The career grand slam, in modern professional golf, is the kind of milestone that a player can spend the second half of his career chasing and never reach. Jordan Spieth turned thirty-two earlier this year, has been on the PGA Tour for thirteen seasons, and has been one major short of the slam for almost nine of them. The PGA Championship at Aronimink Golf Club, which begins on Thursday, will be his tenth attempt at the only one of the four professional majors he has not yet won.
The shape of the chase is by now very familiar. Spieth won the Masters in 2015, won the US Open in 2015, and won the Open Championship at Royal Birkdale in 2017. He arrived at Quail Hollow that August needing the PGA Championship to join the six players in golf history who have completed the slam. He finished tied for twenty-eighth. He has not, in the eight PGA Championships since, finished better than tied for third. The 2017 Birkdale win is also still his last major.
The week at Aronimink begins, then, with the same question it has begun with for most of those years. Is this the week the wait ends?
What has changed and what has not
The case that something has changed is largely about the swing. Spieth has had a quiet rebuild going on under Cameron McCormick for the better part of the last two seasons. The wrist that bothered him through 2023 and 2024 is, by his own account, no longer bothering him. The driver, which had been the loudest weakness in the bag, is by the numbers a top-fifty club on Tour for the first time since 2017. The wedge play and the putting, which were what built the 2015 season, have come back. The sixty-six-foot eagle putt he holed on the seventh at Quail Hollow last week was the kind of shot that tends to travel on a player’s confidence into the next major. The opening round of sixty-five at the Cadillac Championship at Doral two weeks before that was the kind of round he had not produced often enough in the recent past.
The case that nothing has changed is the more important one. Spieth has been close enough to a major Sunday in seven of the last nine seasons to have had a real chance, and has not converted any of them. He has not held a 54-hole lead at one of those championships since 2017. He has, by his own admission in interviews going back to 2019, had to learn to think about the slam without thinking about it, which is the kind of mental task that sounds simple in the abstract and is brutal in practice. He arrives at Aronimink with the ranking of a player in the high twenties in the world, not the high single digits, and with a body of recent results that says he is more likely to make the cut and finish in the top thirty than he is to lift the Wanamaker on Sunday evening.
What Aronimink might say
The course, in fairness, suits him as well as any modern PGA Championship venue could. Aronimink is a Donald Ross design that Gil Hanse restored to a great deal of its original character through a project that finished in 2018. The course plays to a par of seventy and a yardage of roughly seventy-three hundred. The premium is on iron play and on holing putts on greens that do not run especially fast for a major and that do reward a player with a good touch from inside fifteen feet. Spieth, when he is right, is one of the half dozen best putters in the world from inside that range. The trouble he has had over the years has very rarely come from the green. It has come from the tee.
Aronimink defends itself with bunkering rather than length. The fairways are wider than a US Open setup and narrower than the regular Tour week. A driver that finds the short grass two thirds of the time is good enough to contend. Spieth, for the first time in a while, hits more than two thirds of his fairways. The course does not ask the kind of question that the modern bomb-and-gouge specialists are best equipped to answer. It asks a more old-fashioned set of questions, of the sort a player who came up watching Hogan tape and reading Bob Rotella books should be well placed to answer.
The slam and what it means
Six men have completed the career grand slam. Sarazen did it. Hogan did it. Player did it. Nicklaus did it. Tiger did it. McIlroy joined them at Augusta thirteen months ago, after a wait of his own that had run to a similar number of attempts. The pattern, if there is one, is that the slam tends to come for a player when he has stopped letting it dictate his preparation. McIlroy spent the last two of those attempts speaking publicly about how little he wanted to think about it on the first tee. Spieth has been there for three or four years already. He arrived at the 2024 PGA at Valhalla saying, more or less, that the chase had started to feel like something other people cared about more than he did. He arrives at Aronimink, by all reports from the practice rounds, saying very little about the slam at all.
Whether that is the helpful frame of mind or the resigned one will be one of the things the week reveals. The other will be whether the swing changes have produced a player who can, in May, on a Donald Ross course in suburban Philadelphia, finally answer the question that has hung over him since the summer of 2017. The slam, when it comes for Spieth, will probably come on a course that did not look obviously suited to him on paper. They almost always do.