Jordan Spieth’s Journey: A Decade After His Masters Triumph
Picture this: Jordan Spieth, a young golf prodigy, walking up the final fairway of Augusta National Golf Club with an unassailable lead. The crowd is electric, shouting and cheering his name as the sun sets behind the Georgia pines. It’s a moment Spieth had envisioned countless times, a dream come true at the 2015 Masters. Yet, in the midst of this triumph, all he wanted was for it to be over.
“I was almost rushing to get in instead of milking it and doing victory laps,” Spieth reflects. “You’d think you just want to make it last, but at that point, with the stress of carrying the lead at that tournament from the first day on, I was just ready for it to be totally over.”
Revisiting that final hole, Spieth’s nervous energy was palpable. He fidgeted, played with his hair, and made what CBS announcer Nick Faldo called his “worst stroke of the week” on the second-to-last putt. Yet, after tapping in, he embraced his caddie, Michael Greller, and shared hugs with his family and girlfriend. His grandfather whispered, “I wanted to be here for this,” into Spieth’s ear. Despite his parents’ suggestion to take a victory lap, Spieth barely made it a quarter of the way around the 18th green before zipping away.
In a flash, it was over. Spieth shook hands with a few lingering caddies, entered the scoring area, and soon found himself in Butler Cabin. There, he sat across from club chairman Billy Payne, expressing his new goal: to become a two-time champion like Bubba Watson, the 2014 winner who was about to slip the green jacket over Spieth’s shoulders.
At just 21, Spieth had been a one-time champion for barely half an hour. A decade later, he remains a one-time Masters champion, carrying the physical and emotional scars of a career that didn’t unfold as expected. Reflecting on that final hole, Spieth chuckles softly at the whirlwind of it all.
“I would hope to have another chance at that,” Spieth muses. “And maybe I’d go about it a different way.”
The Rise and Fall of a Golf Prodigy
It’s hard to overstate just how exceptional Spieth was in 2015 and how thrilling it was to watch him. With Tiger Woods‘ status as an elite golfer unraveling, Spieth, alongside Rory McIlroy and Jason Day, filled the void. The difference? Spieth was four years younger than McIlroy and six years younger than Day, a wunderkind projecting as a once-in-a-generation prodigy.
It wasn’t just the results. Vijay Singh won nine times in 2004 but didn’t captivate like Spieth. Part of Spieth’s allure was his ability to move the ball creatively around the course. He wasn’t a particularly long hitter off the tee but excelled in the parts of the game that dazzled on television: chipping, pitching, and rolling in putts from everywhere.
He bent approach shots over and under branches, holed out from bunkers in dramatic moments, and followed errant driver swings with miraculous recoveries and par putts that banged in off the back of the cup.
“Jordan Spieth chips in more than anybody I’ve ever seen in my life,” two-time U.S. Open champion Curtis Strange once remarked. “I used to say about Tom Watson, people would say, ‘Oh, he’s lucky,’ but when you do it every day, it’s not luck. He’s aiming at something.”
Ben Crenshaw, a two-time Masters champion and Spieth’s mentor, likened Spieth’s approach to the game to the Wild West legend Wyatt Earp. “He’s got a gunslinger mentality,” Crenshaw says. “I called him that one time, and he kind of looked at me quizzically, and I said, ‘Well, you’re bold and you take chances.'”
Spieth’s magnetism extended beyond the course. He did the classy things, like sticking around to shake hands with eventual champion Zach Johnson after missing the four-hole playoff at the 2015 British Open by a shot. Yet, he wasn’t boring. At a tournament in Phoenix that year, he famously pranked his friend Justin Thomas by having Thomas’ car moved from the players’ parking lot, leaving Thomas in a panic.
In 2015, Spieth topped the money list, scoring average, and top 10s. His 2015 season ranks as the ninth-best by any PGA Tour professional since 1983, according to Data Golf. Of the eight seasons ahead of him, only two — Scottie Scheffler‘s in 2024 and Singh’s in 2004 — came from someone other than Woods.
“Spieth, starting out, was Tiger, basically,” says Matt Courchene, who runs the Data Golf site with his brother, Will. “Actually, at the end of 2015, he was only 22 — so he was really ahead of Tiger’s pace at that point, which is crazy.”
The Masters was the crown jewel. Spieth had finished runner-up a year earlier as a rookie and arrived for his second visit having won or finished runner-up in each of his past three tournaments. He opened with a record-setting 64-66, setting the Masters record for the lowest 36-hole score. Spieth recalls two things about that start: a miscalculation on No. 15 on Thursday that cost him a chance to shoot 61 or 62, and a sense of clarity as he realized the tournament was his to win or lose.
He led by three shots after Round 1, five after Round 2. A 70 on Saturday put him in front by four with 18 holes to go. That night, he watched “Forgetting Sarah Marshall” and prepared to make history.
