Jordan Spieth is not a grillmaster. There isn’t much time in his schedule as a professional golfer to become great at a hobby; he rates himself “probably a 15-handicap” when it comes to smoking meat.
But spending time over the charcoals last fall got him thinking about a lesson he could take into improving his golf swing.
“I was smoking chicken in the fall on a big smoker I have and it got up to 155 quickly and then takes a while,” Spieth recalled Monday. “I was like, man, this kind of feels like — I was working on (swing) stuff and I was — it kind of feels like what I’m trying to do in the swing. I go play and it’s a little bit out of the barriers that we call sustainable. Kind of outside the margins that we call OK.
“… I don’t know how — if it’s that way for everybody and just seemed that way for me right now where, you know, it’s there, it’s there. It’s like close. It’s matching what I want to do. It feels good and it’s producing right stuff.”
Spieth is beginning to see the results of some stop-start swing progress, and though he doesn’t have a top-10 finish on the PGA Tour this year to show for it, he’s still going to be a popular face at the PGA Championship this week at Aronimink Golf Club.
His T12 at the Masters and T18 at the Cadillac Championship two weeks ago could be signs that the three-time major winner is able to contend at majors again, with the PGA Championship the only one missing from his resume for the career Grand Slam.
While admitting “it would be amazing” to wrap up the feat and become the seventh player to achieve the modern Grand Slam, Spieth said he can’t let that affect his preparation.
“As far as the career Grand Slam, this tournament’s always highlighted. If I can win one more tournament in my life, it would obviously be this one for that reason,” Spieth told reporters. “But the easiest way to do that is to not try to, in a weird way, you know. Just go out and get ready for the first hole, get a good game plan in and attack it the way it needs to be attacked.
“My game has been getting better and better. It’s plenty good to have a chance to win. It’s about working my way into contention.”
Gene Sarazen, Ben Hogan, Gary Player, Jack Nicklaus, Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy are the six who’ve collected a Masters, U.S. Open, Open Championship and PGA Championship in their careers. Arnold Palmer and Tom Watson were a PGA Championship shy of the milestone, as Spieth is now.
The sport saw 59 years go by with just one player, Woods, added to that list between Nicklaus finishing the feat in 1966 and McIlroy winning his long-sought Masters in 2025. The Northern Irishman went more than 10 years between his previous major title and his first green jacket, so Spieth did not want to draw a comparison.
“My situation was certainly different than his at Augusta, so I think that was unique to him,” Spieth said of McIlroy. “Rory’s was obviously a very unique final round and his history of having led there and stuff like that, so I don’t think it would feel similar.
“For me, it would just be like, look, I’ve been kind of — I went on a run of feeling like I was contending or having a good chance of contending at every major for a number of years and then it was periodic, and I feel like I’m close to being able to go back to doing that again. So I just want to give myself a chance.”
Spieth won the Masters and U.S. Open back-to-back in 2015, then added the Open Championship in 2017. He has just seven top-10s at majors ever since, including a T3 behind a victorious Brooks Koepka at the 2019 PGA Championship.
