Spieth will be tested in other ways in Thursday’s first round. He will play with Woods and the four-time major champion Rory McIlroy, a grouping that is likely to be followed by about 70 percent of the tens of thousands of fans on the grounds at Southern Hills Country Club. The atmosphere will be charged, and because a golf gallery does not remain seated as at other sporting events, it will become more like a noisy, chaotic, ever-moving wave.
But Spieth, whose wife, Annie, gave birth to the couple’s first child, a son, Sammy, in November, had a different take.
“I’ll get to tell my kid about this someday — I got to play with Tiger in a major,” Spieth said.
He added that he had done it before, but as he acknowledged Woods’s near-fatal car crash in February 2021, he added: “Last year, you weren’t sure if that was ever going to happen again.”
Spieth did concede that the massive crowd could be a distraction, but one he has gotten used to. When he nearly won the Masters as a 20-year-old and finished first at the tournament a year later, in 2015, Spieth attracted some teeming crowds himself.