order to finance their only child’s golfing ambitions, Gerry worked three jobs, cleaning the toilets, locker rooms, and the bar in the morning at the local rugby club; then pulling pints at the Holywood GC in the afternoons; and, finally, working the evening shift as the barman back at the sports club. Rosie worked the night shift at the local 3M plant. Gerry had grown up in public housing in Belfast. Rosie, whose father, Danny, drove an ice cream truck, had her first factory job at sixteen.
Rory enjoyed all the successes of your run-of-the-mill boy golfing genius. Played in the World Amateur Team Championship at sixteen. Top-ranked amateur in the world at seventeen. Silver medal for low amateur in the Open Championship at Carnoustie at seventeen. He turned pro and won enough fast enough to put a Ferrari in the garage in the big house by the time he was twenty. The story of the championship player, however, begins on the tenth hole of Augusta National in 2011 roughly a month before his twenty-second birthday.
Taking a four-shot lead into the final round, McIlroy broke apart like a meteor careening through Earth’s atmosphere, struggling on the front nine and then burning up on the back, making a triple bogey on the tenth when he caromed his tee shot off a pine bough and into the luxury white brick cabins on the left, very near the one Jordan Spieth would stay in on his first trip to Augusta National a couple of years later. It was, literally and figuratively, downhill from there. Stunned, shaken and stirred, the phenom played the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth a combined six over par and finished with an 80, the same score he posted the year before in the second round at St. Andrews after opening with a record-tying 63 on the Old Course.
McIlroy played the first two days of that Masters with a twenty-two-year-old American, Rickie Fowler, and twenty-three-year-old Australian Jason Day, a veritable antique by comparison. Augusta National had egg salad older than any of them. Bottles of wine so youthfully impertinent couldn’t make it into the club’s celebrated cellar. In two days the brat pack was a combined twenty-three under par. McIlroy’s serviceable 69 on Friday got him to ten under par, good for a two-shot lead over Day. Staying in a house off Berckman’s Road with some Belfast buddies and displaying a form that could retard the cause of Irish quarterbacking for generations, McIlroy and his friends killed time throwing a football around in the street until they were chased off by a little old southern lady with an aversion to high spirits.
After McIlroy threw the gates open Sunday, it seemed like half the golfing world scrambled through. Ángel Cabrera was ten under after a birdie on the eighth. Geoff Ogilvy birdied the twelfth through the sixteenth holes to get himself to ten under. Adam Scott was ten under through the eleventh. Luke Donald double-bogeyed the twelfth, then birdied the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth to get to ten under. Bo Van Pelt eagled the fifteenth to get to, once again, ten under. Day was ten under through thirteen, and K. J. Choi was ten under with two to play. The four corners of Augusta National were a rolling cacophony. An Argentine. A South African. Three Aussies. A Korean. An Englishman. Heck, even a couple of Americans. The roars came from every direction. Ogilvy here. Cabrera down there. Scott in the valley. Day on the hill. Choi in the corner. Donald hitting a bank shot off the pin at the eighteenth and then chipping in. Ultimately, Charl Schwartzel birdied the last four to snatch the jacket off the shoulders of Aussies Scott and Day. Sharing a private jet Sunday night with the lead loser, Schwartzel wore the jacket, while McIlroy, laid bare on the golf course, was clothed only in the graciousness he’d shown after beating himself.
“It’s so goddamn hard to win out there. I don’t care what decade you want to go back to. It was hard to watch him, that last round,” said Tom Weiskopf, someone who knew a little about Masters heartbreak, of McIlroy. “I always look at a young guy like that, that’s very talented, the next time he may win but he may not again, too. It’s just that difficult.” McIlroy made it look easy, and fast.
In the time it took to change spring to summer, with a birthday party and a trip to Haiti for UNICEF in between, McIlroy matured into the portrait of the champion as a young artist, winning the U.S. Open in a walkover, dropping records behind him like bread crumbs marking the trail to the future. Unpretentious, gifted, confidently humble, swaggeringly modest, McIlroy bounced across the soggy fairways of Congressional CC. His seventy-two-hole total of 268 was the lowest ever by four shots. His sixteen-under-par total broke the previous mark versus par, set by Tiger Woods at Pebble Beach, also by four. He was the youngest Open champion since Robert Tyre Jones in 1923. He hit more greens in regulation than anyone in a U.S. Open, for as long as someone had kept track of such things. His eleven-under par on the par fours broke that previous mark by a mere seven shots. He had the lowest fifty-four-hole score in Open history. He became the only player to reach thirteen under par, fourteen under par, fifteen under par, sixteen under par, or seventeen under par in a U.S. Open. He had the lowest thirty-six-hole total ever and was thought to be the youngest thirty-six-hole leader since Walter Hagen in 1914.
In April at Augusta Graeme McDowell, the 2010 U.S. Open champion from Northern Ireland who is as close to an older brother as McIlroy has, sent him a text message: “I love you.” At the time McIlroy joked it might be the drink talking. G-Mac left another note in Rory’s Congressional locker. The words were different, but the meaning was the same. “Nothing this kid does surprises me,” said McDowell when it was all finished. “This guy is the best I’ve ever seen, simple as that. He’s great for golf. He’s a breath of fresh air for the game and perhaps we’re ready for golf’s next superstar and maybe Rory is it.”
As McIlroy was walking to the eighteenth tee with an eight-shot lead Sunday evening, Lee Westwood was walking off it. As they got closer to one another, Westwood, a nominee for the crown of “Best European Not to Win a Major,” broke into a broad grin. McIlroy looked down, smiling, deeply proud but deferential to an older friend he knew wanted a big title every bit as badly as he did, maybe more so. They exchanged a light fist bump as they passed. Two steps farther on Westwood gave McIlroy’s caddie, J. P. Fitzgerald, a whacking high five.
