Jordan Spieth, tied for the lead with Bubba Watson at 5 under par going into Sunday’s final round, is only 20. He has already won a PGA Tour event — the John Deere Classic last summer when he was still 19. You have to go back to 1931 to find another teenager, Ralph Guldahl, who’s won a pro tournament.
No one that young has ever won the Masters.
At the University of Texas in 2011, Golf.com says “Spieth was the Big 12 Player of the Year and a first team All-American while leading the team in scoring average. His team went on to win the national championship.”
With this Masters, he has also already out-youthed Woods — who competed in the Masters at age 20 in 1996 and impressed the field with his abundant talent, but didn’t make the cut that year. Woods won the next year at age 21.
“He’s young, nerves are no big deal to him,” Watson told reporters. “He’s a great player and a guy like that, he obviously has no fear … He’s special.”
Born during the Clinton administration, Spieth is from a generation that hasn’t even learned to fear Woods, The New York Times points out. Perhaps that’s the key to discovering golf’s next greatest. “It could be someone who listens to the talk of Woods’s onetime dominance and rolls his eyes the way he does when his grandfather talks about Elvis,” The Times’ Bill Pennington writes.
“Spieth, child of the 1990s, said he had not played a video game in years,” says Pennington. “This week, he has turned off his phone.”
Of course, Sunday at the Masters is long and intense, and Spieth could wither on the green. Watson, 35, won the championship last year and has the advantage of experience.
“I’ve won one, so I’ve got that going for me, you know,” Watson told reporters after he lost his three-shot lead on Saturday. “But if I play bad tomorrow, I still have a green jacket, so that’s a positive.”