On Sunday, Justin Rose tried to challenge Spieth’s triumph but fell short. “It felt like he’s had the lead for the past month,” Rose said afterward. Spieth, after hurrying through his moments on the final green, allowed himself a moment to linger during the post-round news conference.
After answering numerous questions, the Augusta National moderator asked Spieth to recap his birdies and bogeys, a perfunctory end to many sessions. Many journalists left the room, but Spieth gleefully spent nearly 20 minutes detailing his final round, breaking down how he “conquered my favorite tournament in the world.”
It was a coronation, one that seemed destined to last. When Spieth won the U.S. Open at Chambers Bay that June, talk of a Grand Slam seemed reasonable. He didn’t win the British Open or the PGA, but he finished tied for fourth and second, with only four players finishing ahead of him in majors all season. He ended the year with five wins, the FedEx Cup, and every meaningful award, holding a stranglehold on the future of golf in the post-Tiger Woods era. With Augusta National seemingly tailor-made for him, it felt inevitable that he would win another Masters, perhaps even a few.
But it didn’t happen. Instead of continuing to rise, Spieth’s career tumbled into a series of fluctuations, leaving him at times looking like the genius we revered and at times like a magician who can do incredible tricks but never puts on a show.
The Challenges and Resilience of Jordan Spieth
On the 13th hole of the final round of the 2017 British Open, Spieth’s tee shot went wildly off-line, ricocheting off a spectator’s head and landing in Royal Birkdale’s dunes. It seemed like a critical mistake, but Spieth took a penalty drop, hit the ball on the green, saved a bogey, and then went on a birdie-eagle-birdie-birdie run to win the tournament by three.
It was Spieth’s third major title and the highlight of a season that, while not as trophy-laden as 2015, was statistically nearly as good. However, it was also the last time Spieth would win a tournament for nearly four years.
Understanding why Spieth slipped into a slump is challenging. Golf is notoriously fickle, and its history is filled with players who have been otherworldly for stretches only to lapse into something more mortal.
Theories abound regarding Spieth’s dip. Unlike some top players who find themselves flailing, Spieth hasn’t changed his caddie or coach, Cameron McCormick, since his junior days. However, Spieth did tinker with his swing, according to McCormick, who said in 2019 that Spieth’s ideas at the time ran counter to his teachings.
“I became a more secondary instructor-coach,” McCormick said on Claude Harmon’s podcast. “He became less focused on the things that made him great, which was an ability to control the golf ball and make an impact happen.”
Indecision in Spieth’s ball-striking put pressure on other parts of his game. His driving had always had some variance, but his putting, once his rock, also started slipping, adding more mental strain.
A consistent top-10 putter on tour from 2015 to 2017, he ranked 123rd in strokes-gained putting during the 2017-18 season and was 101st, 79th, and 155th in the past three seasons.
“Spieth’s a horrible short putter now,” says Courchene, the golf statistics analyst. “I’m not saying it’s the yips, but the numbers show he clearly has issues.”
Was the low point the time he shot 81 at Riviera in 2019? The 12 straight months without a single top 10 from 2020 to 2021? The disappearance of his game in the middle of a Friday match at the 2023 Ryder Cup? In truth, it doesn’t matter. Spieth won 10 times between 2015 and 2017, then only twice from 2018 on. After once spending 26 straight weeks at No. 1 in the world rankings, he fell as low as 92nd and is currently 65th, just behind Alex Noren and Mackenzie Hughes.
“If you feel like you’re kind of stuck in a rut, it’s really hard to fake it ’till you make it in golf,” Spieth said.
According to Data Golf’s ranking points system, Spieth’s performance up through 2017 was so much better than the average player that his results, as Courchene said, best compared to (and even exceeded) all-timers like Woods and McIlroy. Since then, Spieth’s production is more in line with players such as Sungjae Im or Daniel Berger — decent pros who, with no offense intended, are not at present especially close to being superstars.
Whatever the cause one chooses to blame, the results are clear: Spieth has simply been a whole lot of average. When you win three majors and 10 tournaments in your first five years as a full-time pro, average can feel like undeniable underachievement.
“You go look at his strokes gained total from 2013 to 2017, and you look at his strokes gained total now, and he’s roughly half the player that he used to be,” former pro and Golf Channel analyst Brandel Chamblee told Golfweek last year.
“That’s not oblivion by a long stretch, but when you’re winning majors and setting the world on fire and winning as often as he was, to where he’s at right now is quite a difference.”
Spieth doesn’t shy away from that characterization, either. He is very aware that a scattered victory at the Valero Texas Open or Heritage Classic — while nice — isn’t close to delivering on what 2015 promised. He hasn’t won a PGA Tour event in three years.
“I think if you told me at the end of that year what my accolades would be, or where I’d be [10 years later],” Spieth says, “… it’s not quite what I would have been looking for.”