At Augusta National the final walk on the eighteenth is dramatically uphill. In April, when he got to the top, instead of claiming a green jacket, McIlroy wrapped himself in dignity in defeat. At Congressional his walk at the last was dramatically downhill to his first major victory, what many believed to be his destiny. In a Jim Craig–Olympic-hockey-style moment, he scanned the crowd looking for his father. “I knew he was going to be somewhere close,” says McIlroy. “I just spotted him before I hit my first putt. And then when I put it up to whatever it was, a foot or whatever, I looked to him and gave him a little smile, a little grin.”
On Friday when McIlroy hit wedge to the rear of the eighth green, allowing the ball to funnel back down the slope and into the cup, he threw his head back, his arms open, and beamed at the heavens. The records mounted as the week wore on. He was the fastest to double digits under par in the history of the U.S. Open. He got there at a younger age than Gil Morgan, Ricky Barnes, Jim Furyk, or Tiger Woods. McIlroy hit seventeen of eighteen greens in Thursday’s 65 and fifteen more in Friday’s 66, tying Woods for the largest thirty-six-hole lead in the 111 years of the championship. Instead of throwing a football with the lads, he killed Saturday morning watching Batman, then went all Dark Knight on them Saturday afternoon with a near-flawless 68. He’d held at least a portion of the lead at some point in each of the previous four major championships and went into Sunday of the U.S. Open eight shots clear. Unlike Augusta, disaster was not on the menu. Day ultimately won the B flight, adding second in the U.S. Open to his T2 in the Masters.
If the wisdom of Weiskopf was rendered moot almost immediately by McIlroy, not so Jason Day. It took four years of frustration dealing with injury and self-doubt for the Australian to break through in a major championship. When he did he set the record for the lowest score ever shot in a major with his twenty-under-par performance at Whistling Straits in Wisconsin in the PGA Championship of 2015. If McIlroy had come from a humble home, Day had turned away from nothing short of juvenile delinquency. He lost his father, Alvin, to stomach cancer when he was just twelve years old, a grief that turned rebellion into the recklessness of drinking and fighting. The family was poor, boiling water for hot showers. His mother, Dening, worked two jobs and mortgaged anything of value to send Jason to Kooralbyn International School. It was there he met Colin Swatton, who would become his golf coach, his disciplinarian, his caddie, his older brother, his surrogate father. After he won the PGA Tour’s Match Play Championship in Tucson in the winter of 2014, Day touched on that past. “I think I finally realized—I’m going to be honest here, I came from a very poor family—so, it wasn’t winning that was on my mind when I first came out on the PGA Tour. It was money. I wanted to play for money, because I’d never had it before. Winning takes care of everything. And it’s not about the money anymore. I just want to play golf, golf that I love, and win trophies.” There were more close calls, including the Open Championship at St. Andrews just weeks before Whistling Straits, but when the Wannamaker Trophy came, it came with tears for all that had gone before.
McIlroy was slow to back up his record-setting performance at Congressional, but when he did, it was equally dramatic. With a near-flawless final round of 66, he added an overpowering PGA Championship title on a long, wet Kiawah Island Ocean Course to his overpowering U.S. Open on long, wet Congressional, propelling himself to number one in the World Golf Rankings and halfway to the career Slam, joining Jack Nicklaus, Seve Ballesteros, and Tiger Woods as the only modern-era players (Jordan Spieth would join them in short order) to have won two major championships before their twenty-fourth birthdays.
Having survived a second round where the wind blew so hard off the Atlantic Ocean Walter Hagen wouldn’t have bothered to get out of his Pierce-Arrow, McIlroy built a three-shot lead going into Sunday. Taking a tip from Nicklaus, he set himself the goal of playing all four rounds in the 60s. “I got to 12 (under) and stood on the 18th tee and was seven ahead,” said McIlroy, who then turned to his caddie, Fitzgerald, and told him he was going to win this major by eight, too.
After yet another perfectly placed, massive drive on a golf course meant to be so visually intimidating that the grip of a driver feels like a live hand grenade in a player’s fingers, when McIlroy approached the green the crowd closed in behind him in the late-afternoon light. He broke into a wide grin when he saw his father standing by the scaffolding bridge that led from the green to the clubhouse. He made the twenty-footer from the front edge, of course, then stood beside his golf bag, bent over like an Olympic sprinter catching his breath. He straightened up and put his head back to look at the sky, reprising the picture of joy after his eagle from the eighth fairway at Congressional. He walked toward his father with his head down, clutching double handfuls of his own curly dark hair, on his way to another level in the game. A measure of McIlroy’s complete dominance was that the ultimate runner-up, David Lynn, was never even a hint of a factor. He didn’t allow so much as a whiff of weakness to float off on what had become a gentle breeze, playing each nine three under par, scrambling magnificently when he needed to, closing the tournament as impeccably as he’d opened it, with a bogey-free round.
“The thing he’s done is he’s lapped the field twice,” said three-time major champion Padraig Harrington, another Irishman. “It says when he plays well, he’s better than everybody else. There’s been ups and downs since his last major win because of the pressure and the expectations and the hype. Now that he’s delivered again, it will be a lot easier for him going forward.”
If there was a knock on McIlroy—and there was—it was that perhaps he lacked the fire in his belly. Being half of Wozzilroy, one of the tabloid titles for the celebrity union of Danish tennis star Caroline Wozniacki and the youthful Irish golfer, seemed more interesting to him than a quest for greatness. Earlier in the year McIlroy, himself, said he’d taken his eye off the ball. And if there was a knock on his record, it was that he didn’t win as often as a talent mentioned in the same breath with Tiger Woods ought. McIlroy, it seemed, enjoyed a life outside golf, a life that got a little messy.
