Michaux: Green Jacket will soften blow for Jordan Spieth

Food probably doesn’t taste as good. Sleep isn’t as restful. Waking moments are likely interrupted by a memory loop of the 12th hole.

Jordan Spieth understood what his immediate future would feel like before he ever left Augusta National. When you measure your career in major titles and historical milestones, the ones that get away are never easy to forget. The loser’s hangover is worse than any winner who goes on a celebratory bender.

“This one will hurt,” Spieth admitted. “It will take a while.”

Spieth will never forget what happened Sunday at Augusta National. He had a five-shot lead with nine to play and he was poised to become the youngest player to win three majors and tie Ben Hogan, Byron Nelson and Seve Ballesteros with a second green jacket before he’s even 23. That kind of opportunity doesn’t happen all the time – even for a kid who’s never known what it’s like to not hold a lead in the final pairing in three career Masters Sundays.

So the short term has to be painful. But the long term? Spieth will be fine.

Why so certain? Because he’s already got a green jacket hanging in his locker forever at Augusta.

“He won it last year, so I don’t feel too sorry for him,” Rory McIlroy said when he found out about Spieth’s Amen Corner demise.

McIlroy knows more than most about the value of such possessions. He suffered his own Masters meltdown on the same holes where Spieth spit this Masters away. McIlroy was only 21 in 2011 when he blew a three-shot lead at the turn with a gruesome run of triple-bogey-double on 10, 11 and 12 that left him bent over in anguish on the 13th tee.

The difference? McIlroy didn’t already have a green jacket of his own. Five years later, he still doesn’t. The Masters haunts him as the only jewel in the career slam that has eluded him. The scars reopen a little every year when McIlroy returns to Augusta.

He admitted as much when he left Sunday.

“I haven’t got the job done when I needed to and I don’t think that’s anything to do with my game, I think that’s more me mentally and I’m trying to deal with the pressure of it and the thrill of the achievement if it were to happen,” he said. “I think that’s the thing that’s really holding me back.

“Yeah, this is the one that I haven’t won and this is the one I want to win more than anything else. I won a claret jug; I want to win more. I won a Wanamaker (PGA trophy). I won the U.S. Open. But this is the one that I haven’t.”

There is something to be said for playing with house money. It still stings when you blow it, but they can’t take your nest egg away if it’s not on the table.

This is where Spieth’s collapse – however shocking it was to see – deviates from past Masters disasters like McIlroy, Greg Norman, Curtis Strange, Ed Sneed or Scott Hoch. Whether big or small in their stature and failure, none of them ever got a peek inside the Champions Locker Room. Their lost chances still haunt each of them in one way or another.

Davis Love III, a two-time Masters runner-up, can certainly attest. Seeing what happened to Spieth picks the scabs of his own career heartaches.

“Every time I see something like that I think back to the ’95 U.S. Open,” Love said Wednesday at Harbour Town. “I had a putt to win and then I had a putt to get in the playoff and then I made the putt to not be in the playoff. I’ll never forget. I bogeyed the last two holes and I could have won the U.S. Open. You never forget it. Just maybe you think you’re never going to have another chance. At 22 (Spieth is) going to have a lot more chances. I’m sure he’s looking at it differently. It doesn’t matter if he wins five Masters and five of every other major and breaks Jack’s record, he’s still going to look back and go, ‘I could have won that one.’ He’ll never get over it.”

I’m sure Jack Nicklaus looks back at one or two of his 19 career runner-ups in majors and thinks, “I could have won that one.” I’m sure Tiger Woods sees the names of Rich Beem, Michael Campbell, Trevor Immelman and Y.E. Yang on the trophies he’s held and thinks, “I should have beaten them.” I’m sure Arnold Palmer thinks back on his blown leads in 1959 and ’61 and believes, “I should have won four Masters in a row.”

Spieth will return next week at his home-state Texas Open and will share how his food tastes and if his sleep’s improving. In the meantime, his caddie, Michael Greller, gave a glimpse of the team mentality in a heartfelt Facebook post.

“The 2016 Masters stung. ... But don’t feel sorry or sad for us,” Greller wrote. “We won’t get stuck in this moment, nor should you. We will work harder, fight harder and be better for it. We will bounce back as we have done many times.”

What’s done is done. Spieth can’t get a mulligan at No. 12 or erase the unsightly quadruple bogey from the permanent record. But he can heed the lesson of one college basketball coach, who cited Psalm 30:5 after his team blew a commanding late lead and got eliminated from the NCAA Tournament.

“Weeping may endure for a night, but joy comes in the morning.”

There will be other joys in Spieth’s career. One terrible, horrible, no good, very bad hole won’t stop that.

Spieth’s last words before he got into his car Sunday night and drove out Magnolia Lane on were fashioned in a little gallows humor.

“They just told me I can’t take my green jacket with me,” he reportedly said.

The good news is they can’t take his green jacket away. That record-setting 2015 triumph can offset a multitude of sins in the memory bank. In the long run, that will make all the difference as he moves on and leaves the 2016 Masters heartbreak in his rearview mirror.