AUSTIN, Texas — All in all, it wasn’t the worst day Jordan Spieth has ever had.
He did avoid stepping on a scary-looking garter snake slithering across the middle of the sixth fairway.
He made a couple of new friends behind the seventh green when his tee shot flew the green, hit one gentleman in the chest, ricocheted off and smashed the cellphone of another bystander.
He made enough mistakes in his second-round match that he’s got plenty of incentive to work on his game before his Friday tee time in the World Golf Championship-Dell Technologies Match Play at Austin Country Club.
That said, it was pretty much a miserable day for the former Texas Longhorn great, who, despite not having his A game, managed to stay in the thick of things in his showdown with a relative unknown in Taylor Montgomery.
Once the back-and-forth match ended on the 17th green, when the Tour rookie sank his 6-foot, 4-inch birdie putt for a 2 and 1 victory — his sixth birdie of the day and second in the last three holes — Spieth’s day was over. He quickly jogged up the bordering hill, hopped in a golf cart with his caddie and whisked away without a word.
Understandably, practice beckoned.
Maybe that’s part of a new strategy for the normally loquacious Spieth. After holing out a miraculous, 85-foot flop shot on No. 15 in his 4 and 3 victory over Mackenzie Hughes on Wednesday, he said he was trying to be a little less chatty on the course.
Talk-show hosts aren’t as gabby as this guy.
“Yeah, I’ve been trying to work on just kind of hitting and playing and not talking so much. I did an OK job of that,” Spieth said Wednesday. “I would say I didn’t do a great job of that on my last hole. I was like, what am I doing hitting it over here, and then I ended up holing the shot. It doesn’t necessarily affect how I play, but it is a lot less energy used up.”
He’ll need to conserve all the energy he can.
But if he was in no mood to chat, Montgomery sure didn’t mind conversation about his moment in the sun. This marks the first appearance at the WGC-Dell event for the towering 6-3, 215-pound athlete who is ranked 57th in the world despite playing in just 18 PGA Tour events.
But he’s got game, he’s remarkably consistent and usually a solid putter if the wind isn’t gusting to 30 mph as it was Thursday. That wind made even trickier players’ reads on greens because they were slower than your normal DMV line.
So how does this win rate?
“I mean, high up…
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