The Ocean Course was followed by troubled waters. McIlroy changed equipment, and struggled. He hired and fired and sued agents, went to court, settled, and struggled. He sent out Wozzilroy wedding invitations and, before the ink was dry, RSVPed his own regrets. Despite a growing history of fast starts and Friday falters, at Hoylake in the 2014 Open Championship he seemed at ease again. “I don’t know if I can describe it. It’s just I feel like I have an inner peace on the golf course,” he said. “I wish I could get into it more often.”
McIlroy’s instructor since his boyhood, Michael Bannon, remained an anchor in the tumult. “You’re looking at somebody who’s just got his game back and is working hard at it all the time. That’s what I see,” said Bannon. They began preparing for Hoylake by working on all the fiddly shots around the greens. They discussed a bit of course management, Gaelic style. “One thing I did say to Rory was to make sure when he hit the ball to make it go forward, you know,” said Bannon with a pixie smile. “That was the big thing we worked on.” The Irish translation: stay out of the bunkers and the gorse.
Before the 2014 Masters McIlroy said, “It’s almost like golf is waiting for someone to stamp their authority on the game and be that dominant player. I hope it’s me.” After Hoylake it was. The year’s two majors prior to the Open Championship had been won in dominating performances by Bubba Watson and Martin Kaymer. It was a second major title for each, and both had been through dormant stretches. Watson smote Augusta National with his pink driver. Kaymer coldly dissected Pinehurst’s reconstituted native areas after Ben Crenshaw and Bill Coore restored them to Donald Ross’s No. 2 Course.
If Watson was something of an enigma, it wasn’t a particularly good one. He’d grown up in the Florida Panhandle. His father, Gerry, was a Green Beret in Vietnam and carried the scars, emotional and physical, to prove it. The boy’s golf swing was homemade, dug out of the sandy soil of a town once called Scratch Ankle. The son hit the ball enormous distances. He verbally abused his caddie. He could curve shots like no other player in the world. He won his first Masters in 2012 when he was thirty-three in a playoff on the strength of a recovery shot from so far back in the dark woods on Augusta’s tenth that the marshals might as well have been gnomes and trolls. Even Louis Oosthuizen, whose nickname is Shrek, knew it was the best shot he saw all day, and he’d made a double eagle on the second. It was off the pine needles and leaves, under the limbs, through the patrons, around the TV tower, up in the air, 135 to carry, 40 yards of hook, kick right, two putts to win. “I’m used to the woods. I saw the gap. I got there. I saw it was a perfect draw, a perfect hook,” Watson said in his rapid-fire cadence, the iambic pentameter of his self-diagnosed ADD. “I hit my 52-degree, my gap wedge, hooked it about 40 yards, hit about 15 feet off the ground until it got under the tree and then it started rising. Pretty easy.”
Bubba bludgeoned Augusta National for an encore two years later. “There’s no one else that can really play the way he does,” said Rickie Fowler, a friend though Watson was ten years his senior. After winning in 2012 Watson confessed to a green-cloth and brass-button hangover, unable to crack the top twenty-five in a major in 2013. At times he could run as hot as a double-bogey vindaloo. “I can tell you, last year was a rough year with the pressure of trying to prove yourself,” said his caddie, Ted Scott, after Watson won a second Masters in three years.
For his second act Watson flew it over bunkers, slung it around doglegs, and scooped up his adopted son, Caleb, on the eighteenth green, turning Augusta National into Bubbaland, a personal playground the boy from Baghdad seemed born to romp across. Sunday opened with Watson tied with Jordan Spieth, a twenty-year-old Masters rookie from Texas. Through seven the kid from Dallas was at minus eight and two ahead of Watson. Fortunes flipped in two holes when Watson went birdie-birdie on the par-five eighth and the par-four ninth and Spieth went bogey-bogey. The back nine was pure Bubba. He hit it so far around the corner on the thirteenth that, despite clipping a pine tree or two, all he had left into the green was sand wedge. “When he had wedge into 13 I said OK, well, this is pretty ridiculous,” said Spieth. “So, hat’s off to him.” Watson won by three.
In June 2014 Kaymer completed the Hallmark Calendar Slam by adding a runaway eight-shot U.S. Open victory on Father’s Day to the Mother’s Day Players Championship he had won in May. For four days Kaymer played chess with the great architect Donald Ross, relying on an aggressive opening gambit of back-to-back 65s, the best opening thirty-six holes in the 114-year history of the championship, then patiently trading pawns with the field, missing in the right spots, keeping disaster at a swale’s length. In the process he linked the sand hills of North Carolina to the sand dunes of Lake Michigan, where he claimed his first American major in the 2010 PGA at Whistling Straits in the playoff Bubba Watson lost and Dustin Johnson missed by grounding his club in a bunker that moments before had been standing-room only for about a thousand spectators. Six months shy of his thirtieth birthday, it gave the greatest German golfer never to have had the yips two majors and a major-minor, a triptych of titles owned by Jack Nicklaus, Lee Trevino, Ray Floyd, Tiger Woods, and Kaymer.
Going into Sunday’s final round with a five-shot lead, Kaymer did one of the hardest things there is to do in golf: he increased it. “When you lead such a big tournament with five shots, it’s very, very difficult to keep going,” said Kaymer. “A lot of people can say I want to keep going, I want to play aggressive. But then somehow you hold back. You have to believe. You have to play brave. If you hit a bad shot, you hit a bad shot. But that’s the way you want to play golf, or at least the way I want to play golf.”
