CHARLOTTE — This year at Quail Hollow, the questions were inevitable. Jordan Spieth has won the Masters, the U.S. Open and the Open Championship, thus needing a PGA Championship victory to complete the career Grand Slam. This is the ninth year in a row that has been true, but what makes it feel so pressing in 2025 isn't Spieth himself, but the history we just saw at Augusta. Rory McIlroy's completion of the career slam in April—just the sixth golfer to achieve the milestone—is professional golf's biggest story since Tiger's 2019 Masters win. Naturally, it has everyone's mind on the feat—and who might become the seventh to do it.
"There's been a number of years I've come to the PGA, and no one's really asked me about it," Spieth said on Tuesday. "It's funny, I think if Rory didn't [win], then it wouldn't have been a storyline for me here necessarily. ... I just feel like I've been asked about it more than other years, including years where I've come in—I want to say '22, I came in after winning and finishing second back-to-back, which I would have thought would be a time where that would have been one. So I've kind of been surprised by the dynamic a little bit."
Despite the surprise, Spieth recognizes the ebb and flow in the narrative from another contemporary—Phil Mickelson. For several years, Mickelson’s quest for the career Grand Slam at the U.S. Open was a major talking point, then it died down, then it rose again after he won the PGA at Kiawah. Mickelson hasn't crossed off that last major yet, and at 54 his chances are dwindling. That example, in part, is what makes the PGA such a momentous event each year for Spieth.
"It's always circled on the calendar," he added. "For me, if I could only win one tournament for the rest of my life, I'd pick this one for that reason."
More on the PGA Championship
Spieth said that watching Rory accomplish the goal at Augusta inspired him, but that the PGA Championship remains a statistically tough tournament for him to win. By the stats, the U.S. Open should have been the hardest for his particular game, but as he admitted with a smile, he "snuck it out on a course [Chambers Bay] that's not a normal U.S. Open golf course."
He considers the Masters and the Open conducive to his game, which leaves the PGA as the toughest nut left to crack. (No one has ever closed out the career Grand Slam at the PGA Championship.) Still, there's hope.
"I think I'm in a position now," he said, "just because I have faster ball speed than I did back then by a significant amount. It was really just kind of the driving statistic that you need at U.S. Opens and PGAs that would have held me back."
Spieth said he doesn't feel insulted by the lack of career slam questions prior to this year; he knows that his form hasn't always been great, and even when he came close in 2019 at Bethpage, he felt it would take a kind of magic act to actually pull it off over the weekend.
"I was in the final group on Saturday with Brooks," he remembered, "and I was like, I know what it's like to have control of my game. I've played with Brooks with control of my game, and I see what he's doing right now, and I don't have mine. Let's see if I can fake it these next two days."
He couldn't—he finished in a tie for third, six shots behind Koepka—but he said he's feeling far better about his game today as he recovers from wrist surgery. And he should—with two top-10s this year and only one missed cut, he's inside the top 50 in the FedEx Cup standings and putting together rounds that look at least vaguely like the Spieth of old. It may be too much too soon to expect him to win this week, but he seems to have approached Quail Hollow with a sense of the stiff challenge. McIlroy’s rocky road on Sunday at Augusta gave him a sense of how history can weigh on you when an achievement like that is imminent.
"You could tell it was a harder win," he said. "Most of the time he makes it look a lot easier. So that obviously was on the forefront of his mind. Something like that has not been done by many people, and there's a reason why. But I'd love to throw my hat in the ring and give it a chance come the weekend."
