Bogey, bogey, bogey, par, bogey, bogey. It’s a helluva way to start the most important round of your life.
In the span of about two hours on Sunday, J.J. Spaun looked like a golfer in complete freefall. It looked like the magic touch from his first three rounds at Oakmont Country Club had completely abandoned him. On the second hole, it appeared as though the crowd was watching the golf gods forsake him in real time when his approach shot bounced once, hit the flag stick and then rolled 50 yards away from the cup.
“I hit it perfect, and it was right at it. It was just a matter of was it the perfect distance or not?” he said. “All I heard is a really loud, ‘Oh!’ It wasn’t a good one. … It was just really unlucky. It was pretty much a two-shot swing. I was thinking that would have been pretty close, maybe inside of five feet, if it didn’t hit the flag.”
That start on the course was emblematic of how Spaun’s day began.
“I was running to CVS in downtown because my daughter had a stomach bug and was vomiting all night long,” he said. “It was kind of a rough start to the morning. I’m not blaming that on my start, but it kind of fit the mold of what was going on – the chaos.”
So, maybe then the rain that drenched this stunning golf course outside Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, was a form of divine intervention.
The worsening conditions led to a weather delay when Spaun was on the ninth hole. When he got back on the course more than 90 minutes later, all of those bad vibes – the five bogeys, the frequent walks in the rough, the horrific breaks – were washed away.
“They were just like, ‘Dude, just chill,’” Spaun said of a conversation with his coaches during the break. “If you were given four shots back going into the back nine on Monday, like you would take that. They just said, ‘Just let it come to you, be calm. Stop trying so hard.’
“That’s what I was doing. I felt like I had a chance, a really good chance to win the US Open at the start of the day. It just unraveled very fast. … But that break was actually the key for me to winning this tournament.”
Spaun’s road to major championship glory is long and winding. His nascent dreams of becoming a skateboarder were derailed when he was hit by a car at the age of five and his father said no more skating. He had a successful college career at San Diego State University and turned pro after graduating in 2012, earning his way onto the PGA Tour in 2016. Two years after that, he was diagnosed with type-2 diabetes.
After three years of doing all the things he was supposed to do and not feeling any better, it was discovered he actually had type-1 diabetes – a diagnosis that potentially saved his career. He only had one win to his name on the PGA Tour: the 2022 Valero Texas Open.
“It’s just such a mental grind,” he told CNN Sports of that time in his life. “You’re trying to not only play good golf, you’re trying to be a dad, trying to provide for your family. You’re on the road four to seven weeks in a row, not seeing your family, and it just takes its toll. And sometimes you gotta realize and have a good perspective on what matters most, and then eventually that can help you turn the corner on the things that you don’t really expect, which for me was golf.”
He’s certainly had lower scores during his career – two of them during this tournament – but no round will ever feel as sweet as this one for the 34-year-old Californian.
As the 125th US Open devolved into golf carnage and tournament chaos, Spaun was the only leader who could limit his errors and pull out some magical moments – the critical ingredients for winning a major tournament.
His drive at 17 – the tempting short par-4 that practically begs players to pull out their drivers and go for the green – was a thing of beauty. It started out left, faded back to the right, dropped onto the green after 295 yards, took five hops and rolled toward the pin. For a second, it felt like “Happy Gilmore” coming to life – a professional golfer might really be about to hit a hole-in-one with his driver. Instead, it missed the hole by inches and he was able to two-putt for birdie and take sole possession of the lead.
And as good as that shot was, it’s his putt on 18 that will go down in golf lore as one of the greatest major-championship-winning shots in history.
Spaun had driven right down the middle of the 18th fairway and hit his 6-iron from 202 yards out to get on the green. He got there, but it wasn’t exactly a gimme – his ball settled 64 feet and five inches from the hole. With Scotsman Robert MacIntyre watching from the clubhouse – having pulled out an incredible 2-under 68 to finish the tournament at 1-over – and waiting to see if he was going to be playing in a playoff on Monday, Spaun had work to do.
His ball had settled on a little bump on the far-left side of the green. Sunday’s pin placement meant the ball had to go down one ridge, up another and be on the right line as it went through an absolutely gigantic left-to-right break across the treacherous putting surface.
“I knew the importance of the putt, I didn’t know exactly – I didn’t want to look at the leaderboard because I still wanted to execute the putt how I would if it was, you know, during a practice day or on Thursday,” he told CNN Sports on Sunday.
“But it’s funny, the last thing I said to myself before I stepped into my routine was, ‘This is a $100 make,’ which me and my caddie do for fun during practice rounds. We go to random parts on the putting green during the practice round. And, they’re long, 50-plus feet, and when you make it, you get 100 bucks. So, it was kind of like a fun little moment where I was like, ‘OK, I’ve done this before’ because I’ve taken a few hundred bucks off of him.”
Spaun absolutely nailed it. Right into the heart of the cup. It’s the kind of putt that a golfer would remember making forever even if it came on a municipal course during a twilight round with no one else around to witness it.
But on this stage, at this course, at this tournament, after all the rain and wind and delays and bogeys? Pure golf magic.
Magic is something the father of two, a season-pass holder at Disneyland, would know all about. After how Oakmont battered the field of the world’s best golfers this week, Spaun might be the only player in the world who considers this track the happiest place on Earth.
From CNN
