“That was the amazing thing: none of the adults had any idea that golf would become his life. Even his parents didn’t know. Jordan was determined. He knew before everyone else.”
Introducing Tom Hood. The impact of 9/11 on the hotel sector in the United States meant the liquidation of his business department within Marriott hotels. He turned to teaching, with his first class, that of the fifth grade at the St Monica catholic school on the outskirts of Dallas, including a certain Jordan Spieth among the group of 10- and 11-year-olds.
“I taught maths and science, which meant having Jordan for half a day, every day,” Hood recalls. “As a new teacher, you can imagine the challenge. And this was a big challenge; the class was a rambunctious, rowdy group.
“At the back of the class Jordan sat there, totally calm. There would be chaos going on around him. Jordan never knew it but he was a lifesaver in the classroom. He was my salvation. I didn’t lose control, just by looking up and seeing Jordan.”
Hood’s recollections of Spieth fit with a recurring narrative around the 22-year-old, who will host the champions dinner at Augusta on Tuesday night after becoming the second youngest winner in Masters history last year. “He was a good citizen,” the teacher adds. “He was respectful, he had a great demeanour. His citizenship stood out. It was a privilege to know him.”
Hood was soon acutely aware that his young pupil would be known on a far broader scale for nonacademic pursuits. Spieth was always an excellent athlete; a first-choice pitcher in the St Monica baseball team, the quarterback of the football team, a starting guard in the basketball team. He was involved in sporting success before – and this is the key – deciding to shape his own destiny.
Spieth had reached eighth grade. It was his final year at St Monica before moving to high school at 14. He opted not to play in the school football team, despite an imminent chase for glory. He did, reluctantly, partake in basketball. Baseball, however, was met with flat refusal; to the astonishment of others. Jordan knew.
“Jordan just said: ‘I don’t want to play. I only want to play golf,’” Hood explains. “We didn’t even have a golf team. We would let him even pitch for us without practice but he wouldn’t play. The baseball team was going for a championship.
“One day, Jordan’s father came up to me and said: ‘I’m done fighting with Jordan about this. We are not talking at the dinner table because of it. Nobody understands it but he only wants to play golf.’”
Nonetheless, his early all-round talent means the first public record of Spieth in the media was not in the sport that has catapulted him towards greatness. On 28 October 2001, the Dallas Morning News carried a photo of “The Reds” baseball team, who had just completed a season with a record of 18 wins and no losses. Front row, far right: Jordan Spieth. His dad, Shawn, is pictured as an assistant coach. By August 2003, Jordan’s win in his junior club championship division at Brookhaven country club – courtesy of 34 stableford points – is recorded. Six months later, Spieth is shown in the St Monica fifth-grade football team that had claimed the Junior Varsity Division Two championship.
Skipping forward to 2008, Spieth’s insistent focus on golf makes perfect sense. “Jordan Spieth shot a six-under-par 30 on the final nine, then sank a 10ft birdie putt on the first playoff hole, to win the District boys individual title on Tuesday at Riverside Golf Course,” reports the Dallas Morning News.
Scrolling through the microfilm in a Dallas library the week before the 80th Masters, I found the Texan city gripped by sporting fever of a different kind; the impending WrestleMania 32. You need to scrape pretty hard to find traces of appreciation for Spieth. I find myself crestfallen as a library assistant doesn’t so much as recognise his name. But when tributes arrive, they are unfailingly warm.
Mike Rawlings, the mayor of Dallas since 2011, handed the first of his keys to the city to Spieth. This was before the golfer had even won a major championship, let alone blitzed the field at last year’s Masters, when he became only the fifth golfer in history to win the tournament wire-to-wire, equalled the 18-under-par winning score set by Tiger Woods and broke the records for 36- and 54-hole totals on his way to the Green Jacket.
“He has represented this city so very well and he gives back,” Rawlings insists. “I play at a golf course in north Dallas, we have a fundraiser every year for a domestic violence charity. Jordan makes sure he comes and plays. There are not a lot of heroes that young but he is one. He is young, he is polite, he is gracious and he is a killer on the golf course.” But what links Spieth and his home? “I think it is about youth,” Rawlings adds. “People don’t understand how young Dallas is as a city. We are only 160 years old. The new Dallas really only took off after Erik Jonsson took over as mayor, post-Kennedy assassination. That is only 50 years ago; the things that have happened in the city during that time are remarkable. We have so many young people moving into the city and I feel like we are about how old Jordan is, or a senior in college. We are not an adolescent any more but we are still in the early side of our lives.”
Perhaps it was inevitable that Spieth would be part of a fairytale. The Midway Hills district in which he was raised has a batch of streets inspired by Walt Disney: Dwarfs Circle, Pinocchio Drive, Cinderella Lane, Snow White Drive and others.
Just north of Midway Hills, Brookhaven country club lies within minutes of Interstate 35, in a distinctly middle-class area. This suburb of Farmers Ranch achieved national notoriety due to a protracted legal battle that began in 2007 over a policy to prevent illegal immigrants renting. It took a supreme court judgment in 2014, deeming the law unconstitutional, to finally end the wrangle. Brookhaven itself could hardly offer a more contrasting environment. It is a wonderfully vast tree-lined setting including three golf courses, practice facilities, tennis courts and swimming pools. It was swimming that first attracted his mother, Chris, and Shawn Spieth to enrol the entire family. The membership is 3,000, with 1,200 of that for golf alone. The emphasis is on family. Spieth soon moved from the pool to the driving range.
