Jordan Spieth’s wild British Open win prompts comparisons to the all-time greats again

Where does Jordan Spieth want our expectations to go now?

“It seems a bit unfair at 22 to be expecting something like that all the time,” he said at last year’s Open in a memorably frosty press conference.

After it became academic that his chances of winning at Troon had been blown away in the wind, a frustrated Spieth met the media and had clearly had enough. Spieth was asked an open-ended question about where his game and mind were and he, with a refined Spiethian bite, laid into the gathered inquisitors.

The gist of his monologue was that every question he was getting was framed against a 2015 standard, the year he won the first two majors of the season, and it made him feel like he was having a bad 2016. He used the word “unfair” twice and asked people to stop being so negative. It is true that winning the Masters and U.S. Open back-to-back is a Hall-of-Fame accomplishment and Spieth may have had his career year at the very start of it.

But a year later at the same major championship as that gentle rant, Spieth took the Claret Jug in a major performance that may be his most impressive yet. And now we’re invoking Tiger and Jack and the career slam.

Spieth might not win two majors every year but his accomplishments force us to keep reevaluating where he’s going in this game, measured against its history. Sunday’s incredible show, what the censorious Johnny Miller called “the greatest finish I have seen in championship golf,” pushed Spieth past Tiger and into territory where only Jack Nicklaus has strutted. Spieth’s British Open win earned him three legs of the career slam before his 24th birthday, and only Nicklaus, in the history of golf, had gotten that far before turning 24.

We can only measure Spieth against the likes of Tiger and Jack based on age thresholds. It’s not an actual discussion of careers because he obviously has a long way to go. It is preposterous to say anyone is the next Tiger. It is preposterous to say it with Spieth, but he’s making it slightly less preposterous with every win. Spieth keeps doing things that remind us of the best the game has had to offer and at a historically fast pace during a time when the fields have never been more loaded.

This time, he did it in a different way that might make this major the most impressive of the three. On Saturday night when he walked off with a three-shot lead, we heard so much about how great a front-runner he is and how he almost always closes these 54-hole leads to win. But he was on tilt this final round: a “buddy, it seems like we’re collapsing” walk-to-Augusta’s-13th-tee kind of tilt. He’d lost his lead, his game, and seemed mentally shook.

Then he made a bogey that will go down in major championship lore and ground Matt Kuchar to dust to win his first Open. It was an outrageous turn: one that just exploded quickly and ended in what felt like an instant. Golf is, often rightly, criticized for being too slow-moving, especially for a TV broadcast. This felt like a Steph Curry three-point assault that puts the Golden State Warriors on a 15-0 run and flips an entire game in 90 seconds.

Oddly enough, the flurry actually started with a bogey. The one thing that matters the most to a golf outcome, the scorecard, often tells us so little about what happened. A simple bogey 5 on the card at the 13th hole laughably under-represents just what happened there. This was the kind of turn that golf media love to purple up and for which we now also have Twitter for a mass freakout.

There was a British countryside search party, a summit expedition, and a game of Risk baked into one bizarre 20-minute scene that didn’t feature a single golf shot. The pictures and video, some captured from above with low cloud cover invading the shots, are instantly a significant part of the story of Spieth’s career and Open Championship history:

The hilarity of the pictures made it seem like this was sure disaster, far worse than just some bogey on the card. But Spieth was using his rules cognition, and as he said after the round, vast experience of hitting wild drives, to mitigate the damage. It all looked mad because there were pictures of trailer trucks, and dunes, and fans scrambling in every direction. There was Johnny Miller telling him to go back to the tee and re-hit. The unorthodox move was jarring, but it was actually getting him ahead and probably saving him.

It will become one of the most entertaining, interminable, and critical bogeys in major championship history. Spieth only needed four strokes from behind an equipment semi on the driving range. He lost a shot and the lead to Kuchar but somehow gained a “momentum shift,” as his caddie told him walking off the green following the critical bogey-saving putt. Think about that — he dropped a shot and out of the lead for the first time but felt like he got a momentum boost from the hole. That’s Spieth sorcery.

The adventure of the 13th rightfully became the most notorious bogey, but Spieth was unsteady from the first tee. It was there that he tugged his drive left and got what he called a “crap” break when his ball stayed up in the thick hay. The bogey at the leadoff hole was the first of four on the front nine. Until then, he’d made just four bogeys over the first three days, combined. The front nine ended with Spieth standing over a short bunny putt forever and then missing it to drop back into a tie with Kuchar. Based on how this entire week had gone, and the way he finished the third round Saturday night, few people could have predicted his three-shot lead evaporating by the 10th tee.