It was a job made considerably easier when, among Kaymer’s five chasers in red figures going into Sunday, only Erik Compton, courageously playing tournament golf six years removed from a second heart transplant, could equal par on the outgoing nine. He would finish a distant second, tied with Fowler, eight behind. While the 2010 PGA at Whistling Straits is remembered as much for the guy who missed the playoff as it is for the guy who won it, Kaymer went to the Masters in 2011 as the world number one but left it despondent, missing the cut for the fourth straight time, and convinced he couldn’t play Augusta National with his natural left-to-right ball flight. It wasn’t that he wanted to overhaul his swing as much as he craved a full arsenal of shots. He put himself in the hands of his longtime instructor, Gunter Kessler, and set about gathering them, immediately going into a slump that elicited howls of “What was he thinking?” Kaymer understood the process would take time, but he couldn’t put everyone else’s expectations on hold. “I knew that I would struggle a little bit for a while,” he said. “Getting so much attention and then all of a sudden, you know, you don’t win again. So why is that? So why do you change? And it’s annoying.” Pinehurst No. 2 was the payoff.
At Hoylake in ’14 McIlroy stamped a little of his own authority on the game, showing a toughness down the stretch his critics believed was the one club he didn’t have in his bag. After delivering a finishing kick on the old racetrack at Royal Liverpool that staked him to a six-shot lead after fifty-four holes, McIlroy showed his mettle Sunday, staring down the pack of wolves nipping at his heels with 65s and 66s and 67s that he knew would do him no harm without his help. McIlroy had pummeled Hoylake for three days and kept his bottle on the last one to win the Open Championship by two over Sergio Garcia and Rickie Fowler. Rory’s father, Gerry, along with some pals, had placed a series of three wagers with Ladbrokes that his boy would win the Open Championship by the time he was twenty-five. Since the first one was made when Rory was fifteen, the bets had some attractive, if diminishing, odds. It wasn’t the first time a Hoylake side bet paid off. Bobby Cruickshank got 50–1 on Bob Jones to run the tables in 1930, including the Open there.
The victory put the twenty-five-year-old Irishman a notch ahead in history’s ledger, adding the claret jug to his eight-shot victories in the U.S. Open at Congressional and the PGA at Kiawah Island, and gained him entry into the select club of players who had completed three legs of the modern career Grand Slam. “I’ve always been comfortable from tee to green at Augusta,” said McIlroy of the one that got away. Had it not been for his 80 that day three years before, McIlroy might already have his Slam. When Rickie Fowler rallied to tie him on Saturday at Hoylake, McIlroy exploded at the finish with a pair of eagles in three holes. When Sergio Garcia went out in five under par through ten holes on Sunday, McIlroy held steady. It was Garcia who finally blinked, leaving his ball in the bunker on the par-three fifteenth.
After Garcia’s demoralizing mistake, McIlroy had a three-shot lead with three holes to play and two of them the par fives, the sixteenth and eighteenth, that he’d played in six under par through three rounds. Barring an out-of-bounds disaster—and Hoylake had them—he wasn’t going to be caught, particularly with the luxury of having iron in his hands on the seventeenth and eighteenth tees. The more pressing question for McIlroy was the same one facing Watson and Kaymer. They’ve achieved escape velocity, separating themselves from their peers, but could they continue to cruise at altitude?
“I’ve really found my passion again for golf,” McIlroy said. “Not that it ever dwindled, but it’s what I think about when I get up in the morning. It’s what I think about when I go to bed. Even though there’s still one major left this year that I want to desperately try and win, I’m looking forward to next April and trying to complete the career grand slam.” It didn’t much matter that a few weeks later the PGA Championship finished in the dark because, by then, it had become clear McIlroy was golf’s shining light. If he had managed to stay out front at Hoylake when it came to the PGA Championship at Valhalla, he would have to come from behind. McIlroy took a narrow one-shot lead into the final round, but after playing the first nine one over par, he headed for the back two behind. It would grow to three standing in the fairway of the par-five tenth when Rickie Fowler made a thirty-footer for birdie up ahead.
McIlroy responded with three-wood from 281 yards that got the right bounce and rolled to within seven feet of the hole. “The ball flight was probably around 30 feet lower than I intended. And the line of the shot was probably around 15 yards left of where I intended,” he said. “It was lucky, it really was. You need a little bit of luck in major championships to win and that was my lucky break. I didn’t hit a very good shot there but it worked out well and I made eagle from it.”
It lifted him back into contention a shot behind Fowler and the forty-four-year-old Mickelson, who birdied the eleventh. By the time Fowler, Mickelson, McIlroy, and his Swedish playing partner, Henrik Stenson, had all gotten through the thirteenth, there was a four-way tie at fifteen under par. Fowler and Stenson both bogeyed the fourteenth. Mickelson bogeyed the sixteenth. McIlroy hit a nine-iron from a fairway bunker to ten feet on the seventeenth for the birdie that would give him a two-shot advantage going into the PGA Championship’s first night game, played in its entirety on the par-five eighteenth.
There had been a two-hour weather delay Sunday, and with late tee times designed to push television viewing as late as possible into prime time, the players were running out of light. McIlroy scrambled to hit a drive at the eighteenth before either Fowler or Mickelson had played their second and very nearly hit it into the hazard on the right. The final two pairs were scurrying to finish. Mickelson and Fowler didn’t know McIlroy was going to play his second to the green before they’d finished the hole but then stepped aside while he played up. Each still had a potentially game-changing eagle attempt. Fowler wound up three-putting from fifty feet. Mickelson nearly holed his chip but settled for a birdie that closed the gap to one. It was a chaotic denouement catering to showbiz instead of championship golf. McIlroy’s second was in the greenside bunker, and he blasted out and two-putted for his fourth major championship, joining Walter Hagen, Nick Price, Tiger Woods, and Padraig Harrington as the players who had captured the last two major championships of the season. “I really gutted it out today,” McIlroy said. “Look, I’m playing some great golf at the minute and I want to keep this run going as long as I can, and hopefully I’m in just as good form heading into Augusta next year and have a chance to win the career Grand Slam. If that happens, then we’ll turn our attention to Chambers Bay and I’ll try and get the job done there.” The first Reign of Rory—for the throne is always in danger of a palace coup of one sort or another—turned out to be a shorter one than Edward VIII’s, though he didn’t exactly abdicate. He did, however, put himself on the bench for a significant part of 2015 after suffering an ankle injury playing football (European style) with his mates.
