Jordan Spieth Will Look Back on the 2015 British Open as the One That Got Away

ST. ANDREWS, Scotland — He was a stroke short, one swing of the 274 Jordan Spieth needed over the five days and four rounds of the British Open. This is the game of golf, a heartbreaker, because of one swing.

Three in a row, the first three majors of any year. Ben Hogan did it, won the Masters, U.S. Open and British Open in 1953. And nobody has done it since, and it's likely nobody will do it. Ever.

Arnold Palmer won the first two and then was a stroke away in 1960 right here at St. Andrews. Jack Nicklaus won the first two and was one stroke away in 1972 at Muirfield. Spieth won the first two and then Monday, in a tournament extended an extra day because of wild weather, was one stroke away once more at this most famous of courses, the “Home of Golf,” St. Andrews.

Spieth indeed has his two majors, and someday he may even have a half-dozen or even a dozen majors, a number only Nicklaus (18) and Tiger Woods (14) have reached. But he’ll rue this British Open, remembering what could have been the chance of a lifetime that he couldn’t capitalize on.

Seize the time, we’re told. Spieth almost did.

Golf isn’t horse racing. It doesn’t need somebody to win three in a row, or a Grand Slam to boost the game the way American Pharoah winning the elusive Triple Crown after 37 years was said to have saved the turf sport.

Still, what Spieth, 21, might have done with a win was bring in a new audience as Tiger Woods did when he exploded onto the scene 19 years ago.

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This 144th Open was, with a leaderboard full of great names, a compendium of great shots—and also some painful ones, like the putt Spieth knocked off the eighth green, forcing him to take three more putts and end up with a double bogey.

This by the player some call the best putter in the game.

The rain was coming down, a deluge. “Pelted in the face,” Spieth said. He wasn’t complaining, just explaining. A par three, the eighth, 174 yards.

“It’s a hard shot,” Spieth said, “and I just tried to sling one in there and left it 40 yards from the pin on the green. If you make bogey, you’re still in it.”

But he made double bogey. “There was absolutely no reason to hit that putt off the green. I can leave it eight feet short and have a dead straight eight-footer up the hill where I’ll make that the majority of the time, and I said, ‘I’m not leaving this one short,’ and instead hit it off the other side of the green where it was really dead.”

So many things can go wrong. Fourteen clubs, friends until they’re enemies. Strange bounces, balls hanging on the edge of a cup, bad lies after good shots. The best putter in the game putting himself out of a chance of history.

Even after the triple, Spieth was tied for the lead after 16 holes. Then at the 17th, the Road Hole, the par four that has wrecked so many dreams—Tom Watson never won at St. Andrews, in part because of the hole—Spieth needed three to get on and couldn’t hole the par-saving putt.

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That left him one back. The 18th is a birdie hole, sometimes reachable in two, but his second shot, a chip, spun back from near the cup into the swale known as The Valley of Sin. He needed birdie. He could only par.

Such is the story of golf: Huge opportunities ruined by the smallest of margins.

The competition is fierce, the differential miniscule. One mistake, one brilliant shot. We’d gone 43 years from Nicklaus at Muirfield, the tournament the British press nicknamed the “Grand Slam Open,” to Spieth at St. Andrews. So difficult to win one major, much less three majors, the first three of any year, in two countries, on three completely different courses.

Woods won the last three in 2000, but he never won the first three. Neither did Phil Mickelson or Ernie Els or Greg Norman. We thought Spieth was going to do it. Spieth thought he was going to do it. He couldn’t, and with people such as Rory McIlroy, who missed this Open because of an ankle injury, Rickie Fowler, Louis Oosthuizen and dozens more, neither he nor anyone will accomplish it.

It’s an evil game, golf. It’s a fantastic game. There’s no defense. You have control only over your own game, not the games of anyone else. A two-foot putt counts the same number of shots as a 300-yard drive. Zach Johnson, who won this 144th Open in a three-way playoff, can’t hit his tee balls very long, but he hits his putts very straight. And all the hours of practice by a golfer can be negated by a few seconds of poor thinking.

“I just made a mental mistake on No. 8 and it cost me,” Spieth said. Cost all of us, other than Johnson. Cost us the chance to experience the joy of a man reaching for the stars, or at least for golfing brilliance.

If Spieth had won The Open Championship, we would be speculating on whether he indeed could win the Grand Slam, all four majors in a calendar year.

But now, we're left to concede that surely no one will win the first three majors—Hogan stands and swings alone—much less all four. There are too many variables.

“I played a great round of golf today,” Spieth said of a day that had him tied for the lead and then left him—and us—musing about what might have been.

“It’s just that the kind of golf that was played by the field this week, it just took some special golf,” he said.

Just one stroke more special.

Art Spander is a winner of the 2009 Lifetime Achievement Award in Journalism from the PGA of America. Unless otherwise noted, all quotes were obtained firsthand.