A banner outside the professional’s shop states: “It is never too early to dream big.” Yet, intriguingly, hailing of Brookhaven’s most famous son is understated, save an oil painting inside the clubhouse, a couple of signed flags and another artwork, this time for sale, in the window of the pro shop. Brad McCollum, the director of golf, rather bashfully states that Brookhaven is planning more tributes to Spieth, almost giving the impression the 22-year-old’s success has taken the club by surprise.
Spieth drifted south from Brookhaven, working under the close instruction of Cameron McCormick at Brook Hollow Golf Club and subsequently Dallas National. McCormick inherited a 13-year-old who was both prone to frustration and, as seems incredible in 2016, a weak putter. Last year, when Spieth followed up his Augusta success with victory in the US Open before finishing fourth and second at the Open and US PGA, respectively, his long-time coach was named PGA teacher of the year.
One of many seminal moments in Spieth’s life arrived at that very age during a high school match at Dornick Hills Golf Club in Oklahoma. On the 2nd hole, the much-respected University of Texas golf coach John Fields caught a glimpse of the future.
“It was a par three over water, 170 yards, pin was in a dicey back-right place,” Fields says. “He missed the green to the right and I can still see what happened next to this day. He had a downhill chip from a bad lie and the ball came out just like it knew what it was doing, it had spin on it and stopped within six inches of the hole.
“I thought: ‘I’ve got to have this guy.’ You can’t manufacture that kind of ability, it is God-given. Right there and then, I thought: ‘Not only do I want this guy on my golf team, he has something special.’”
Spieth would spend only a little over a year at college, helping the Longhorns to a long-awaited national championship in 2012. “It wasn’t like he was leaving after he had done nothing,” says Fields. “He helped us win something that we had been wanting to win for 40 years. He helped give us this wonderful gift.
“Truthfully, I knew he was likely to leave Texas early. I knew that when he was in the hunt at the Byron Nelson Championship at the conclusion of his junior years in high school. What I was hoping at that point was that he would come to the school because what happens if he wins that golf tournament?
“So the time that we had with Jordan was unbelievably wonderful. I appreciated every minute of it, everybody here did. When I left, I told him we knew he was going to have tremendous success. ‘But I don’t want you to go. I don’t want you to ever think that I wanted you to leave here.’ Meaning, I didn’t want him to get the idea that I was in any way angry with him or in any way happy he was leaving. I wanted him to know that he could always be at Texas and he was wanted here. But we absolutely understood it was the right time for him to go, we supported him 100%.”
Dylan Frittelli, a team-mate of Spieth for that brief period and who sank the putt that won the championship, nicknamed the man three years his junior “Superstar”. Frittelli, a South African now playing on the Challenge Tour, adds: “I was 19, going on 20 and had heard about this kid in Dallas. He had won a few tournaments, all of a sudden he won the US Junior Championship and people were talking a lot more about him. John Fields was trying to recruit him, he would tell us a lot about this kid. I was like: ‘Yeah ... sure, sure, I hear this stuff all the time.’
“Then I played in Houston, an event with a South African team, Italian team and American team. We all roomed together and I got to know Jordan pretty well there, he was still only 16. I played one round with him and afterwards was like: ‘OK, this kid is pretty good.’ He had a long way to go but there was definitely something there.
“At 16 he was very mature, very confident in his playing abilities. Socially, a 16-year-old is normally awkward and unfamiliar with their surroundings. Jordan waltzed right in, chatting to sponsors and knowing everybody.
“When he progressed to college, he had that something ... everybody talks about it without knowing exactly what it is. In my best deduction it is a desire, an all-encompassing drive and focus to achieve at whatever he does. We used to play ping pong in the locker room. If I managed to beat him six, seven games in a row he wouldn’t be able to let me walk out until he beat me. I’d beat him eight times and he still hadn’t had enough. Eventually when he beat me, then we could go out and practise.”
Frittelli laughs when recalling the team meeting when Spieth proceeded to offer an exact, hour-by-hour wind forecast. “He was just so analytical. No stone left unturned.”
It is not what Spieth achieves on the course that defines his life, however. That is his relationship with his sister, Ellie. It is why, understandably, there is a large element of privacy around so much of the Spieth story. Now 15, Ellie was born with a neurological disorder that puts her on the autism spectrum. She did not even have the power of speech until she turned four. Shortly after Jordan had put on the Green Jacket at Augusta, it was Ellie who Spieth spoke of, describing her as his inspiration and “the most special part of our family”. So much of the Spieth family’s work – Chris took on two jobs – was to pay for Ellie’s place at the Vanguard preparatory school. Fees there range between $17,000 and $21,000 per year; Ellie still attends for 35 hours per week.
“It is just such a sweet, loving relationship,” says Rosalind Funderburgh, the school’s founder, of the dynamic between Ellie and Jordan. “It is very natural. It isn’t stilted, it isn’t condescending. It is exactly the kind of thing you would expect from an adoring older brother towards his young sibling.
“I have known Jordan since he was in high school and whenever he comes to visit his sister, there has never been a single difference in the way he is. They are a very low-key family; there has never been any bigheadedness.”
Spieth’s journey, from model pupil to sporting inspiration, is one to cherish.