After coming so close in 2014, the young Texan Jordan Spieth figured Augusta National owed him one. He took two.
If McIlroy was your basic Irish prodigy, Spieth was the Lone Star version. He won two USGA junior titles, was on the leader board of the PGA Tour’s Byron Nelson Championship when he was in high school, and won an NCAA team championship in his only year at the University of Texas. He grew up in a middle-class Dallas neighborhood of brick ranches where the streets are named for Disney characters, the place where dreams come true. Jordan’s parents, Shawn and Chris, were among two hundred or so in a high school graduating class in a small town in Pennsylvania. Shawn went to Clemson University to play baseball but transferred after a year to Lehigh University, where he pitched and played first base and center field. Chris was a power forward with a sharp pair of elbows across the river at Moravian College.
He got his first job with Alcoa and later a master’s of business administration. She was a computer engineer and worked for Neiman Marcus for seventeen years. Their middle child, Steven, is six-feet-six and played shooting guard at Brown University. Jordan is six-feet-one. “The last time I played him one-on-one, I beat him,” says Jordan. “I knew it was the luckiest I could ever be so I said, ‘I’m never playing you again.’” And he didn’t. Spieth learned his golf at Brookhaven CC, a middle-class club in Dallas where they let kids be kids. Jimmy Johnson, Steve Stricker’s longtime caddie, played at the same golf course where Spieth sharpened his game. “He doesn’t like to lose,” says Johnson. “That’s about the biggest compliment I can give to him—he just doesn’t like to lose.”
The Spieths’ third child, Ellie, seven years younger than Jordan, was born with neurological challenges the cause of which has never been fully understood. “She’s what keeps our family grounded,” says Jordan. “She’s by far the funniest person in our family, by far.” Steven’s basketball games were easier for Ellie to attend than Jordan’s golf tournaments because, as Shawn, says, “you just never know when she’s going to want to talk or yell Jordan’s name.”
Both Jordan and Steven attended the Jesuit College Preparatory School of Dallas, where after Ellie was born Chris worked part-time to defray tuition costs. Seniors there spend part of every Wednesday doing community service. Jordan asked if he could work at Ellie’s school, the Vanguard Preparatory School, where most of the children have mood disorders or are somewhere on the autistic spectrum. Ellie’s classroom had three small tables surrounded by small chairs, art projects on one wall, the alphabet on another. Kevin Goodnight was Ellie’s teacher then. “I’m a huge golfer,” he says, “but we never got to talk shop. Jordan would come in and he would instantly go to work with these kids. If we were doing math, he would find someone who needed help. You doing okay? Are you okay? Until he found someone. We had a boy who could not shoot a basket. He would throw the basketball up and it would go backwards over his head. It would go everywhere except at the basketball goal. Jordan worked with this boy and worked with him. The kid finally made a basket. Oh, he just went nuts and the whole playground erupted.”
When Chris was four her mother, Ginny, collapsed on the kitchen floor, stricken with a brain aneurysm. She survived. Chris’s father, Bob Julius, was an electrical engineer at Bethlehem Steel. At first Chris and her five siblings were split up, sent to other families to live. Eventually, Bob was able to gather everyone back together. Ginny was handicapped the remainder of her life, severely so as time passed. Bob took care of her for forty-four years. All of Jordan’s life he’d watched people he loved taking care of other people he loved. It was that voice, whispering the things that actually matter in his ear, that made him universally liked among his peers.
Spieth fell in love with Augusta National’s greens the first time he saw them. To him, putting wasn’t a mechanical exercise but an artistic one—something he’d learned from watching another Texan, Ben Crenshaw—and there is no better canvas than Augusta. McIlroy played his golf from the teeing ground out. If he had his driver under control, he was close to unstoppable. Spieth played the golf course from the green back, plotting his path to produce the putt he wanted. It was no mistake that in his breakout 2015 season, Spieth was the deadliest putter in memory from twenty to twenty-five feet. At least the deadliest since Tiger Woods. He knew which side of the hole he wanted to be on and was hitting his irons well enough to execute.
His Texas roots helped him in his first Masters when he nearly out–General Lee’d Bubba Watson, relying on Crenshaw and Crenshaw’s longtime Augusta caddie, Carl Jackson. “I have a lot of respect for this golf course,” said Spieth. “I told Michael (his caddie Michael Greller) I was going to buy a t-shirt for him that says, ‘Carl Says,’ because he keeps saying that to me out there.” Before becoming Spieth’s caddie Greller had been a sixth grade teacher at Narrows View Intermediate School in University Place, Washington. He began caddying as a summer job at Chambers Bay, the course where Spieth would follow up his record-setting 2015 Masters victory with a U.S. Open title.
If McIlroy was blessed to have Michael Bannon from a young age, Spieth was equally lucky to find Cameron McCormick. Just before his thirteenth birthday, he and his father, Shawn, decided it was time for more formal instruction than anything he was getting at Brookhaven. McCormick was at nearby Brook Hollow GC, one of President George W. Bush’s hangouts. A transplanted Australian, McCormick came to America to play college golf; got a foot in the door at Butler Community College in El Dorado, Kansas; and eventually transferred to Texas Tech. After graduation he returned to Australia to try to play but didn’t have much luck. He gave the mini tours a whirl in Florida and quickly ran out of money. Having majored in international business, he was about to set golf aside for commerce when he got an assistant’s job at the Lakes at Castle Hills GC, then another post at Dallas CC, and, finally, a teaching spot at Brook Hollow, where the Spieths found him.
