The boy, Brenton Pettijohn, stood on a tree stump beyond the green at hole No. 3 at Oakmont Country Club on Saturday night, peeking over rows of spectators to see Jordan Spieth and his putter. Spieth’s U.S. Open title defense was going south, but Pettijohn hadn’t abandoned hope.
“He’s making a charge,” said Pettijohn, a 15-year-old from Marshall, Ill., “but it takes time.”
All week, even after storms swept in and softened the golf course, Spieth said the 116th U.S. Open could be won with an even-par score after 72 holes. Back-to-back rounds of 72 had Spieth safely above the cut line but eight shots off the lead entering the third round Saturday.
Spieth chipped back toward par early in the round, birdying three of the first four holes to briefly climb into the chase, and the crowd swarming around him swelled even larger, pressing against the ropes along the lengthy Oakmont fairways. The lesser names on the leaderboard were wary.
Spieth, however, was weary. He rounded out the 36-hole day by shooting 3 over the rest of the way. He enters championship Sunday at 4 over, nine shots behind leader Shane Lowry.
Pettijohn was at the U.S. Open with his father, who surprised the boy with Friday-Saturday tickets for his birthday, and is an up-and-coming golfer at Marshall High School. He admires Spieth’s short game and his mental game.
“He’s able to stay calm,” Pettijohn said. “Maybe not recently, but he’s had some frustrating time.”
To a kid like this, Spieth is magnetizing. The 22-year-old with eight PGA Tour victories and 1.5 million Twitter followers doesn’t have Jason Day’s world No. 1 ranking or Rickie Fowler’s social-media pull, but he’s done more than most to help fill the game’s Tiger Woods-sized void.
In 2007, when Tiger still was Tiger and finished second to Angel Cabrera at the U.S. Open at Oakmont, the gallery went where he went. Now, there’s a more even split between familiar names — Phil Mickelson, primarily — and the newer kids on the block, golfers such as Spieth.
On a FOX Sports media conference call last week, lead golf analyst Paul Azinger, winner of the 1993 PGA Championship, and on-course reporter Curtis Strange, the last man to win back-to-back U.S. Opens, described the current PGA Tour landscape as a brotherhood. They like it.
There does seem to be a friendly camaraderie building. Saturday morning, for example, Bubba Watson, walking up the fairway at No. 2, tipped his cap to Spieth, who was at the fifth green, and Spieth and his caddy, Michael Greller, doffed theirs in return. Later, Spieth gave Jason Dufner an enthusiastic thumbs up for his perfect approach shot at No. 12.
“The game is always evolving,” Strange said. “It evolved 20 years ago when Tiger came out and we had the most visible athlete on the planet playing our game — we were lucky. Now it has evolved into three, four or five guys that have great personalities, are honest, are fun, and that’s good.
“As good as Tiger was, sometimes he wasn’t fun and entertaining and all of the above. He was more serious and more business and more …”
“[Ticked] off,” Azinger interrupted.
“… private,” Strange finished.
Another difference is these young guns are flawed. They’re flappable.
“There are no Tigers,” Azinger said. “These guys are unbelievable, but Tiger was unbelievable times 10. I look at these guys now and think they’re brave, they’re different, they’re gutsy, and they’re nervous. And we get to watch it.”
Spieth’s string of birdies Saturday ended when he blasted a tee shot at No. 14, yelled, “Down! Down!” and watched it bend into a fairway bunker. He banged the ball from the bunker to the rough, and from the rough to the wrong side of the green before bogeying.
He parred five holes in a row, then double-bogeyed No. 2 to drop back to even for the round and 4 over par for the tournament. At No. 3, Spieth reached the green in two shots and lined up a long birdie putt that would bend left to right. Pettijohn, standing on the stump, held his breath.
Spieth missed the birdie putt. When he missed the par putt, too, Pettijohn bit his water bottle cap and turned away. He carried on anyway, moving quickly to secure a good spot near the tee box at No. 4 where he might be able to urge on one of the game’s greatest active golfers.
After Spieth sent his drive straight down the fairway, a booming voice rang out. “Hey Jordan, keep your head up. You’re hitting it pretty good.” It wasn’t the soft-spoken Pettijohn’s voice, but he didn’t think encouragement was such a bad a idea, either. What could it hurt, at this point?
So, the boy called after him: “Nice shot, Jordan!”
Stephen J. Nesbitt: snesbitt@post-gazette.com and Twitter @stephenjnesbitt.
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