Slaying the Tiger

by Shane Ryan

  8

  THE MASTERS

  Jordan Spieth, the Great White Hope

  The skeleton of Augusta, Georgia’s, former glory can be seen in the old buildings lining Broad Street and spread throughout the downtown historic district on the south side of the Savannah River—the cotton exchange in its Queen Anne grandeur, the red brick Italianate homes, the Greek revival columns of the old medical college. The ghost of a thriving, vibrant Southern city is everywhere, and it gives you an immediate sense of nostalgia for the time before urban decay set in during the 1970s, and back even further, when the city was a cotton powerhouse.

  Today, despite a revitalization effort, there’s a decrepit feeling to the downtown, and once you leave the old part of the city, it gets worse. If you ever visit Augusta and are expecting to enter a pastoral paradise, as I was in April, be advised that this won’t happen until the exact moment you turn off Washington Road and enter the grounds of Augusta National. This is not mighty Atlanta, quaint Athens, or elegant Savannah; it’s the part of Georgia that got left behind.

  The Augusta National Golf Club is set apart from the city, as it has been from the very start. You may be able to see a water tower from certain parts of the course, but otherwise you’re safe from the modern realities, surrounded by the tall loblolly pines that usher you along the verdant fairways—steeper than they appear on television—through one of America’s most beautiful golf courses.

  In the week leading up to the 2014 Masters, Fuzzy Zoeller was on everyone’s mind. In 1979, in his first Masters appearance, he won the green jacket. No Masters rookie has won it since. Augusta National is a course that rewards experience in a thousand subtle ways, and the Masters generates the kind of pressure that can crush a newcomer—or, hell, a veteran. But the concept of a 2014 youth movement had taken root, and considering the class of first-timers at Augusta—Spieth, Reed, English, DeLaet, Dubuisson, Horschel, Kirk, Stadler, Every, Walker, and the young Swede Jonas Blixt, among others—it seemed like the twenty-five-year rookie drought might end.

  Two small items made news as Masters week got under way: Adam Scott was serving Moreton Bay Bugs—a kind of small lobster you find in the oceans of Australia—at the champions dinner, and the famous Eisenhower tree on the 17th hole was irretrievably damaged in a February ice storm, and had been euthanized.

  The biggest story, though, was the absence of Tiger Woods. Most players who held a press conference between Monday and Wednesday had to field at least one question about him, and what I learned from their answers was: Tiger Woods is a famous golfer, Tiger Woods was not playing that week, and the fans seem to be interested in Tiger Woods. In terms of the Masters, the fact that he wouldn’t play was either basically unimportant, a minor disappointment, or a total disaster that would ruin the whole week.

  —

  The gentlemen who operate Augusta National don’t allow journalists inside the ropes, and if we want to follow the players, we have to do it like every other civilian, in the midst of a dense gallery. I tried it out on Thursday, but I’d grown spoiled by easy access. After a fruitless hour fighting for a glimpse of a player, I’d had enough. I gravitated back to the flash area near the clubhouse, and waited as the Masters rookies came through, collecting their reports on the toughest maiden voyage in golf.

  Matt Every was annoyed when a rules official put him on the clock after he asked for a ruling that took longer than it should have, and made seven bogeys en route to a +5 start. I asked if he gave himself any allowance since it was his first competitive round at Augusta, and he looked disgusted with the idea.

  “I’m not a hack,” he said. “I’m not here just for fun.”

  Harris English had played ten rounds at Augusta in the past, but he was still shocked by the speed of the greens Thursday, and the nerves didn’t help either. He scrambled well, but that only saved him from complete disaster, and he signed for a 74.

  Patrick Reed stayed in red numbers for most of his round, but bogeyed the last two holes to finish +1. He stormed by the reporters, refusing to talk, and when a few caught up with him in the locker room, he told them he “hit it like shit all day.”

  Many of the players talked about the pin placements, which were unusually difficult for a Thursday. When Graeme McDowell first saw the sheet with all the locations, he laughed. “They’re not easing us into it, are they?”

