Jun 18, 2025
J.J. Spaun celebrates alongside his caddie, Mark Carens, after making a birdie putt on the 18th hole to win the U.S. Open at Oakmont Country Club on Sunday in Oakmont, Pa. (AP photo)
OAKMONT, Pa. — J.J. Spaun faced his first big moment on a big stage in golf and he wasn’t ready for it.
He didn’t even have a club in his hand.
Spaun was a 26-year-old PGA Tour rookie at Torrey Pines in 2017. He was not eligible for the pro-am and wanted to see the North course when he came across an enormous crowd that could mean only one thing: Tiger Woods.
He was walking along the edge of the fairway when Amy Bartlett, a Nike representative, spotted him and offered a chance to meet Woods. Spaun shook his head and took a step back. Bartlett laughed and dragged him over.
“I was too scared,” Spaun said a few weeks later. “I didn’t want to bug him.”
Woods was gracious, as he often was with young players.
For Spaun to imagine then that their names would be on the same piece of hardware — a silver U.S. Open trophy — would have been hard to fathom.
“I never thought I would be here holding this trophy,” he said in the Sunday twilight at soaked Oakmont during the trophy presentation. “I always had aspirations and dreams. I never knew what my ceiling was.”
In March, Spaun was in the interview room after his playoff loss when he looked up at a television and saw for the first time his tee shot on the island-green 17th at the TPC Sawgrass that didn’t quite reach land. “It’s floating,” he said as he watched the golf ball in the air.
Far more fun was looking up in the scoring room at Oakmont for his first look at the 65-foot birdie putt on the 18th that capped off a wet-and-wild finish to the 125th U.S. Open.
Equally memorable, if not more important, was standing on the tee at the 314-yard 17th hole, remembering the cut driver he hit during the practice round and envisioning a repeat, which is what he delivered. The drive settled 18 feet behind the hole for a two-putt birdie that gave him the lead and ultimately made him a major champion.
Where he goes from here is less interesting than how Spaun reached this point. He didn’t have the easiest path. He just worked as hard as anyone. And he always kept going.
In his second year playing on the Canadian Tour, Spaun missed the cut in all but one of his seven tournaments. The next year he won, getting him to the Korn Ferry Tour, and then getting him to the PGA Tour.
“I think it’s just perseverance. I’ve always kind of battled through whatever it may be to kind of get to where I needed to be and get to what I wanted,” he said. “I’ve had slumps at every level. I went back and said: ‘You’ve done this before. You’ve been down before. You got out of it.’
“There’s a little pattern, so hopefully I don’t do that pattern again.”
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AP golf: https://apnews.com/hub/golf
OKLAHOMA CITY — Jerry West and Elgin Baylor did it often. Kyrie Irving and LeBron James did it a couple of times. …
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