“I had a big loop in my swing, a very weak grip, misaligned, shoulders open and hit kind of push draws,” said Spieth. “I went to Cam and he asked me what my goals were. I said I want to be the best player in the world someday. He said okay, then we’re going to have to make some changes and it’s going to be difficult. It’s probably going to take a little while and you may not play your best golf for a while. I just went to the range and I’d hit bags of balls, a bunch of 7-irons, and they wouldn’t go higher than this off the ground.” Spieth held his arm out to his side to demonstrate. Something of a Butch Harmon in Sean Foley clothing, McCormick is a student of biomechanics, relies on TrackMan for feedback, is interested in the intellectual and psychological aspects of the game, and considers himself more overall coach than swing instructor. His intent was to refine Spieth, not define him. “It was fascinating to see. A kid of immense skill, you don’t want to screw him up but, still, he was very one-dimensional. I’d only been teaching for five years at that point and this was the most talented man I’d ever come across,” says McCormick. “Over time it’s always been about softening the excessiveness of his tendencies while still enabling the athlete to produce the outcomes that he wants to produce.”
What the athlete produced was a major championship season just short of another Texan, Ben Hogan.
Spieth had the best seat in the house to witness Bubba Watson’s dismantling of Augusta National in 2014. The pet theory of the moment was that the MacKenzie & Jones course, pinched in with tree plantings and tickled with light rough, had become a patsy for left-handed power players—Phil Mickelson and Bubba Watson, to be precise. The high power fade of a lefty was the new gold standard, the most advantageous way to attack the golf course. An entire generation of players saw Tiger Woods do things they couldn’t do, and in response, their chins dropped to their chests. Jordan Spieth saw Bubba Watson play the thirteenth hole at Augusta National with a driver and a sand iron. But when Watson won his second green jacket with an eight-under-par total, Spieth’s reaction was, “Okay, fine. How do I get to nine?”
The mistakes Spieth had made on the eighth and ninth holes as a Masters rookie, and later on the twelfth, simply couldn’t be repeated. Spieth and Greller went back to Crenshaw and Jackson. They doubled down on Spieth’s affinity for the greens, and the results were as dominating a performance as Augusta had ever seen. His only brush with vulnerability came when he finished his Saturday round with a double bogey on the seventeenth and a salty up-and-down with a delicate flop shot from the right of the eighteenth to a tight pin. When it was done and dusted, Spieth had shot 270, eighteen under par, to tie Woods’s scoring record set in 1997. He was the first wire-to-wire winner of the Masters since Raymond Floyd five-wooded the place into submission in 1976. He set the fifty-four-hole and thirty-six-hole scoring records. Only Woods won a Masters at a younger age. He made more birdies in four rounds than anyone who had ever played in the tournament.
Golf, and Augusta National, had seen its share of dominant players, golfers who were capable of overpowering not just that golf course, but any golf course. When Bob Jones said that Nicklaus played a game with which he wasn’t familiar, it was a tip of the cap to his power with woods and long irons. Woods displayed a power game few could imagine and none of his peers could duplicate. In the age of rocket balls, driver heads the size of cabbages, computer-monitored launch angles, and ball flights that carried farther than Orville and Wilbur did at Kitty Hawk, suddenly there was a player, Spieth, who could be dominant by what seemed like sleight of hand. Sure, he made a lot of putts. Who wins who doesn’t? This, however, was something altogether different. It was the ultimate backhanded compliment, acknowledging how good Spieth was without being able to define what made him that way. How does he do it? Hell, if I knew, I’d do it too, they all said.
The question no one could quite wrap their arms around was simply, what makes this guy so damn good?
Later in the Summer of Spieth, after Zach Johnson had won the Open Championship for his second career major and Spieth had missed his quest for the calendar Grand Slam (and the playoff at St. Andrews) by a shot, the ’07 Masters champion did as good a job of explaining golf’s newest, youngest star as anyone. “I get that every aspect of his game, it doesn’t look flashy—this, that and the other—but everything is really good. And he’s a great putter,” said Johnson.
But I think what sets him apart, at least in my opinion, is the intangibles. If I knew what they were, I’d try to implement them, but it’s like an innate ability to just get it done. You’re just like, man, you think he’s out of it and all of a sudden he surfaces again. He’s gritty. He likes to grind. Seems to me he kind of likes when his back is against the wall. I think there’s a little bit of tension and pressure, to some degree, that guys have when you’re supposed to rise to the top. For whatever reason, that doesn’t bother him a bit. It’s impressive.
Spieth shot 64-66-70-70 to wreak his revenge on Augusta National, and his season was only getting started. All the talk going into the Masters was of McIlroy’s quest for the career Slam. All the talk coming out of it was Spieth. The U.S. Open was headed to Chambers Bay, the golf course where Spieth’s caddie, Michael Greller, not only worked but had been married. In the Masters McIlroy shot a final-round 66 to finish six behind Spieth. At Chambers Bay he shot a final-round 66 to finish five behind Spieth. By the time they left the Pacific Northwest, the calendar Grand Slam had gone from darn near inconceivable to achievable.
Rarely had national championship golf been played in the Pacific Northwest. The PGA Championship was held at the Portland GC in 1946 and again at Sahalee CC outside Seattle in 1998. The U.S. Open had never been in that part of the world, an oversight the USGA hoped to rectify by adding Chambers Bay to its rotation. The blue blazers had developed a case of puppy love with the romantic notion of a links-style, entirely fescue-grass golf course—tees, fairways, and greens—as if Puget Sound was the Irish Sea. Unfortunately for the condition of the greens, it’s not. The result was an agronomic nightmare of Poa annua (which grows in every West Coast course) and fescue. On perhaps the worst playing surfaces since the advent of the lawn mower, the greens were close to unplayable, eventually reduced to little more than dirt. This was not the product of poor work by a grounds staff but, rather, the backwash of a bad idea. Spieth’s victory there was all the more remarkable because, if he wasn’t the best putter in the world, he was certainly the hottest. It was like playing a championship with his best weapon tied behind his back.