  Spieth, who beat most of his fellow rookies with a 1-under, played with Rory McIlroy and Reed, and he noticed how Rory took angles that looked strange on certain holes, but ended up being perfect. On 17, for example, Reed made a mistake by hitting the ball on the downslope of the green, while Spieth hit what looked like a perfect approach that came to rest on the upper ridge, leaving him a short but difficult putt. Rory, on the other hand, hit a wedge that landed fifteen feet left of the hole—a place neither Reed or Spieth would have thought to look—and had the easiest putt of the three.

  All of them were learning what it felt like to be thrust into the unique cauldron of Augusta National. The Masters is arguably golf’s most prestigious tournament, but it’s also the only major played on the same course year after year. You can’t really accumulate experience at any other major, because the courses won’t repeat for another five to ten years, if ever. Only Augusta rewards repeat visitors, and the course itself is so strange and difficult that there’s no good way to prepare if you’ve never been.

  Every had given it his best shot, arriving the previous Friday to get some extra rounds, but he still missed the cut, and felt disgusted with himself.

  “I felt so prepared going into this week, and I couldn’t have been less prepared,” he said. “I usually just fucking show up on Tuesday and do my thing, and this was just me being an idiot and thinking that if I do a little extra, it’s actually going to matter. It doesn’t. The course in the practice rounds was nothing like it was during the tournament.”

  Every’s observation was shared by many—Augusta has the unique ability to completely transform in the space of a day, drying out and cranking up the speed on the fairways and greens. Derek Ernst, another rookie, put the problem of Augusta succinctly after he missed the cut with a 76-76. “I don’t know how you practice for it,” he said. “There’s nowhere I know of that’s like this.”

  Nor can anyone give you advice. “It’s like parenthood,” said Hunter Mahan, a veteran of seven Masters and one child. “I could tell you all about it, but nothing’s going to prepare you for what’s coming.”

  In Thursday’s swirling winds, Bill Haas took a first-round lead at 4-under, with the past two champions, Bubba Watson and Adam Scott, lurking a shot back. Three rookies finished at -2, and two of them, Jimmy Walker and Kevin Stadler, were recent winners on Tour. The other, Jonas Blixt, was just a few days shy of his thirtieth birthday, and playing in his third major championship ever.

  —

  On Friday, the Masters officials decided to move the media into an improvised cattle pen near the clubhouse, packing us in where a collection of sneering Pinkertons could zap us with cattle prods if we leaned too far over the ropes or tried to escape. Several local media members, unaccustomed to the aggressive nature of golf reporting, were suffocated to death during high-volume interviews.

  Or at least those were the rumors I tried to spread when I saw our new accommodations. Outside the pen, under the famous “big oak tree,” the scene was far more elegant. Caroline Wozniacki wandered around with bright pink hair and a long skirt, looking extraterrestrial and beautiful, and the American tennis star John Isner, towering above everyone, chatted with friends and fans.

  Graham DeLaet had received a congratulatory letter from the premier of Saskatchewan in his locker, and he recovered from his opening round collapse to shoot 72, still missing the cut but leaving with his dignity intact. Harris English also failed to make the weekend, but was friendly and positive after his round, and felt that he’d learned something crucial. Matt Every was less enthused with his +11, but his message was similar: With the
unpredictability of the wind, and the tricky pin placements, and the extreme slopes, there’s no substitute for experience. Patrick Reed came in with a 79, and when a Masters official asked him to stop by and speak with local media in the town where he had won two college championships, he simply said, “Nope,” beckoned for Justine, and was gone.

  Billy Horschel, who played with Tom Watson the first two rounds, focused on keeping his anger in check around the Ryder Cup captain in case he needed a pick later in the season. He made the cut by a stroke, but Watson advised him to let his game “mature.” Chris Kirk rallied with a 72 to sneak under the cut line; Steven Bowditch did the same. Kevin Stadler and Jimmy Walker were two of the only Masters rookies to finish under par for the first thirty-six holes, but above them, tied at -3, were the best of the new class: Jordan Spieth and Jonas Blixt.

