Spieth leaves Augusta National eager to come back for more

There were 49 other players in the field, but for Jordan Spieth the final round of the Masters was a match-play championship. The only competitor he concerned himself with was his playing partner, Bubba Watson.

Spieth made a point to not look at a scoreboard all day, and he made good on that promise until the 16th hole. Even when he walked off the No. 7 green with a two-shot lead in his first Masters, Spieth had no idea where he stood in the grand scheme.

“I knew Bubba was the one to chase,” the 20-year-old Texan said. “So I didn’t feel the need to look at it.”

That strategy served Spieth well for the first part of the day. He served notice not only to Watson but to the world, that the stories they’d been hearing about the young kid from Texas were true.

“The next American superstar,” as Thomas Bjorn called Spieth, came out with laser-like focus. It took him but two holes to pull ahead of Watson, with a birdie to his par on the par-5 second hole. And he pushed the lead to two with a birdie at the third.

A slam dunk from the front bunker on the par-3 fourth kept his lead over Watson at two and made winning a green jacket as a Masters rookie seem like his destiny. Several pros had pointed to such a possibility before the first round.

But Spieth’s spectacular play seemed also to inspire Watson. Over the second half of the first nine, the 2012 Masters champion became engaged in a game of one-upmanship. And when they came to 570-yard eighth hole, Watson demonstrated some tactics the 135-pound Spieth could not match.

Watson’s 340-yard drive left Spieth half a football field down the hill. Spieth’s shaky fairway wood trying to catch up put him in trouble well right of the green. What resulted thereafter was the first of back-to-back two-shot swings.

“He started out hot with a bunch of birdies,” Watson said. “He holed it from the bunker on 4, knocked it really close on 6. So for me to back it up and make birdies on top of him helped a lot, helped the momentum go my way a little bit.”

Spieth didn’t go away. When Spieth got to 10, down two strokes, “I still thought I could win the golf tournament,” and Watson’s bogey on the hole did nothing to dispel the notion.

But Spieth’s hopes were severely dampened, as they have been by many before him, at the par-3 12th hole. Stuck between clubs on the 150-yard hole, Spieth eased up on the wrong one and ended up in the drink.

“That was tough, tough to swallow at that point, because there’s still a lot of golf left,” Spieth said. “That’s what’s so underrated about that hole. You still have six holes left with really a few good birdie opportunities.”