Of course, everyone plays the same course. But bad greens tend to negate the advantage of the best putters because no one makes much of anything. Right up until the point when it counts, that is. Spieth went into the final round at Chambers Bay tied with Dustin Johnson, South African Brandon Grace, and Jason Day, who had been knocked to the ground on the ninth hole (his eighteenth) of the second round with benign positional vertigo, the aftereffects of which continued to bother him Saturday when he shot 68 to tie for the lead. Johnson, one of the longest hitters in golf, seemed to take control of the tournament, building a two-shot lead over Spieth and Grace after Sunday’s first nine holes. Day struggled from the outset and shot a dispiriting 74. Johnson bogeyed three of his first four holes on the back nine and fell two shots behind Grace and Spieth. Grace, a stocky, little-known commodity in the United States who nonetheless had won six times on the European Tour, dropped out when he sent his tee shot on the short sixteenth out to the right, skipping onto the Burlington Northern Sante Fe railroad tracks—a links echo of the trains running along the eleventh hole at Royal Troon. When Spieth birdied the same hole with a twenty-five-footer, he had a three-shot lead with three to play. It wouldn’t last.
A drive into the rough followed by a poor six-iron (“That was as far off line as I’ve hit a 6-iron in a long time,” said Spieth) led to a double bogey at the seventeenth, dropping him to minus four. He put his head on Greller’s shoulder. Had he lost the U.S. Open? Up ahead, Louis Oosthuizen birdied the reachable par five eighteenth for a remarkable sixth birdie in seven holes to post four under par. Johnson would birdie the seventeenth to make it three at minus four. Spieth, playing ahead of Johnson, drove into the eighteenth fairway. He had 250 to the front of the green and 282 to the pin. His three-wood faded slightly right, rolled across the green’s NASCAR-like embankment, and stayed on the top shelf. He two-putted for birdie and the lead. If Spieth played the eighteenth beautifully, tee to green, Johnson was just short of perfection. He hit a massive drive and a five-iron to twelve feet. Unfortunately, it was twelve icy feet above the hole. Barely touching his putt, it rolled four feet past. The comebacker missed, or, as Johnson later described it, alluding to the greens, “bounced out.”
Johnson was just a few days shy of his thirty-first birthday. Coming off the course he was met by his girlfriend, Paulina Gretzky (the daughter of hockey Hall of Famer Wayne), who was holding their infant son, Tatum. The party girl and the party guy. Though he’d supposedly been suspended in the past for what were reported by at least one news outlet to be failed drug tests—the tour didn’t acknowledge such things—if the question was who was the best athlete in golf, Johnson’s name was the answer you almost always got. He was six-feet-four and 190 with the oily gait of a jungle cat and routinely hit his drives three-hundred-plus yards, four hundred on the hard turf of Chambers Bay. Johnson had overcome more difficult things than losing. In his middle teens it would be fair to characterize him as at risk. His father was a golf professional who lost his job. His parents divorced. Johnson was involved in minor crimes that escalated out of control. A young adult intimidated Johnson and a small gang of friends into committing burglaries. That person, Steven Gillian, is serving a life sentence in a psychiatric prison in South Carolina for an execution-style murder. He had forced Johnson to buy him the ammunition. There is no equivalence between the crime Gillian committed and the mistakes Johnson made, nor should anyone have to be reminded endlessly of the ill-advised things one did at sixteen. It’s enough that those universes touched, even briefly. Golf helped get Johnson out. He was rescued by his grandmother Carole Jones and by the man who was, at the time, the golf coach at Coastal Carolina University, Allen Terrell. “It could have gone a lot of different ways,” says Johnson. “I had some help from some good people and ended up picking the right path.” Chambers Bay was the third major he’d been in a position to win but hadn’t. In 2010 he’d taken a three-shot lead into the final round of the U.S. Open at Pebble Beach, came unraveled on the second hole, and shot 82. That year in the PGA at Whistling Straits, he had what looked like a putt to win on the eighteenth green except he’d grounded his club in the bunker that didn’t look like one. Johnson had been putting things behind him his whole life. Chambers Bay would have to be one more.
Spieth’s roller coaster was altogether different. He thought he’d won it. Then he thought he hadn’t. “And then, after DJ hit his second shot in, I thought, ‘Shoot, I many have lost this tournament,” he said. And then, quick as a three-putt, he’d won it again. “I’ve never experienced a feeling like this. Just kind of total shock,” he said. He had confronted two of the biggest hitters in golf, Johnson and Watson. He’d seen what Bubba could do to Augusta National, then came back a year later to take the jacket off his shoulders. At Chambers Bay he hung around long enough for Dustin Johnson to take himself out. In the process Spieth became the youngest U.S. Open winner since Bob Jones in 1923. He was the sixth player to win both the Masters and the U.S. Open in the same year—Craig Wood, Ben Hogan (twice), Arnold Palmer, Jack Nicklaus, and Tiger Woods. And his birdie at the last was the first seventy-second-hole birdie to win an Open since Jones in 1926.
