Jordan Spieth delivered the kind of bizarre, only-him moment that keeps golf fans glued to the screen during Thursday’s first round of the John Deere Classic.
On his sixth hole of the day, Spieth pushed his tee shot on the par-4 15th into the right rough. Nothing too wild there. The twist came when he reached the ball and found it had finished underneath a trash can.
After moving around the cans to get a better look, Spieth received a ruling from an official and was allowed to move the ball and take a good lie in the rough. From there, he knocked his next shot to just over three feet and rolled in the putt for birdie, getting to two-under on the round.
One man's trash is Jordan Spieth's treasure. https://t.co/sxWtWFIbrI pic.twitter.com/CLz8kv37Be
Of course, the good fortune didn’t carry over. Instead of building on the birdie, Spieth gave it right back before the turn.
He put his approach from the fairway on 18 into the water, made double bogey six, then added a bogey on his 10th hole of the day. In a span of less than 40 minutes, he went from two-under to one-under.
That’s the Jordan Spieth experience in a nutshell.
The clip quickly made the rounds on social media, where the jokes came fast.
The Jordan Spieth experience ™️ 🤣Via: @Skratch pic.twitter.com/F1XokrVA4R
“The Jordan Spieth Experience” His tee shot ends up UNDER a trash can…. ONLY Spieth pic.twitter.com/FX10TjVdP3
Jordan Spieth inspecting his putting this year pic.twitter.com/aGdFvfAchB
if you want to know why people, myself included, will probably never fully quit the Jordan Spieth experience it's because this led to a birdie. pic.twitter.com/ebnjQPruW5
The most Jordan Spieth hole pic.twitter.com/v8D8ZH8jK7
Spieth hasn’t won on the PGA Tour since the 2022 RBC Heritage, but he has still been around plenty of weekends this season. In 18 events, he has missed just two cuts.
What he hasn’t done is make a real Sunday run. He does not have a top-10 finish this year, with a pair of T11s at the Arnold Palmer Invitational and the Valspar Championship standing as his best results.
He has made the cut in all three major championships. At the Masters, he finished T12 at five-under par.
He was T18 at the PGA Championship in May, then stumbled to a T56 at the U.S. Open a few weeks ago.
Last week at the Travelers Championship, he finished T66.
Now he’s back at a place where he’s won twice before, trying to navigate the John Deere Classic while the familiar Spieth chaos follows along. If he does find a way into the mix this weekend, that birdie from under the trash cans is the sort of shot CBS will be replaying over and over.
Oh, and take a second to watch this video of Spieth rating pizzas last week at the Travelers in Cromwell, Conn. It’s tremendous.
Jordan Spieth rates pizzas.Enjoy.@FanDuel pic.twitter.com/ausu1iRbaJ
In Other News...
Scottie Schefflers So Called Off Year Says Everything About Expectations
For almost anyone else, one win, a spotless cut streak and a stack of top-25 finishes would count as a banner season. For Scottie Scheffler, it has been enough to fuel talk of an off year, which says more about the standard he has set than it does about any real drop-off in form. He remains world No. 1 and the FedEx Cup points leader, and the numbers still point to a player who has been among the most reliable in the game all season.
The frustration for everyone else trying to keep up is that even when Scheffler has not been piling up trophies at his usual pace, he has still been in the mix almost every week. He has carried that consistency through 14 starts, and the gap between his season and his reputation has only grown because the ceiling is so high. In a year when his rsum looks lighter than usual, the larger question is how long the rest of the field can keep treating that as a letdown. [Read more 🡒]