Jordan Spieth stood 70 yards from the pin on the par-4 11th at Aronimink during Friday’s second round of the PGA Championship. The hole was cut five yards from the right edge of the green. Five yards of green in front of it. A wrong shot goes long, or short, or just… nowhere good.
He hit a sawed-off knockdown wedge — low, drawing, dialled into a five-yard window — that landed on an upslope short of the hole and stopped stone dead.
Justin Thomas called it “incredible” on Twitter and added that there were “maybe five people on earth” capable of pulling off that shot. Michael Kim went further: Spieth was, in his opinion, the only player in the entire PGA Championship field who could have executed it.
Spieth himself? “A top-two shot I’ve ever hit on tour.”
What Made It So Hard
The physics of the shot are straightforward enough — land a high-lofted wedge short of the hole, into an upslope, with enough spin to kill the pace. Simple. Except the margin of error was essentially zero. Hit it a touch too hard and it rockets long. Miss the upslope and you’ve got a full run-out.
Spieth’s description of his thought process is the most revealing thing about it: “I just tried to throw my hands into the ground, and hit a low driving draw. It’s nice because it’s one of those shots where you can’t get technical with it. You just have to feel it.”
You can’t get technical with it. You just have to feel it.
That’s the thing about shots like this — they don’t live in the realm of mechanics. They live in instinct honed over tens of thousands of hours of practice. Spieth has been inventing weird short-game shots since he was a teenager. This was just the latest one.
The Bigger Picture
Spieth didn’t win the PGA Championship — Aaron Rai took the Wanamaker Trophy by three shots. But the shot on 11 was the moment of the week. The one people will still be talking about long after the leaderboard is forgotten.
That’s the ballsy part. Spieth had safer options. He chose the one that required him to be one of five people on earth. And he pulled it off.
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