The Slam was alive. But before Spieth got to St. Andrews he had a stop to make. Silvis, Illinois. Rather than go to Scotland early to scout the Old Course, Spieth would honor his commitment to play in Zach Johnson’s charity event and in the John Deere Classic, the site of his first PGA Tour victory. “So, the U.S. Open came along and I’m thinking, well, I don’t know, he’s still committed, right? I’m assuming Clair Peterson at the John Deere was kind of thinking the same thing,” said Zach. “Clair and I were texting one day and I’m like, you know, he’s a great kid. He’s a phenomenal player. He’s an even better kid. If he and his team feel it’s necessary to not play I totally get it. I wouldn’t be surprised either way and Clair wouldn’t have been either. What he did honoring his commitment is beyond classy and just goes to show, once again, how much he truly gets it. He didn’t have to do it.” Oh, and by the way, he won.
Hogan won his third straight major at Carnoustie in ’53. Palmer finished a shot behind Kel Nagle in ’60 at St. Andrews when he had his shot at it. Nicklaus and Woods both came acropper at Muirfield, Nicklaus losing to Lee Trevino in ’72 and Woods getting blown out of his shoes on Saturday and finishing six shots out of the playoff won by Ernie Els in ’02. It was Spieth’s turn in the barrel, and the barrel was the home of golf, and he would lose to the man whose charity tournament he’d graciously attended the week before.
It had been eight years since Zach Johnson, now thirty-nine, had won the Masters. He’d beaten Tiger Woods, Retief Goosen, and another South African, Rory Sabbatini, by two shots on a cold and windy Augusta National by never going for a par five in two, wedging them to death instead. It was the first time in his professional career that Woods had held the lead in a major on the last day and lost. Describing himself in 2007 as just a regular guy from Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Johnson was anything but. At five-feet-eleven, on a particularly uplifting day, and 160 pounds if he was draped in chain mail, Johnson was neither an imposing physical specimen nor a long hitter. He was a deft putter, using an unusual stance with his eyes inside the ball, and particularly dangerous with short irons in his hands. Pound for pound, Johnson was the toughest player on the tour. In a rare Monday finish caused by wind delays, Johnson tied with Louis Oosthuizen, who had won the previous Open Championship at St. Andrews, and Australian Marc Leishman, who’d been playing with Adam Scott when Scott became the first Australian to win the Masters, all at fifteen under par. Jason Day left a putt that would have earned him a spot in the playoff agonizingly short on the tiny eighteenth, but it was Spieth’s near miss that was the headliner.
Despite a four-putt double bogey on the eighth hole, Spieth made yet another long birdie putt on the sixteenth to reach fifteen under par. He couldn’t hold it at the seventeenth, no disgrace on the moiling Road Hole, and needed a birdie three on the short eighteenth to earn a spot in the playoff. It was a score both Oosthuizen and Johnson had produced, the latter sending Johnson’s caddie, Damon Green—a good-enough player himself to make some noise in a U.S. Senior Open—into an abbreviated version of his celebratory “chicken dance.” Spieth hit his drive on the eighteenth well left of his intended target, the clock on the R&A. No real damage was done, since St. Andrews’s first and eighteenth fairways combine to make the widest target in all of golf. It did, however, leave him with an awkward yardage to the pin. His wedge finished in the Valley Sin, “the gulley” as he Texified it later, from where he failed to make three. It had been a gallant run at three majors in a row. The defending Open champion, McIlroy, had missed it all. His left foot was in a walking boot after rupturing a ligament playing soccer with friends. It was the first time the defender hadn’t played in the Open Championship since Ben Hogan decided not to come back in 1954.
Even more unusual was Spieth’s waiting on the steps of the Royal and Ancient with his caddie, Greller, as the threesome went out for their four-hole playoff won by Johnson when he started birdie-birdie on the first and second holes. When his victorious friend walked by, Spieth warmly congratulated him. Later, they flew back to the States on the same plane with several other players, drinking from the claret jug. “Jordan, he’s a good friend,” Johnson said later. “He embraced it. He was genuinely happy for me.”
Not that Spieth was content to lose. “We wanted to work hard and give ourselves a chance and I felt like, if we did that, we could pull it off,” he said. “Unlike the first two majors, I had a chance to win and I didn’t pull it off. And that was the hardest part to get over, for me. I knew the history of it. I knew what we possibly could have done but, at the same time, my frustration was only that we were tied for the lead with two holes to go and we didn’t close it out. You don’t get many opportunities to contend in a major, in an Open Championship at St. Andrews, in your life.”
At Whistling Straits in the PGA, Spieth reprised the role he’d played opposite Bubba Watson in the 2014 Masters. This time it was Jason Day who put on a driving exhibition. After coming up inches short at St. Andrews, Day seemed to turn a corner when he won the next week in the Canadian Open. He proved unstoppable in Wisconsin. Playing with Spieth on Sunday, Day took a three-shot lead into the final round, shot 67, and was never challenged.
“I was amazed that he kept pulling driver and kept hitting it in the tight zones,” said Spieth. “I probably would have hit 3-wood in that scenario just to keep it in play. He proved me wrong. Each time he stood and took it back, I had hope. And each time after it came off the face, the hope was lost.” After a massive tee shot on the par-five eleventh, when Spieth saw how far Day had driven it past him, he turned to the Australian and shouted at him, “Holy shit, you’ve got to be kidding me!”
Spieth embraced the tearful Day on the eighteenth green with the same esteem and respect he’d shown for Johnson weeks before in St. Andrews. Even in defeat he would ascend to number one in the world, the dream he’d told Cameron McCormick about as a teenager. It was a perch he’d fall off quickly, replaced by Day, and return to almost as fast when he won the FedEx Cup. Conventional wisdom held that McIlroy, Spieth, and Day would be passing that mathematical honor back and forth for years the way kids used to trade baseball cards. Here were three players who possessed outsized ability and candid honesty, from modest backgrounds and different corners of the globe, who showed an appreciation for achievement, be it their own or someone else’s. They were humble in victory, dignified in defeat, and formidable in competition. The torch had passed into generous hands. And more were on the way.