And yet still: However challenging a stretch Spieth has sunk to, the faith in his ability to deliver at the Masters persists. Each spring, April arrives with the same flurry of talking-head pregame show conversations, the same bettors plunking down money, and the same headlines about Spieth rediscovering himself on Magnolia Lane. No matter Spieth’s struggles, the Masters remains a reset button for Spieth believers, an annual expression of genuine faith that’s objectively unmatched when compared to any other player of Spieth’s level or stature.
All of which raises another appropriately seasonal question as Spieth — again — steps to the first tee at Augusta National:
Why might this year be different from all other years?
Augusta National: A Place of Hope and Redemption
There is a lilt to Spieth’s voice when he talks about Augusta National, a warmth and comfortable familiarity. It makes sense — most of us probably sound similar when we lapse into memories about the formative classrooms or fields or gyms of our college days, and it just so happens that Spieth’s equivalent is one of the best-known golf courses in the world. (Remember, he was 20 when he finished tied for second there for the first time.)
“I just have a good feel about the place because I know that I don’t have to have my best stuff to play well,” he says. “I’ve made birdie on every hole out there.”
As it turns out, that claim is not entirely true (at least not in tournament play); through 40 Masters rounds, Spieth actually hasn’t yet birdied the 11th hole at any point. But the sentiment is fair enough: This is a place where he has seen, and lived, plenty.
There are some nightmares, of course. A final-round 75 in 2017 was a hope-killing slog, the opening chip that rolled back to his feet and sent him toward a first-round 79 last year was uncomfortably jarring, and the 2016 meltdown, when he put two balls in the water on the 12th and blew a five-shot lead on the back nine on Sunday was, as Faldo described it, “a mixture between disaster and torture.”
Yet even with those low moments, it is (so far) statistically true that Spieth overperforms at Augusta, with Data Golf’s calculations showing that Spieth scores about a stroke-per-round better at the Masters than the model would expect. His historical player profile — as someone who shines in iron play and around the green — also matches Data Golf’s ideal fit for the course.
The question is whether Spieth can actually perform to that profile anymore.
- Feel like doubting? Point to the missed cuts last year and in 2022.
- Want to believe? He sandwiched those MCs with a tie for third in 2021 and a tie for fourth in 2023.
Spieth also is adamant that the end of last season was a significant turning point because he addressed a wrist injury that first bothered him in 2018, lingered for years, and was aggravated again in 2023. He finally had surgery last August.
Spieth didn’t hit balls for about three months after the procedure. He didn’t play a full round until another month after that, working instead on trying to return to the swing thoughts that carried him when he was younger. “I’m not calling this swing changes,” he told the Associated Press in January. “These are just a reset into some of the stuff I did that was my DNA, that was super advantageous that I had gotten away from for one reason or another.”
Now, Spieth says, he is healthy. He is confident. He is 31, despite it sometimes feeling like he has lived through two or three full careers already. He also knows Augusta National as well as anyone.
Justin Ray, the head of content at Twenty First Group, a sports intelligence and analysis firm, says no other major “is kinder to its longtime tenants” than the Masters, because it has the smallest field and is the only one of the four played on the same course every year. So given Spieth’s success at the Masters early in his career, Spieth “is a guy we’re going to think about every April until he doesn’t play golf anymore,” Ray says, regardless of his level anywhere else.
And why not? Fred Couples led after 36 holes when he was in his 50s and made the cut last year, when he was 63. Jack Nicklaus tied for sixth when he was 58. Four players have won green jackets more than 10 years apart: Nicklaus, Gary Player, Woods, and Crenshaw — a mentor and fellow Texas resident — who won his two green jackets in 1984 and 1995, when he was 43 years old.
Spieth is aware of Crenshaw’s 11-year gap between titles, and it’s something he and those around him have seized upon as a reminder that he isn’t necessarily done yet.
Smylie Kaufman, the former pro-turned-broadcaster, went through his own battles with injuries (and the yips) before retiring early and moving into TV. He and Spieth talk often about how to push back against the mental strain of struggling.
“I texted him the other day, and I said, ‘This second act of your career, it’s not done yet. It’s not over. And I think the world is waiting to see what you’re going to be able to accomplish,'” Kaufman says.
Someday, Spieth says, he will tell his children — Sammy, 3; Sophie, 1; and a third who is due in July — all about his first act. About 2015 and the feeling on that Sunday and the rush of living out, however quickly, the sequence he had always imagined.
But every time he walks on the grounds of Augusta National, his hope is that they’ll ultimately be there to see something even more special. To share with him a moment that he will stop and savor and soak up for as long as possible.
“Some of the bad I remember quite clearly and a lot of the good I remember quite clearly,” Spieth says. “And then I think, ‘OK, this is still my favorite tournament in the world — how can I make more memories here?'”
Originally Written by: Sam Borden
