Jordan Spieth’s driver cracked while he warmed up for his first round of college golf, minutes before he was to tee off in front of a former U.S. Open champion.
“He didn’t panic,” says John Fields, the University of Texas golf coach. “He just kind of laughed about it.”
Texas coaches headed to Old Overton Golf Club’s pro shop in search of a replacement. They handed the new club, a different brand with a similar shaft, to Spieth on the first tee. Among the gallery watching the star freshman’s debut was Jerry Pate, the 1976 U.S. Open champion and namesake of the University of Alabama’s event.
“He pulls that club out on the first tee, never having hit it before,” Fields recalls. “We’re all holding our breath. And he hits it right down the middle with a little cut.
“That tells you a lot about somebody. That tells you they obviously have tremendous confidence in their abilities, but also tremendous feel if they’re going to make a driver work that they’ve never hit before.”
Spieth had plenty of shots down the middle that day, as he shot 65-69 to share the lead. “I just remember thinking, ‘It doesn’t really matter what happens to this guy. He’s going to find a way to get it done,’” says Ryan Murphy, the team’s assistant coach that season.
Finding a way to succeed in spite of setbacks is a trait many great players share.
Spieth displayed it on the first day of his collegiate career and less than two years later when he followed an unsuccessful Q-School attempt by winning the John Deere Classic, becoming the first player since Tiger Woods to qualify for the TOUR Championship by Coca-Cola after starting the season without status.
Spieth has won six more PGA TOUR titles since, including two majors. He is the reigning FedExCup champion and World No. 1 as he returns to the town where he played his college golf, Austin, Texas, for this week’s World Golf Championships-Dell Match Play Championship.
Spieth spent 1 ½ seasons in Austin, leading the Longhorns to the NCAA title in his freshman season.
A collegiate title may seem insignificant in light of all that Spieth has accomplished, but only if one ignores the context surrounding that 2012 NCAA Championship at Riviera Country Club.
The University of Texas, which produced Ben Crenshaw, Tom Kite, Justin Leonard, Mark Brooks and many more, was 40 years removed from its last national championship and pressure was mounting on the program. Spieth, born and raised in Dallas – three hours north of Austin – knew what it would mean to help the proud program return to the top.
I think it just added to his belief that he could achieve incredible things.
“It was huge,” Spieth says of the NCAA title, which was won on a walk-off birdie by the team’s South African senior, Dylan Frittelli. “It was the No. 1 priority in going to school there.”
Spieth concedes that he may not have turned pro in December 2012, a decision that was announced on the school’s Longhorn Network, if his team hadn’t won it all. He may have stayed in school to take another shot at the national championship. Winning the NCAA Championship, and his low-amateur performance at the U.S. Open a couple weeks later, gave him the freedom to leave school knowing he had accomplished his goals.
“At the time, (the NCAA Championship) was the most monumental thing he had been a part of. He achieved a national championship for the University of Texas,” Fields said. “It doesn’t get much bigger than that, not in our world.
“I think it just added to his belief that he could achieve incredible things.”
And it was a big relief to Fields, who’d been at the helm in Austin since 1997.
Despite fielding some strong teams, the Longhorns hadn’t finished in the top 10 at an NCAA Championship since 2004. Even worse, rival Texas A&M won the national title in 2009, the year college golf's biggest event switched to a match-play format.
Spieth says his former coach called the championship a “120-pound monkey off his back,” a joke with a double meaning, referring also to the weight loss the coach underwent after the biggest victory of his career.