For his own sake, let’s hope Jordan Spieth doesn’t flirt with a cliffside catastrophe again at the eighth hole at Pebble Beach Golf Links in Pebble Beach, California.
A year ago, his tee shot in the third round at the famed par 4 during the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am crossed into the penalty area but stopped 18 inches from plummeting over the edge and on to the rocks more than 70 feet below. It made for great TV, listening to the pleas of caddie Michael Greller to play it safe and take a drop before Spieth risked life and limb to hit a 7-iron from 162 yards and pulled off the death-defying stunt.
“I think I saved a stroke. Does the reward outweigh the risk? Not if you think the risk was dying,” he said. “I’m glad I ended up making a 4 because if I made a 5 it would have been one of the worse decisions I ever made. Instead it was just a bad decision.”
How “downright terrifying,” as CBS’s Colt Knost put it, was Spieth’s shot? Enough so that the resort pushed the red line farther away from the ledge, grew the rough between the end of the fairway and the bluff and added signage to discourage players from trying to replicate Spieth’s daredevil heroics.
Even Spieth, who played the hole in November on a family trip and again on Monday during a practice round, conceded that in retrospect discretion may truly be the better part of valor.
“I think now knowing my son a lot better,” he said of Sammy, who was less than 3 months old at the time, “I may not have hit that shot.”
Spieth, the 2017 tournament champion, nearly won the tournament for a second time last year, finishing runner-up to Tom Hoge. The AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am, which includes rounds at Spyglass Hill Golf Course and Monterey Peninsula Country Club’s Shore Course, has been a happy hunting ground for Spieth, who has recorded six top-10’s in his 10 previous appearances and owns the best scoring average (69.0) over the last 40 years of anyone who has played 15 or more rounds. It would seem to be a perfect place for Spieth to break out of a mini-slump – he hasn’t recorded a top 10 since the British Open in July, and in his last start at the Sony Open in Hawaii, he became the first player in tournament history to go from first-round leader to missing the 36-hole cut.
“It was just kind of a bad run of cards,” he explained.
Aside from Pebble Beach being one of his three favorite courses in the world, Spieth said part of the attraction of making the pro-am a regular stop on his schedule is once again teaming up with country music singer-songwriter Jake Owen.
“I don’t think he still knows times when not to say certain things, but that’s OK. We expect that. Like, ‘Hey, so, are you going to like make a birdie or are you just going to keep making bogeys?’ He’ll say something like that. And I’m like, ‘Oh, maybe that isn’t the nicest thing to say at the time,’ ” said Spieth.
Spieth is bidding for his 14th Tour title and would like nothing more than to be standing on the 18th green with the trophy late on another Sunday.
Spieth also is a longtime ambassador of AT&T and has made Pebble Beach one of just four tournaments he’s played in all 10 of his seasons on Tour. But more and more top talent has found reasons to skip the event in recent years. This year’s highest-ranked players in the field are world No. 10 Matt Fitzpatrick, the reigning U.S. Open champion and No. 11 Viktor Hovland, who captured the 2018 U.S. Amateur at Pebble Beach, but only seven of the top 50 are teeing it up this week. Spieth said that he hopes that the Tour will find a way to make the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am a designated event in future years, though he tabbed it above his pay grade to determine how that would work with the celebrities and captains of industry such an integral part of the event’s success.
“Can you imagine Rory (McIlroy) and (Jon) Rahm, the hottest two players in the world right now, coming down, 16, 17, 18 at Pebble Beach?” Spieth said. “A bunch of others in the top 10 in the world gunning them down. It would be must-watch television. I would love to see it happen somehow.”
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