Can 16-year-old repeat performance at Byron?
Sports debuts don’t get any better than Stephen Strasburg’s first outing as a major league pitcher Tuesday night.
Coming with much less hype — but perhaps more astonishing — was the performance last month of 16-year-old golfer Jordan Spieth. At the Byron Nelson Championship, the Dallas native not only became the sixth-youngest player to make the cut in a PGA Tour event, he contended for the title.
At a level at which many college All-Americans find themselves overmatched, Spieth, a junior at Jesuit High School, was within three strokes of the lead on the back nine before fading to a tie for 16th place.
When Spieth tees off in the St. Jude Classic in Memphis on Thursday, is it reasonable to expect a similar performance?
“I’m just going to do the same thing that I said for the Byron, that you don’t enter a tournament unless you think you can win,” Spieth told reporters Wednesday. “It always comes down to the guys putting the best in the end.”
For perspective on what Spieth accomplished three weeks ago, consider that it took Tiger Woods eight tries before he made the cut in a PGA event, doing it at Augusta as a 19-year-old college freshman.
Spieth compares to Woods in other ways. He picked up a club for the first time at age 18 months. Last summer, Spieth won the U.S. Junior Amateur at the same age (15) as Woods when he won his first of three.
Since playing in the Nelson, it has been a whirlwind for Spieth, who returned to school, finishing exams last week. He also played in an amateur tournament in Arizona and posed for photos for a national golf magazine. On Monday in Memphis, Spieth shot 72-68 – 140, failing to qualify for the U.S. Open. He tied for 39th in a field of 120, but only 12 spots were available.
“I had four days of normal school to make up, the eight straight days that I missed before that, which was not fun,” Spieth said. “I just got off of exams this past week. And you know, I couldn’t even tell you exactly who — what kind of interviews or photo shoots or whatever.”