  Beginning on the back nine, Bubba Watson had laid waste to the course. With five birdies in a row starting on the 12th hole, he rocketed up from -3 to -8, and though he faded to -7 with a bogey on 18, he had taken complete command of the tournament. He led John Senden by three shots, and a pack that included Spieth, Blixt, and defending champ Adam Scott by four. With the confidence from the Northern Trust win, and his triumph at the 2012 Masters, it was clearly his tournament to lose.

  He was in fine fettle at his post-round press conference, bantering with the media in his usual borderline aggressive way. “How many green jackets you got?” he asked one reporter, in a discussion about the stress he had endured after winning his first.

  “I hit nine-iron the last two days, flew it 186 yesterday on sixteen…I guess it’s all right,” he boasted, when someone asked him about his athleticism. He was in his element, needing just one more great round to make Sunday a cakewalk.

  —

  Instead, on Saturday, he came back to the field, making three bogeys in four holes on the front nine and finishing at -5.

  That afternoon, I set up shop at Amen Corner, the famous three-hole stretch beginning at no. 11, the 505-yard par-4 with a pond guarding the left side of the green. After making the long approach to the most difficult hole on the course, players move to the par-3 12th, with its short but perilous 155-yard tee shot over Rae’s Creek—named after an early settler who operated a grist mill—onto a narrow green framed by bunkers and azaleas. The green on 12 is like a sanctuary, where no fans are allowed. When players leave the tee and cross Hogan’s Bridge, they are isolated…a last lonely moment before the pressure cooker of the finishing stretch.

  The par-5 13th completes the evil troika, forcing players to hit a draw off the tee to position themselves for the approach. Alternatively, you can cut the corner, go as the crow flies, and hit over the trees and the creek tributary on the left, but only a crazy person would even attempt it. A crazy person like, say, Bubba Watson.

  But that was all to come. On Saturday, I watched the leaders pass through 11 and 12. I saw Fred Couples, who always rises to the top of the Masters leaderboard on Friday, make Saturday’s first birdie on the 11th—there would be only two all day—and react to the standing ovation with the preternatural cool that seems to be his birthright. Kuchar bogeyed the hole, but caught fire afterward, reaching -5 before making bogey on 18. Spieth overshot his mark on the approach to 11, and the green was so infernally fast that his chip rolled twenty-five feet past the hole, forcing him to two-putt for a bogey and sink to -3. Jonas Blixt reached -5 before the 11th knocked him down a peg, too, and Amen Corner bit him again on 13, taking another bogey for its massive trophy case. Bubba came through with pars after his shaky front nine, and managed to make just one bogey on the back nine and survive the day with a 75.

  As I hustled back to the big oak and the cattle pen, results trickled in from the final holes. Adam Scott had survived Amen Corner, but tanked the rest of his round, finishing with a 76 that all but ensured he wouldn’t defend his green jacket.

  Blixt and Kuchar had each finished at -4, tied for second, while Rickie Fowler closed fast with a 67 to reach -3. At the top of the leaderboard, though, two men were tied at -5. The first was Bubba Watson, which wasn’t unexpected. The second was Jordan Spieth, who would tee off in the last group on Sunday at the Masters at the tender age of twenty.

  * * *

  Q: When did he commit to Texas? Was it his senior in high school?

  A: It was his junior year. Feb. 6, 2010, which was a Saturday, and he called at 2:30 pm in the afternoon. But who’s counting?

  —Exchange with JOHN FIELDS, golf coach, University of Texas

  Jason Day, keen observer that he is, was the first to spot the pattern. After his Monday press conference at Augusta, as a group of reporters milled around the podium, he joked that anybody who watched the Golf Channel on a regular basis might start to believe there was an emerging young golfer with a long, cumbersome name: “twenty-year-old Jordan Spieth.”

  There’s truth in every jest, and Spieth’s story can’t be separated from his youth. On the other hand, the fact that he’s young and plays golf with enormous skill only begins to explain the collective fascination. What really gets us, fans and media alike, is the maturity. He speaks with the wisdom and perspective of someone with fifty years of experience, and he never seems to deviate. By all rights, he should come off like a pretender, like a kid playing a part, but everything about his behavior feels sincere. That’s what differentiates him from the other child stars.

