Jordan Spieth’s opus: The dumbfounding 2017 Open Championship at Royal Birkdale

SOUTHPORT, England — For 22 minutes and 20 seconds, during a dreary summer Sunday in 2017, a small seaside town in northwest England stood still.

Except for one man, stuck on the 13th hole, who didn’t stop moving, pacing, gesticulating, negotiating, climbing, descending, believing (eh, maybe just praying) that he wasn’t about to royally screw up a major championship for the second time in 15 months.

The rest of us watched in astonishment, too busy wondering what the heck was going on to ponder the existential crisis that waited on the other side if he couldn’t wrestle his way out of this one.

Ah, yes, The Open Championship has returned to Royal Birkdale, the rota venue whose identity lies in its champions. There are no defining golf holes here, just defining victors. Peter Thomson, Arnold Palmer, Lee Trevino, Johnny Miller, Tom Watson, Ian Baker-Finch, Mark O'Meara and Padraig Harrington make up the entire list of winners. Oh, and that one man, lest we forget.

The last time we were here, we watched that man pull off a mind-numbing feat that has only dulled in history if you refuse to acknowledge it. We won’t refuse. Instead, we celebrate.

Royal Birkdale, among its list of who’s who of champions, will be forever known as the site of Jordan Spieth's opus – the dumbfoundingly wild 2017 Open Championship.

It’s an event, specifically the final six holes, that deserves the full retrospective treatment more than any golfing event in the last decade. Did you forget the blow-by-blow? Have the details gone fuzzy? Have the emotions softened? After this, you’ll answer all three questions firmly. No.

Spieth’s preamble to the 13th started shockingly stable, though the cracks had begun to line the foundation, with the crazy seeping through. Spieth’s reputation as a rogue cowboy had materialized at this point. Every cliché and folk legend is christened by a series of moments, and we were about to watch another – arguably his greatest – unfold.

To be fair, we should have seen it coming. The first three rounds went too well. Spieth shot a bogey-free 65 to share the lead on Thursday, battled adverse conditions on Friday with a 69 that put him two ahead of the pack and extended that lead by a shot with another 65 on Saturday. Matt Kuchar sat three strokes back, with no one else within five shots of the lead.

So, naturally, the rug was about to be pulled from under Spieth.

Waiting for the last tee time on a major championship Sunday is among the most difficult mental challenges in sport. Still, The Open, pushing its tee times deep into the afternoon with excess daylight to play with, is the most grueling. Spieth spent most of the wait thinking about one shot. His first. The opening hole at Royal Birkdale is considered one of the hardest on the rota. Out of bounds lurks right, and on this particular day, the wind was ripping from left to right.

Spieth, we would learn later, has a penchant for missing well right. That potential hung in his mind. So as his ball curved with a tight draw toward the left edge of the fairway, Spieth thought he had cleared the first hurdle. But links golf tends to turn a good shot into a terrible one with a single bounce, as it did to Spieth’s. The ball careened left off a hump and into tall fescue. Bogey.

He dropped another shot with a three-putt on the third and again after a three-putt on the fourth.

After three days of wonderful, clean golf, the lead was gone.

It’s now time to address the subtext that hung over Spieth at this time and the history he looked ripe to repeat. Less than two years earlier, Spieth produced a jarring collapse matched only a few peers in pro golf. He led by five shots as he made the turn at the 2016 Masters, only to lose it all in an hour. He put two balls in Rae’s Creek at the 12th, attempted valiantly to fight back, lost by three to Danny Willett and, to make matters worse, had to be the one to put the jacket on Willett’s shoulders.

It was The Golden Child’s first scar – and a rather large one.

“I thought I have a reputation as being able to close, but I was hesitant in saying ‘majors’, to myself, because there was a lot of – I put a lot of pressure on myself unfortunately, and not on purpose, before the round today, just thinking this is the best opportunity that I've had since the '16 Masters," Spieth said Sunday night at Royal Birkdale.

“And if it weren't to go my way today, then all I'm going to be questioned about and thought about and murmured about is in comparison to that, and that adds a lot of pressure to me. After four holes it was even more so.”

Spieth lived in that headspace for the next eight holes, arriving at the 13th as he left the fourth: tied with Kuchar. Then came "The Moment" and the start of a fever dream from which we’re still recovering.

Twenty-two minutes and 20 seconds of pure electricity.

It begins with his drive. A ball that went so far right that The R&A’s rules officials never considered whether where it ended up should be considered out of bounds. Spieth looked as if a car crash was playing out a few feet in front of him, holding his hands to his head as his ball sailed further offline than any of them all week.

The charm of Royal Birkdale as a championship venue lies in the dunes that line both sides of most holes, creating a natural amphitheater that golfers play through, rather than over. Only the wildest tee shots threaten to fall near them, much less land in them. Spieth’s ball drifted over them and nestled into the backside of a steep bank, some 100 yards right off the middle of the fairway.

This is where the hysterics and frenetic lore really start.

The ball was nearly lost. A group of fans was insistent that they saw it drop into a swale of thick fescue much closer to the fairway. It wasn’t until several minutes of searching that the situation crystallized. Spieth’s ball had actually hit a spectator in the head and bounded to the other side of the dunes, far from where everyone was looking.

Spieth quickly decided the ball was unplayable where it sat. But how do you proceed? None of the options were palatable. Spieth could go back and re-tee, though a double bogey or worse was waiting to happen. He could drop within two club lengths of the ball, but that would keep him on a steep bank with little chance of advancing it out of the cabbage he was already in.

