Celebrating Masters Week with some memorable final rounds. In 2015, a guy who was supposed to be a senior on the University of Texas golf team beat the PGA All-Star team, and set records doing it.

This ran originally April 2015 in The Times and The News-Star

By TEDDY ALLEN

AUGUSTA, GA — Got a problem? Squeaky door hinge? Allergies giving you fits?

Gears slipping in the family SUV?

The suggestion from this bureau is to give Jordan Spieth a call. After the way he won the 79th Masters Tournament this weekend, there seem to be few problems the 21-year-old couldn’t solve. He could probably fix this global warming question if he can just get a decent gauge on the slope of the Earth, maybe figure out which way the grain of the grass is cut.

Spieth shot a 2-under 70 Sunday and a record-tying 270 total to win the Masters by four strokes over runners-up Phil Mickelson, winner of three Masters, and Justin Rose, winner of the 2013 U.S. Open. He had that same 4-stroke lead after Saturday’s round, but all weekend the match felt much closer than the final score indicates, and for good reasons.

One, it’s a major. Two, it’s Augusta National. And three, the PGA All-Star team kept showing up on the leaderboard and catching fire.

Each player — Mickelson and Rose and Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy and others — tried to fan some flames, and each saw their charges doused by Spieth executing gutsy irons to precise targets, by pulling off an especially delicate and timely flop shot Saturday on 18, and by draining edge-of-your-seat par putts. This was no waltz through the azalea.

His scoring total for 36 holes (130) ties the record in a major. His 54-hole scoring total set a Masters record. His opening round 64 was one off the record in a major. His Sunday birdie on 15 — he had a Masters record 28 — put him at 19-under, the lowest anyone had ever been in a Masters. And he missed setting the Masters total scoring record by a stroke; he bogeyed 18 after the war was won.

He and Woods now share that Masters scoring record, and Spieth is the second-youngest player, behind Woods, to win the tournament. Woods shot a

270 and won by 12 over runner-up Tom Kite in 1997, his first of four Masters victories and his only one on the course before it was “Tiger-proofed.” It was 6,925 yards when Tiger was 21; it’s 7,435 yards now. Spieth’s victory is as impressive as Tiger’s, but in a different way.

In ’97, Tiger left the field. This year, Spieth tried to leave the field with his record rounds, only the field wouldn’t leave. Rose bogeyed 18 and had to settle for a tie for second, but a par there would have given him a minus-15 total, a score that would have won 73 of the previous 79 Masters Tournaments — including this one, if somebody hadn’t shot 18-under.

“Jordan,” Rose said, “was too much.”

First, after Spieth’s worst iron by far of the week, there was the Saturday lob wedge on 18, a shot from a downhill lie that flirted with a bunker and ended 8-feet below a tight pin. He made the putt to grind out a par and protect the four-stroke lead after his only double bogey of the tournament had come on 17, where he’d lost two strokes.

Earlier in the week, Woods had opened with a 73 but came back with a

69 and was hanging around. Mickelson tied for low score of the day with a 67 Saturday to get back in it. And Rose birdied five of the last six holes Saturday to get into the final pairing.

Would Spieth lose a four-stroke lead on Sunday as another 21-year-old named McIlroy had done four years ago?

On the first nine Sunday, three times Spieth lost a stroke to Rose, a U.S. Open champ. And three times, he immediately got it back. It looked like an NBA game: the scoring went from a four-stroke lead to three to four to three to four and to three again in the first seven holes.

Spieth got the lead back to four on 8 and to five on 9. But nothing was over.

With Mickelson making a birdie on 13 and an eagle on 15 in the group ahead of him — and after Spieth dropped another stroke when he three-putted 12 — the eighth Texan to win the Masters and the first since Ben Crenshaw did it in 1996 went for the green on 13. He got there. And got his birdie.

“The two biggest shots I’ve ever hit in my life, coming off a three-putt,” Spieth said.

But “the key moment,” Rose said, and the final drama, was still ahead, at the par-3 16th. Rose sized up a 10-foot birdie putt. Spieth had flown the green and faced a tricky pitch on a slick green. A birdie/bogey would be a two-stroke swing and knock Spieth’s lead down to two strokes with two holes to play.

Spieth ended up 8 feet away with a sliding putt. Rose missed his birdie try and made par.

And Spieth? “I was just trying to put good speed on it, feed it out there and see the line.”

Par. Four-stroke lead. Ballgame.

“If I get it to two there, it’s game on,” Rose said. “But my putt just slipped by and he made a great 8-footer, which kept his momentum going.

Which is what he basically did all day.”

