Masters 2017: Jordan Spieth ready to atone for last year’s 12th hole horror at Augusta

Augusta has its ghosts. There is the spurned widow who haunts the halls of the Partridge Inn, the scorned preacher who cursed the old marketplace on Broad Street and, of course, all those furious old golfers down at Amen Corner, staring at the flags and trying to figure which way the wind is blowing.

The Corner is home to one of the meanest, most famous, little par-threes in all of golf, Golden Bell, which the locals joke has broken more men than marriage and moonshine. During the pre-tournament press conferences on Tuesday there were six questions before someone finally plucked up the courage to ask Jordan Spieth the one thing everyone wanted to hear about: how he felt now about his meltdown there last year, which cost him victory in the tournament.

Spieth is sick of talking about it but he did. The memories of what happened, he said, “will surely be there”, and already had been while he was out practicing this week. They came flooding back when he got out on the course for his first practice round. On Tuesday he played the back nine. And of course when he got to the 12th, he hit his tee shot so close that he was able to tap in his birdie putt without thinking twice.

Before he walked across Hogan bridge to do that, he turned back to the crowd and said out loud: “I really could have used that one 12 months ago.” Instead Spieth hit his first into the water. And his second. He took a quadruple bogey. So by the time he finally got to the 13th tee, his three-shot lead over Danny Willett had turned into a one-shot deficit.

Spieth says, rightly, he is proud of what he did that day, despite it all. “I felt like I fought hard. I felt like I made the right decisions and I felt like I made a lot of good swings and made a couple of bad swings like any other round of golf. We went to the 13th hole and at that point, you know, you go from leading to now you’re trying to come from behind in a tournament.” He scored birdies at the two par-fives, the 13th and 15th. The walk to the 16th tee, he says, was “one of the coolest moments I’ve ever had at the Masters”, “watching the crowd one by one, each row, rise up and really believe it with me”. But he missed his par putt on the hole “and it kind of took a bit of air out of me”.

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If Spieth is sick of the questions about what went wrong, he has obviously spent a lot of time talking about it with a few of his close friends and colleagues. He seems to have been trying to do two things. One is work out, in meticulous detail, what went wrong. “It’s just tough because there’s not much depth to the green and there’s swirling winds,” he says. “You want to take it over the bunker because it’s the safest place to either side. But that’s also where the narrowest landing spot is.” Even a small gust in the wind can spoil a good shot. “The green depth on both sides, the max green depth is probably ten paces, which, in swirling winds with the spin that a nine or eight iron generates, that can be affected by the wind going up five miles an hour just like that. That can throw it off from landing in the middle to the front edge or the back edge.”

Despite all that, Spieth wants to persuade himself that the 12th is just another hole and that his collapse there was just another bump in his career, “one of many tournaments I’ve lost given a certain performance on a hole or a stretch of holes. It happens in this game”. And that is the other bit of “therapy” that he seems to have been working on. “I feel very comfortable out there” at Augusta, he says, Which must be true, since he has finished second, first and second again the three times he has played here. And he says he is “excited about the opportunity ahead” this week: “I can go back and really tear this golf course up.”

He says that, “if it happens this year, fantastic” but “if it doesn’t happen this year, then I’ll be ready the next year to do it”. And by then, he hopes, everyone will have stopped asking him about that damned 12th.