Meltdowns on course test mettle

It is a fact of golf from which no professional is immune.

Public failure is inevitable. Sometimes on a major scale. Occasionally on the biggest stage that nobody is likely to forget.

Jordan Spieth had no place to hide last year when he hit two balls in the water on Augusta National Golf Club’s shortest hole and gave up the last of what had been a five-shot lead over Danny Willett just three holes earlier. The gallery at Amen Corner watched in uncomfortable silence, holding their collective breath in stunned disbelief. A worldwide television audience was glued to the scene like a NASCAR crowd watching a pileup at Talladega.

“I can’t imagine that was fun for anyone to experience, other than maybe Danny’s team and those who are fans of him,” Spieth said in the hazy aftermath last April.

Spieth cited “a lapse of concentration on 12” and perhaps getting too cautious thinking about parring in after a “dream-come-true front nine.” But those painful minutes standing alone with his caddie in the most exposed corner of the golf world aren’t easy to brush off.

“Big picture, this one will hurt,” Spieth admitted. “It will take a while.”

They say time heals all wounds, and Spieth believes what happened to him at the Masters is “a 365-day thing” that he will bury one way or another by the end of this week.

Sometimes it can be that simple. Sometimes not.

“With Jordan, he’s won the Masters already, so he’s got that monkey off his back,” said Ernie Els, a four-time major winner who knows a thing or two about monkeys at Augusta National. “If he’s never won the Masters, I think that would have been a mental scar. But I don’t think that it is now.”

Having already won the Masters the year before, Spieth does possess the greatest tonic to easing the hangover of letting another one get away. That wasn’t the case for guys like Ed Sneed, who blew a three-shot lead with three to play in 1979, or perennial hard-luck Augusta cases like Greg Norman or Tom Weiskopf.

It wasn’t the case for Rory McIlroy either, having imploded in spectacular fashion on Nos. 10, 11 and 12 in 2011. He won the U.S. Open for his major breakthrough two months later, but he still bears the scars at Augusta, which remains the missing piece of his career slam.

“Of course it hurt and it still hurts,” McIlroy said. “Of course it does. But at the same time I’ve moved on and I’ve won majors and I’ve made a pretty good career for myself since that. But it still … I think back and think about what could have been and if that hadn’t have went wrong I wouldn’t have to answer the questions that I have to answer at this time of the year every year until I win one. There’s a lot of that stuff that goes through your head, but you learn from it, you move on, and hopefully when I get myself in that position again at Augusta I’m going to do better.”

Every major champion responded to questions about past failures with the same two words – move on. It’s a simple solution not so easily executed – even if the stakes of past failures weren’t as high as the Masters.

Charl Schwartzel, the 2011 Masters winner, suffered a late collapse in his native South African Open in 2015 – an event he still desperately wants to win.

“I had a four-shot lead with five holes to go or something like that,” he said. “I was cruising. I mean, I thought ahead. … It disappeared in front of my eyes. I made double on 16, bogey on 17, parred 18 and lost in the first playoff hole to a birdie. That was very difficult to swallow.”

Schwartzel said the only remedy was moving on.

“If you can’t get over it, then you’re never going to get over it,” he said. “You’ve got to put it behind you. It takes time. It’s easier said than done. But time heals, heals a lot of things. But the quicker you stop thinking about it and the quicker people stop talking about it, you get over it and you’ve got to make new memories. I’ve replaced it with good memories again. I’ve won three times since.”

Rebuilding positive memories is hard to think about in the moment when everything is crashing. The flood of emotions that wash over a player run the gamut as he stands in the middle of it feeling like Jean van de Velde with his trousers rolled up in the Barry Burn.

“It’s a matter of being angry with yourself for messing up, and then also you’re really sort of embarrassed at what you’ve just done,” Schwartzel said.

For great champions, experiencing a taste of shame and humility is like swallowing bile. Even the best golfers can feel like everybody is looking at them and snickering at their failures before they can retreat to the locker room and get away from the course.

“When you’re the middle of the little laugh, the joke, it’s kind of tough to take,” said Els, who felt the awkward stares all around him after six-putting the opening hole of last year’s Masters to effectively end his chances before he started. “But you’ve got to suck it up and move on. You’re not always going to be a winner. You’re going to be a loser sometimes and you have to be able to handle it.”

It’s the handling of it that distinguishes the rank-and-file from the champions. Henrik Stenson, who won last year’s British Open in a Sunday duel with Phil Mickelson, said he treats his “little bag of heartbreaks” compiled over a career as motivation.

“Of course it’s going to sting for awhile, but you’ve just got to get back up and try again – that’s the nature of it,” Stenson said. “But I think it still motivates you. If you’re competitive, then you’re going to take that as fuel to try and become better and … learn from your mistakes and do the right things when you need to in the future.”

Ultimately, failure often proves to be golf’s most valuable teachable moments.

“Just got to keep plugging and accept it and understand what went on there and then move on,” Els said. “What happened there, let that be a lesson. Don’t do it again, and if you do, don’t make another mistake on top of it.”

“It’s all learning experiences,” said Curtis Strange, who suffered his worst career moment at Augusta when he hit in the water at Nos. 13 and 15 to blow his best chance to win a green jacket in 1985 but went on to win U.S. Opens in 1988-89. “You don’t learn the first thing when you win. It’s too easy. You learn when you lose and you screw up and you say, ‘I did this or did that or felt like this or made a mistake.’ Some of it is physical, and you are going to make physical mistakes. But a lot of it’s mental, which you can learn not to repeat.”

Spieth, at 23 years old, has checked most of the boxes already in golf’s version of the stages of grief. He accepted what happened last year. He’s rebuilt better memories, winning at Colonial, Australia and Pebble Beach since last year’s Masters. He returned to the scene of the pain in December to exorcise “the demon” with a couple of casual birdies on the 12th hole. Now he just has to face it in competition again to officially move on.

“It will be nice once this year’s finished,” Spieth said.

McIlroy can certainly relate to that thinking when returning after past indignity at Augusta National, although Spieth has one huge advantage over him – a green jacket.

“In 2012, I couldn’t wait for the Masters to start and I couldn’t wait for it to finish,” McIlroy said. “I couldn’t wait for it to start because I wanted redemption and I wanted a chance to prove myself again. So that was a little bit of a different mindset. But everyone is different, I guess. Jordan still has an amazing record at Augusta. … He can console himself by opening up his wardrobe and seeing one hanging there. It’s a little bit different.”