Players 2025: Jordan Spieth, golf's folk hero, rides the wave of chaos to opening 70

PONTE VEDRA BEACH — Here are three possible lead paragraphs for this story about Jordan Spieth, who on Thursday at the Players Championship lived up to (and perhaps beyond) his reputation for chaotic stretches of golf, with two chip-ins for eagle, a water-logged double bogey, and a heady admixture of golf that you might call beautiful and ugly and brilliant and dumb, depending on when you blinked. Pick your favorite:

1. In the aftermath of his opening-round 70, placing him just outside the top 10 at two under, Jordan Spieth faced the press and made the extraordinary claim that he prefers "boring golf." There's no doubting his sincerity, but on some unconscious level, you can't shake the feeling that this spiritual heir to Seve Ballesteros is deluding himself.

2. In the moments when his game reaches the heights of extraordinary madness, as on the front nine Thursday, Jordan Spieth's scorecards can best be understood as a metaphorical depiction of a great tempest—the sudden electricity of the birdie-eagle start, the deceptively placid par-par representing the eye of the storm, and the tumultuous, terrifying five-hole conclusion of double bogey, bogey, eagle, bogey, birdie, and nothing remotely normal, like a par, in sight.

3. In the 1982 film “The World According to Garp,” Robin Williams, playing the title character, says "sometimes you can have a whole lifetime in a day." And though the film hit theaters a full 11 years before Jordan Spieth was born, on a day like Thursday you still get the sense this quote was about one of his rounds.

Maybe none of those are sufficient. One sign of a timeless entertainer is when people expect a certain level of eye-popping volatility, and you routinely surprise them anyway (even house media has a term for it: The Jordan Spieth Experience). Spieth as chaotic artist has been a trope for a long time, but it persists precisely because of days like these when he trumps the mania of his own past.

There are larger questions about Spieth that drive the discourse, such as, "how is his wrist?" and "will he ever return to top form?" He said his wrist felt fine, and we don't know if Peak Spieth is ever coming back, but those questions paled to the spectacle of that larger-than-life front nine.

He played the back first, and the day began auspiciously on the 10th hole with an approach to a foot that he tapped in for birdie, but the first sense of the wild undercurrents appeared on the par-5 11th, when he holed out for eagle from the sand:

Does anybody hole out more than this man? Is there any explanation beyond "magic" for a phenomenon that has never been believable, but happens anyway? Will we be able to explain this to future generations in any adequate way?

Two more pars, and then the pendulum swung back, as it always seems to do for Spieth lately. He drove into the water on 14, suffered a double, then gave away the last of his strokes on 15 when he couldn't go up and down from 41 feet. At which point—of course—he holed out for eagle again:

A three-putt on the island green? Sure. A concluding birdie on 18? Absolutely. With that, Spieth finished his first nine with a 34.

I caught him on the second hole, the light breeze not quite enough to disturb the tops of the tall palms, and the last vestiges of morning dew still clinging to the grass. Spieth marched to the green in his teal shirt, dark blue pants, and white hat, shoes, and gloves. He made birdie there with an 11-footer, said hello to a group of eager kids who had been ignored by the previous groups, and proceeded to make four straight pars. But though his last nine was not quite as shocking as the opening act, his inner mercury had not quite settled.

A few things you notice about Spieth: First, he's never still. When he's waiting for his turn at the tee, he'll shrug his shoulders, hitch up his pans, and waggle his fingers. His face has a preternaturally calm set, but it disguises spasms of nervous energy. Similarly, he's always in communication with his caddie Michael Greller. When he drove the ball right on the fourth hole, with water threatening, he immediately asked, "cover everything?" and Greller just as quickly responded, "yeah."

Sometimes the communication is nonverbal, as when he looked at Greller in shock when his chip didn't roll far enough on 2, or when he employed one of his trademark sighs at some new piece of bad luck. When mistakes come, he usually looks distraught, and expresses the feeling with his head, by hanging it in defeat or raising it to the skies in agony. After fatting a bunker shot, he shouted a rare, guttural, "ohhh NO!" Once in a while, though, he'll have a small explosion; when he missed an eight-foot par putt on 7, he came off, hissed "dammit," half swung his club in anger, stood smoldering, gave one more "dammit," and then retreated to the pine straw to practice his stroke.

It's a constant show, and although lately his trouble had seemed to come from bad swings rather than bad decisions, on the ninth hole, his last, he succumbed to the devil on his shoulder. With 299 yards left after a good drive on the par 5, he took a risk even though his brain was telling him to be prudent and lay up. His shot was a disaster—miles left into the trees. He saved par, but knew it was a missed opportunity.

"Pete Dye got me again," he conceded after the round. "When you don't have a wedge out of the fairway, you have to take your medicine on these par 5s, play the angles ... I probably lost a shot there."

When he left the scoring tent, his agent handed him his watch so he could put it on before he went on TV. He faced the media without complaint, waiting patiently while Lucas Glover answered questions before him, and tried to explain himself as best he could. He's honing new habits; he's slowly gaining faith in his wrist; he's happy, despite the blunders, that there's birdie-making "firepower" in his game; he wants to hit more fairways on Friday.

There's not much left to say after this breathless round, except that even in this diminished era, he remains one of the best shows in golf. He is constantly creating fresh hells, then escaping them with an ingenuity available only to one man on earth. His trajectory may be on the way up, at least until it plummets again, but to watch him is to hope that the roller coaster speeds on, in bounty and in dearth, for years and years and years.