It’s what he basically did all tournament. He had an answer to every question, then added exclamation points. And he did it looking like an old-school golfer: steely-eyed but gentlemanly, sort of Crenshaw-like if Crenshaw had been balding at age 21. His swings all seemed systematic, sort of old and effortless; the only violence in his game is when he yells at his ball to go or hurry or get down. Even his fist pumps are more like little jabs. Losing to Spieth is like getting beaten by the smartest kid in class or the chess club champ.

“He’s not intimidating,” said three-time Masters champ Nick Faldo, “but he sure is demoralizing.”

And he’s the 2015 Masters Tournament champion. He’s a Dallas prodigy who’s supposed to be a senior at the University of Texas right now.

He’s a young star who became a one-man gang against a relentless field, a student of the game who, on a cool and overcast day at Augusta National, became the first wire-to-wire winner of the Masters since Raymond Floyd in 1976. Must be hard to do since that was 39 years ago, 18 years before Jordan Spieth was born.

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Ran originally April 5, 2020 in The Times and The News-Star

So far during the Current Crisis, everyone’s been really nice, nice being a relative term.

I’ve almost gotten picked off a couple of times in parking lots, but that’s business as usual. Drivers seem to think there are no rules in parking lots. Puzzling. They park in the little lined rectangles, orderly, but getting there is every driver for himself.

Be extra careful in parking lots.

Having never lived through a pandemic — hope I won’t be able to stay that when this one’s over — it’s impossible to compare eras. Maybe everyone’s nice in a pandemic and this is normal.

So good for us.

I thanked the manager at the grocery store more than two weeks ago when things were starting to get dicey and he smiled and said things had been good, that everyone was acting kind. I saw him again this week and he said the same thing.

“About one in 100 will do something,” he said, “but things have been surprisingly good.”

And he smiled when he said it and it reminded me again how much I love my grocery store folk, ever since I was a boy and the only store in town was the IGA, and Kermit Flowers was the king of it and when he wasn’t fishing at Santee Cooper, which was often, he was always there being nice and keeping shelves stocked and smiling in a grandfatherly way at my mother and extending her credit, which I didn’t know until I was grown.

I just googled Santee Cooper, sort of the Toledo Bend of South Carolina, to make sure my mind remembered it right and it did, but what popped up before the Santee Cooper lakes — Santee Cooper is more than one lake so it’s also sort of like the Robert Trent Jones Golf Trail of South Carolina too except it’s fishing instead of golf — the Santee Cooper electric company — Sigh…Santee Cooper is also sort of like the Swepco of South Carolina — popped up, and with this message:

“Santee Cooper will not be disconnecting power for delinquent bills until further notice, while we are monitoring COVID-19’s impact in South Carolina.”

See? People being nice.

But besides people being nice and smiling — I’m guessing now because most everyone’s wearing a mask — I’ve noticed something else during My First Pandemic: It’s a beautiful thing when the neighborhood goes to the dogs, to the real ones, the four-legged gifts from heaven, the guys and gals who always act the same, national crisis or natural disaster or three-error game.

Dog. God spelled backward. Coincidence?

Uhh…probably. I mean, I’m seeing a lot of selflessness here. A lot of unconditional love. A lot of living-in-the-moment. But …

Honestly, the dogs in our neighborhood, awesome as they are, are a bit off the leash. They don’t know what they’re doing because their owners haven’t taken them for many walks, until now.

For more than a year we have tried to do a daily one-hour walk through the ’hood, and we might see three dog walkers. On the weekends now there are dozens.

There’s the Confused Dog who darts this way and that in short bursts like the ball in a pinball machine. There’s the small dog with Little Dog Syndrome who barks at dogs bigger than him, which is every dog.

There’s the Great Dane who carries himself like he knows he’s a stud and the Chihuahua trying to keep up with his family of five dogs and he’s the runt, his little legs going three times faster than his bigger brothers’ and sisters’ legs. Appreciate his attitude.

There’s the Bored Dog because his owner keeps stopping to look at his cell phone like he’s expecting a call about a kidney transplant. (Leave your phone at home and be present with your dog, man …)

There’s the Basset Hound and Border Collie being walked by the same women, and a more contradictory pair she could not have chosen. The hound lags and the collie charges and the owner’s arms are stretched in front and behind, to the limit, like suddenly it’s the Middle Ages and she looks as if she’s about to be lifted up, drawn and quartered.

As it is in this case, most of the dogs are actually walking their owners.

We need dogs now, more than ever. It’s sort of ruff-ruff out here lately; hopefully the dogs will walk us through it.

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