That’s when a third option emerged. Royal Birkdale’s driving range sat some 50 yards behind Spieth. Could he drop there?

First, he needed to figure out whether the driving range was in bounds. It was, mostly as an oversight. Nobody could hit it that far right, right? The possibility never occurred to the rules officials. So it was never deemed out of bounds. So yes, by rule, Spieth was able to drop his ball as far back as he wanted, including on the driving range, as long as it was in line between the ball’s original position and the hole. The only problem: A group of equipment trucks was parked right where he needed to be. Now what? Well, Spieth “dropped” there, took a one-stroke penalty, then received free relief from the trucks.

Throughout the ordeal, Spieth was delivering on the Spieth Experience™, frantically scaling up and down the dunes, weaving between equipment trucks and asserting his position to the rules officials. Meanwhile, Kuchar sat waiting on the fairway, and the rest of the field pressed on with no idea what was happening. Rory McIlroy made eagle up ahead; Brooks Koepka faded. The broadcast showed some of it, but there was a magnet on Spieth. They kept returning to see where he was, what he was doing, and how the heck he planned to get out of this predicament. It’s as entertaining as a 20-minute stretch of zero golf swings could ever be.

When the ball was finally back in play, Spieth and caddie Michael Greller deliberated over the line and distance. Spieth thought he was 270 yards away and needed to hit a 3-wood. Greller believed it was only 230 yards and a 3-iron. Greller’s assertiveness compelled Spieth to take his advice. It worked. Spieth roped an iron just short of the green and got up and down from a precarious position, saving a bogey that somehow felt like momentum gained, even as he dropped a shot behind Kuchar. An all-world save from the world’s preeminent scrambler. Escaping from disaster and limiting the damage in a way he was unable to in Augusta.

“I told (broadcaster David Feherty walking up to the next hole, did not use it on the air, but I said, ‘You know, it's a little-known fact that God had two sons; it just took the other one a little longer to come back,’” Roger Maltbie told Golf Digest in a 2017 oral history of the round.

There was still a little longer to go.

"Go get that."

Those three words have taken on a life of their own. For a certain subset of Spieth fans, this moment is more iconic than the Houdini act at the 13th. That hole saved his tournament. He won the tournament on another.

Kuchar hit a decent shot into the par-3 14th, but faced a certain par. Spieth produced much more, hitting a perfect 6-iron that nearly dropped for an ace. The immediate birdie brought him back even with Kuchar. Game on.

The decisive blow came at the par-5 15th. Both players were on the green after their second shots. Spieth just crept onto the front edge of the green, 50 feet from the hole. Kuchar found a pot bunker, but hit his third within 5 feet of the hole for a likely birdie. Spieth would have settled for a two-putt to keep things level heading to the 16th. Holing it worked much better. Spieth rammed in the lengthy eagle putt and didn’t bother to walk after it.

Instead, he stared down Greller, pointed to the hole and said: “Go get that.”

“I must have skipped to the hole to grab it, I was so excited. You can see me in the background. I laughed out loud when that putt went in,” Greller told Golf Digest.

Spieth said after that he would redo the moment if he could, replacing it with an iconic Tiger Woods-esque fist pump, but Spieth’s celebration was iconic in its own way.

“That is almost beyond belief,” said Dougie Donnelly, the BBC play-by-play announcer.

Spieth followed it with lengthy birdie conversions on the 16th and 17th, both outside 20 feet, to leave no doubt. The type of putts we look back on with nostalgia when discussing Spieth. Kuchar played the final five holes in 1 under. Spieth played the same stretch in 5 under.

“The 30-footers were 2-footers to me,” he said.

The winning margin was three strokes, the same lead he began the day with. Spieth snatched his third major championship and first Open Championship.

“This is as much of a high as I've ever experienced in my golfing life,” Spieth said in his winning press conference.

Remembering this version of Spieth comes with melancholy. Now 32, Spieth can provide a facsimile of his old self. His misses are just about as wild. His ability to dazzle is still there. Yet it doesn’t come with the frequency or veracity. The putts seem hoped, not willed, into the hole.

There was optimism at the start of 2026 that Spieth would rediscover his vintage form. He told me in December that he hadn’t been fully healthy for the last decade, continually making half-measures to address a wrist injury that wouldn’t go away. It’s hard to step off the hamster wheel of professional golf, but sometimes that’s needed. Spieth finally did that last fall. He had surgery and said he has fully recovered.

“I haven't swung it well for the better part of 10 years, which is wild,” Spieth said in December. “... I shouldn’t have any excuses not to be better.”

Spieth was insistent then, and remains so now, that he has a long-term focus. This is about the next five years, not just this year. But he’s also said he’s “close” on repeat this year. Every part of his game feels good, but in any given week, one part gives way.

At the Masters, he had the second-best approach play performance of his major championship career, but putted terribly on greens he knows like the back of his hand. He putted incredibly at The Genesis Invitational and RBC Heritage, a pair of comfy venues for Spieth. Yet he was held back by wild weeks off the tee. He’s without a top-10 finish this season, a drought that extends back to June of 2025.

It’s a microcosm of Spieth’s nine-year sojourn outside of superstardom. The 2017 Open Championship was the peak. He’s won only twice since that week at Royal Birkdale. He hasn’t finished a season inside the top 15 of the Official World Golf Ranking since.

Can he get back there? It’s a question pondered endlessly in recent years. It becomes harder as missed opportunities rack up. Then again, crazier things have happened. And they’ve happened here at Royal Birkdale on a dreary summer Sunday in Northwest England, when the heavens opened and a shooting star streaked across the horizon.

Maybe another will come back around.