Jordan Spieth showed consistent excellence and excellent consistency in 2015, when he won two of golf's four major championships and climbed to the top of the World Golf Rankings about a month before his 22nd birthday.
But doing what Spieth did hardly made him an outlier. A player copping half a season's Grand Slams has been accomplished 15 times in the past half-century by a dozen golfers, and his five tournament wins for the season were nothing special. Byron Nelson took home 18 trophies in 1945, and Ben Hogan twice hit double digits with 13 titles a year later and another 10 in 1948. Tiger Woods won nine times in 2006, including a season-ending string of seven that included the British Open and the PGA Championship.
Back-to-back Masters and U.S. Opens? Impressive, to be sure, but certainly not unprecedented. It had been accomplished five times previously.
And absurdly young though he may be, Spieth failed to shatter records for precociousness, either. His breakout Masters triumph last spring occurred eight months, 16 days after he turned 21. That fell short of Woods' record at Augusta of 21 years, 3 months, 14 days. In fact, nine players have won a Slam before their 20th birthday, and young Tom Morris hadn't even turned 18 when he claimed the first of his four British Open championships.
But that was in 1868, in a gentile golfing world that bore no resemblance to the super-pressurized one in which Spieth resides. The other under-21 champions also all prevailed in either the 19th century or the first third of the 21st century. In contemporary golf, where the competition is exponentially tougher, only Woods and Rory McIlory come close to being as wet behind the years as Spieth was when he chased his four days of 18-under-par grace at Augusta National with the U.S. Open crown.
He wasn't done, either. A shot here or a shot there and he could have won the British Open and the PGA, too. Instead, he tied for fourth in the former - missing out on a spot in a playoff by a shot - and closed as the runner-up at the latter. Even Woods, who won the final three Slams in 2000, had to settle for fifth at the Masters.
Woods also was the runner-up that fall in the season-ending Tour Championship, which Spieth added to his 2015 stash.
"I mean, what he did last year," Jimmy Walker said, "is a great career for most people."