  Words like “composure” and “polish” follow him around like faithful pets, but even they don’t tell the whole story. Spieth’s maturity is so atypical that you catch yourself looking around for a puppet master, or at least a few strings. Is he a flawless golfing Frankenstein created in a lab run by PR officials? Or just a marketer’s Superman, programmed to say and do the right thing at each moment?

  You can count on him to say “Mr. Palmer” and “Mr. Nicklaus” when talking about the legends of the game, and in those rare moments when he lets his on-course emotions stray from the script—as he did in his match against Ernie Els at the Accenture—he issues an immediate apology. He’s the straight-laced, All-American boy, and if you think it’s all an act and that surely he’s got to break character eventually, well…don’t hold your breath.

  In many ways, he’s the savior the golf establishment has been waiting two decades to find. The concept of golf as a “gentlemen’s game” was always ridiculous, but Tiger put the kibosh on the antiquated notion for good. He fist-pumped, he roared, he intimidated, he swore; he eventually got caught committing adultery on a scale that would have made JFK blush. Everything the man did was inflated—pundits loved to censure him, the Tour loved to fine him, the players loved to hate him, but deep down Tiger never cared. He didn’t have to.

  But where was the great white hope? Sure, golf had its share of drab country club clones—an army of them, really—but where was their king? Where was the young gun with the rosy cheeks and the respectful demeanor who could rise to Tiger’s dizzying heights? Where was the kid with the 1950s charm who never said too much? Who had a pleasingly tame sense of humor, and never offended anybody? Who was smart, but strictly of the establishment? Who was a nice Christian that went to Bible study, but didn’t mention it in every interview? Where was the kid who could remind everyone how great golf had been before Tiger teamed up with Nike to corrupt the whole scene?

  Golf’s retrogressive element had a fantasy. They fetishized the mythical upright citizen. They longed for the kid who could make their nostalgia tangible and grow into a gentleman superstar.

  You can imagine their delight when the dream came true. Jordan Spieth was the redeemer.

  —

  It wasn’t easy to get a private moment with Spieth. He didn’t necessarily object, but he didn’t seem particularly enthused about the idea. The first time I approached him, after an early round at Riviera in February, he was chatting with a friend outside the clubhouse as a mass of kids screamed his name and demanded autographs. He was moving down the line, and I waited for him at the en
d.

  “Are you going to go practice?” the friend asked.

  “No. I’m going back to the hotel to sit on my ass,” Spieth replied, with an air of fatigue.

  Behind him, his caddie Michael Greller, a former sixth-grade teacher, stood talking near Spieth’s bag. I noticed the putter cover—it was emblazoned with dollar signs and the words “Cash is King.” When I looked up, Spieth was gone—the first artful vanishing act I would witness, executed whenever he sensed a journalist lurking nearby.

  That commenced an odyssey, lasting months, that involved negotiating with agents, asking personal questions in large press conferences, and generally trying to read everything I could about him, including old transcripts and two thorough profiles—one by Golf Digest’s Jim Moriarty and one by Sports Illustrated’s Alan Shipnuck.

  Finally, at the Congressional in June, I found him on the driving range with his agent. I waited for an off moment, and made my last-ditch approach.

  “I had an idea,” I said, after handshakes. (In the golf world, each encounter starts with a handshake, even if you see the person every day, and there’s no way around it.) “I get the feeling some guys don’t love the pro-ams,” I continued, “so I was thinking maybe I could join you on the back nine and walk a few holes, and then I wouldn’t bother you the rest of the year.”

  It was a laughable gambit: All his agent had to do was continue saying no, easy for him, and I was operating from a position of no power.

  “Let me just say,” said Spieth, “I thoroughly enjoy the pro-ams, no matter what the other guys say.”

  That was the great white hope in action. I wanted to tell him he didn’t have to lay it on so thick with me, but looking at him, I realized he was totally sincere. This, I thought, is why the keepers of the game love him so much—the crazy bastard actually means it.