Even fewer people could have predicted what came after the 13th: that legendary bogey that would be his final of the day. By the 13th, the linear takes being drawn from Sunday at the ‘16 Masters to Sunday at the ‘17 Open were almost fully cooked. But that’s when the explosion happened: the Steph Curry unconsciousness that came completely out of nowhere given the way he’d played the first 13 holes.

How did Spieth respond to the mess of the 13th? By nearly jarring a hole-in-one, settling for a tap-in birdie, bombing an eagle putt, and pouring in two more birdies to play the final five holes in 5-under. Kuchar played a four-hole stretch in 2-under — a great closing run — and yet somehow went from 1-up to 2-down. A birdie-eagle-birdie-birdie response is Tiger and Jack stuff.

The run extinguished Kuchar and claimed the third leg of the career slam. The score was a 1-under 69 that tells about 2 percent of the story that was Spieth’s major-clinching round. As he told his agent afterward, “17 pars and a birdie would have been fine, too.”

Until Sunday, this looked like Spieth using his best to coast to another win. Nothing seemed difficult. A fan stepped on his ball and gave him a worse lie on Thursday. He just shrugged it off. On Friday, with the wind blowing and it raining sideways in some of the worst weather of the championship, he holed out for par from off the green. It was a Spiethy-save that left his playing partners shaking their heads and stopped a big number that would have brought him back to the field.

On the 18th hole Saturday, he hit what he thought was a poor shot short in a bunker, but it cleared the trouble and landed safely on the green. Kuchar almost holed his out from the fairway for eagle. Spieth made his putt; Kuchar missed his much shorter one. The entire swing reminded of that crucial up-and-down he had to finish Saturday at the 2015 Masters to keep Justin Rose at arm’s length and remove the drama for Sunday. This put him three shots up on Kuchar and felt like it would have the same effect on the Sunday round.

Spieth has seen some things, however, since that 2015 Masters win. He has chased distance (a little bit), blew a 5-shot lead on Augusta’s back nine, been an all-world putter but a poorer ball striker, and receded to a mediocre putter and become the best iron player in the game. In 2015, he was an entirely different kind of Masters winner in a game that had become consumed with power and distance buzzwords. There’s no flashy thing that makes it facile to say or cover why he’s so good, as there is with, um, well maybe your favorite power player who hits it 330 yards off the tee.

Spieth is just good at everything. Sometimes he’s the best putter you’ve ever seen. Sometimes he’s the best iron player on Tour. He has a way of getting the ball in the hole better than anyone else, or as my colleague Kyle Porter wrote recently, he’s the golf version of a guy who just “gets buckets” in every conceivable way and leaves you in the dust dumbfounded. Rory McIlroy confirmed this at the 2016 Masters with the now oft-cited “How the hell is he 2 under par today?” line when they were paired together on the weekend.

This post-Tiger era has left us with a carousel of players who seem to be the next generation star. One month it’s Rory and the next it’s DJ, and then it’s Jason Day and then it’s back to Spieth. The new champion golfer of the year has now shown he gets it done in a bunch of different ways and sometimes without his best. Can we say that about everyone else?

We saw it last month at the Travelers, where he hung on for dear life, and we saw it Sunday for 13 sloppy holes. At the Travelers, he scratched his way to a playoff, holed-out from the sand, and joined Tiger as the youngest to 10 PGA Tour wins in the modern era. At The Open, he joined Jack as the youngest to get three legs of the slam. It’s left us with the remarkable possibility that Spieth could get the career slam before Rory at the PGA in three weeks (that dynamic, and the course being Quail Hollow, a second home and feasting ground for Rory, has suped-up the final major of the season.)

Spieth’s message at last year’s Open expressed a frustration at being measured against a career year. But his statements at the Open two years ago expressed a frustration at not capitalizing on those positions he put himself in to make history.

“Right now, it’s just a tough feeling to be that close in a major,” he said after going to the wire on Sunday and coming up just short of a playoff at St. Andrews. “It doesn’t matter about the historical element of it. Just to be that close on our biggest stage and to come up just short ... you know, how many chances do you get?”

Two years later, he got another chance at the oldest major in golf. It was adventurous, but this time, he made sure he’d wrap his hands around the Jug with one of the great closes in major championship golf. Now we’re left adjusting the expectations of what could possibly come next.