PGA CHAMPIONSHIP: The Jordan Spieth magic … Tiger Woods and the Stanley Cup … Is Corey Conners’ swing like beer?

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TULSA, Okla. — Jordan Spieth was asked what, if anything, it means to him to sign an autograph and make a kid’s day here at the PGA Championship at Southern Hills.

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“That was me,” he answered. “I remember going with my dad to the Byron Nelson, and that’s all I wanted to do was get my ticket signed by as many guys as I could. I’d wait out, just to have that personal interaction.”

We can all easily picture a young Spieth wearing a crooked hat and an oversized golf shirt waiting for an autograph. It all adds up. Things always seems to add up with Spieth, and that’s part of what has drawn people to the golfer since he burst on the scene winning two majors in 2015 at 21 years old.

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One of the hardest things in sports is to explain what draws the public so strongly to one player over another. There are the obvious cases where a player’s actions and how they handle successes or failures on the playing field make them popular or unpopular. But only a handful of players, if that, in any generation have a magical way of getting sports fans fully invested in their fate.

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There is no single reason and still plenty of mystery to it all, but with Spieth part of it is the undeniable sense that what you’re seeing is genuine. Of course, as with any public figure (or really anyone) you never can be sure what’s inside, but Spieth wears his heart on his sleeve and invites us along for the ride, not just at the best of times, but all the time.

This week Spieth has a chance to move up all the way to the opening pages of golf’s history book by becoming just the sixth man to complete the career grand slam, joining Jack Nicklaus, Tiger Woods, Ben Hogan, Gary Player, and Gene Sarazen. The 28-year-old was asked if it means as much to him as it does to golf fans and historians.

“If you just told me I was going to win one tournament the rest of my life, I’d say I want to win this one, given where things are at,” he said. “You feel like you kind of accomplished golf when you win the career grand slam, I guess.”

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The first speed bump in his career nearly took the wheels off for Spieth and led to a nearly four-year winless drought, but with two wins since then, the future once again looks bright for golf’s one-time golden boy and he seems determined to enjoy his time on the golf course.

“There’s moments where I can experience joy, I’m trying to do more and more of that,” he said. “It was a grind for so long that you kind of forget a little bit about the kid in you and the joy and stuff. It’s hard to fake it until you make it in this game. Like if things are really off, you can come in with a positive attitude but it’s not necessarily going to yield any better scores until you fix things that are wrong.”

Coming off a win at the RBC Heritage and a runner-up finish last week at the Byron Nelson, Spieth seems ready to chase history at Southern Hills. He tees off in a supergroup with Tiger Woods and Rory McIlory on Thursday at 8:11 a.m. local time.

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STANLEY CUP IN TULSA?
The biggest surprise of the week so far was stumbling upon the Stanley Cup on the first tee at Southern Hills on Wednesday morning.

Don’t tell anyone but I might have dropped my reporter’s notepad for a moment and taken a photo with the Cup, but hey, I’m writing about golf not hockey.

Turns out the Cup was sitting there on the table beside the 27-pound Wanamaker Trophy as part of an ESPN promotion. Wherever the Stanley Cup goes, so goes the Keeper of the Cup, so Mike Bolt was on hand to provide one-man security for Lord Stanley’s mug (he showed me the white cotton gloves to prove it). Bolt told me that earlier in the morning, Tiger Woods took a particular interest in the Cup and examined hockey’s holy grail. Tiger knows a thing or two about trophies and is probably always looking to get his hands on another one.

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Did he pick up the Cup?

“Pick it up? No. Nobody picks up the Cup,” Bolt said. “I don’t care if you’re Tiger Woods or the President of the United States. You can hug it, you can kiss it, if you feel the need to lift it, go win it.”

Spoken like a true Keeper of the Cup.

CHIP SHOTS
Bryson DeChambeau withdrew from the PGA Championship late Wednesday afternoon after testing his surgically-repaired left hand at Southern Hills. Denny McCarthy replaces him in the field … I told Corey Conners that someone compared his swing to “free beer,” perhaps meaning it was smooth and sweet. The Canadian golfer played along saying, “I like free beer, and I like my swing.” Turns out my pal Evin Priest of Australian Golf Digest actually had said Conners’ swing was like, “three beers,” as in that magic zone a little looser than two beers but not quite four. It was an apt description that was sadly lost in Aussie-Canadian translation. Must have been that fourth beer.