PONTE VEDRA BEACH, Fla. – It wasn’t until the end of his press conference that J.J. Spaun finally saw a replay of his ill-fated shot that doomed his longshot bid to win this Players Championship. He paused his answer to fix his eyes on one of the TVs in the back of the media center.
“Can I just watch it?” he asked. “I haven’t seen it.”
“Look how high it is!”
“It’s just floating!”
A half hour later, he was still in disbelief.
The Players had gone an extra day, to a three-hole aggregate playoff between two players who might be only a year apart in age but whose careers represented a wider gulf: Spaun, 34, who last summer thought his playing days were coming to an end, and the 35-year-old McIlroy, whose outstanding goals would cement him as one of the game’s all-time greats.
The 9 a.m. restart presented a challenge unlike any the players had faced all week. The warm, steamy weather was gone, replaced by bitter cold and ferocious gusts that opened eyes, reddened faces and introduced luck. The wind howled out of a different direction than just 12 hours earlier, rendering any prior knowledge useless. And the nerves? They were the highest they’d been all week, with thousands of fans returning for a made-for-TV spectacle with actual stakes.
Spaun arrived on the 16th tee feeling as though he’d finally reached the end of his never-ending week. He hadn’t slept well the previous two nights, when he held a share of the lead at golf’s fifth major, but warming up he didn’t feel uncomfortable or anxious or stressed. For the past few years, as his career plateaued, he has started to feel the pull of home – of feeling content with his achievements and his young family, of feeling guilty after spending just a single week with them this year. This week, he’d already delayed three flights home, looking and sounding like a man in need of a comforting hug.
But that was for later Monday. Spaun was on the brink of a career-altering moment. Never a world-beater as a junior, a former walk-on in college, he has never viewed himself as anything more than a serviceable pro. Sure, he won in San Antonio in 2022, but there’s been plenty of one-hit wonders throughout the long history of the Tour. Last year, when he was well outside the top-125 cutoff with only a few events remaining, Spaun felt at peace with what he’d accomplished. Eight years on Tour. That one win. Lifelong friendships formed. About $12 million in the bank.
“I didn’t know what my ceiling was,” he said. “I still guess I don’t know what it is.”
Rory McIlroy won The Players Championship in a Monday finish over J.J. Spaun that featured three dynamic playoff holes at the TPC Sawgrass, a harsh wind and very little drama.
Spaun had already learned plenty about himself this week. A few years ago, he took the 54-hole lead in the playoff opener in Memphis, by far the biggest spot of his career to that point. He should have been fortified by his breakthrough victory just four months earlier, but he admitted now that he wasn’t prepared. He shot 78 in that final round, tumbling all the way outside the top 40, and felt a sting of disappointment he never had experienced before.
“I had a lot of scar tissue from that,” he said. “I didn’t want to have that feeling of, not just defeat, but, like, crawling-into-a-hole-and-dying kind of feeling because it was so embarrassing. I was just afraid to feel embarrassed again.”
And so, over the past few years, Spaun found himself shying away from the moment and the spotlight and the pressure. Not consciously, of course, but rather something deeper, letting the anxiety overcome him, allowing mistakes to compound and being satisfied with performances that were often good but not quite good enough.
A mini-breakthrough came earlier this year at Sony, where he hung tough on the back nine and wound up a shot shy of the playoff. And it showed up again Sunday at The Players, where he dropped three shots behind on the back nine but rallied by playing his last five holes in 2 under, in the biggest pressure cooker of his life, to crash the playoff with McIlroy.
Spaun: Was committed to shot on 17, hit ‘too good’
After coming up short in The Players playoff vs. Rory McIlroy, J.J. Spaun explains what went wrong on a 17th hole tee shot he felt committed to, as well as the disappointment in coming up short.
“I was like, OK, don’t be afraid of the moment. Enjoy it,” he said. “This is what every great athlete talks about being in the moment and having the opportunity to win and wanting the ball. Well, I want the ball. Even though I didn’t win, I took a lot from that.”
McIlroy arrived on the 16th tee in a similar frame of mind. He had won 42 times around the globe, and yet he awoke at 3 a.m. Monday and…
