PEBBLE BEACH, Calif. — When it comes to Jordan Spieth at Pebble Beach, it can be easy to forget that some things are a matter of life and death.

Like, for example, the strangest swing thought of his high-octane professional career, which arrived on the cliff overhanging the 8th hole at Pebble Beach in 2022.

“Let’s not shift our weight forward or we might die,” Spieth said with a chuckle, recalling the cliff scene from ’22 on Thursday. “That’s probably the weirdest [swing thought] I’ve ever had.”

Thankfully, 2026’s visit to Monterey Peninsula has proved at least slightly less death-defying. The three-time major champ ended Thursday’s opening round at the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am at 6 under, good for T11 in a loaded Signature Event field, the strongest signal of his 2026 season to date. As is tradition, Spieth’s opening round was filled with at least a little adrenaline — he dunked his approach shot on the 18th hole (his ninth of the day) for an eagle 2.

But as it turns out, the hole-out was far from the most excitement Spieth faced in the early stages of the action from Pebble Beach. In fact, it paled in comparison to the … unusual swing obstacle he was forced to work through in the lead-up to the tournament: Himself.

“I got in a bad kind of mental place Friday,” Spieth said, referring to the second-round 75 that ended his week at the WM Phoenix Open prematurely with a missed cut. “I was swinging it well and I decided to tell myself I wasn’t. I just had a bad day.”

If you’re flinching as you read those words, you’re not alone. The golf world has squinted hard to find signs of a comeback from Spieth in recent years, as golf’s one-time golden child has aged into a frustrating prime. Spieth, who is currently ranked 89th in the world, has dealt with both injury and mental obstacles in the nine years following his last major win at the 2017 Open Championship. He has tried reset after reset during that time — most recently undergoing surgery to correct a wrist tendon issue that had plagued him for years last offseason — to little progress.

But there have been signs of life. Spieth’s wrist took a while, but now he says it’s fully healed, giving him range of motion and, critically, pain-free golf for the first time in a long while. His swing is returning to the feeling that helped jumpstart one of the most thrilling three-year stretches of golf in recent memory.

Under these auspices, Friday’s hiccup at the WM Phoenix Open is concerning, but not disqualifying.

“Things are better than what they seem there,” Spieth said. “That was just kind of a strange deal. I came up here, I played a fun round with my brother on Sunday morning at Pebble. I hit a few balls Saturday when we got in. But I played Pebble and Cypress in the same day, Sunday. Just had a fun day. Played a loop, we didn’t play them all. Then just once Monday hit, it was just get prepared for a normal week and just throw it out the window.”

Spieth did a good job of wiping the slate clean on Thursday at Spyglass Hill — recording four birdies, the aforementioned eagle and no bogeys. The boredom on his scorecard arrived thanks to a vintage performance around the greens, where Spieth finished a perfect seven for seven scrambling.

Thursday’s performance wasn’t enough to fully erase the bad taste from last Friday — but it was enough to water it down. There’s a little bit of reverse psychology at play there: Spieth has historically played well in Phoenix before faltering — maybe now, after the MC, he can flip the script.

“I mean, it was just an off day and a week that is typically a really good one for me,” Spieth said. “The last five [or] six years Phoenix has been a big springboard for me, and I thought, ‘let’s just forget about it and use this as our pseudo-Phoenix and try to get dialed in.'”

Again, it’s not as if Spieth is a stranger to these kinds of prevarications. He is perhaps the most compelling golfer alive, and his vacillations between brilliance and disaster are a big part of the reason why. The dark moments seem … very dark. But they never seem to hang around.

“I just thought I had a fluke kind of crappy day,” Spieth said. “I woke up on the wrong side of the bed last Friday.”

That is, after all, the nice part about life and death with Jordan Spieth: He might stare over the edge of the cliff — but he won’t stay there.

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Tommy Fleetwood gets annoyed. 

Right?

“I think in general there’s probably plenty of things that annoy me,” he said, “but I’m kind of pretty relaxed off the golf course really. 

“I mean, what have I got to complain about or get annoyed about?” 

The question can be thought of as philosophical. And the question is rhetorical, because it’s good to be Tommy Fleetwood these days. Starting in late August, men’s pro golf felt as if it were Fleetwood — and everyone else. He won the PGA Tour’s Tour Championship. His European side won the Ryder Cup. In October, he won the DP World India Championship on the DP World Tour. This week at Pebble Beach, in his 2026 PGA Tour debut, Fleetwood is ranked fourth in the world, and everyone is whispering his name in major talk. 

But pre-late August? There’s always a start to lists like these. And what came before the Tour Championship breakthrough had been a question that had lingered for a while: Would he ever win on the PGA Tour? One-hundred-sixty-three starts. One-hundred-sixty-three non-firsts. Some were painful, such as the one at last June’s Travelers Championship, where he led by a stroke after 71 holes; and the one at early August’s FedEx St. Jude Championship, where he led entering the final round. Maybe one day he’d win. But that wasn’t a given. His winless streak had surpassed the number of games played in a Major League Baseball season. 

After each event, though, he answered everyone’s questions, and that gave everyone a look into just who this 35-year-old Englishman is: A nice guy. One with no excuses to be given. One with no reasons to be annoyed. All of it was undoubtedly endearing. LeBron James was even cheering for a Fleetwood W. But you know the saying about nice guys finishing last and all that, and maybe, on the road to victory, Tommy Lad became a bit of a — actually, we’ll let Rory McIlroy continue the thought. 

“I would never say that Tommy questioned how much he wanted it,” McIlroy said last November. “But he’s always been so nice. So nice. And then I’m like, Is he too nice? Because you need to have just that little bit of edge or prick in you — whatever you want to call it. I know I have it, and I feel like that’s what you need to win. I think it’s harder for Tommy to feel that because of how empathetic he is. 

“But this year, I feel like he’s developed that little bit of edge.”

Maybe McIlroy’s right. Maybe being mean is the necessary means. And that being cutthroat results in no missed cuts. And that taking no prisoners leads to making no bogeys.  

Then again, perhaps there’s room for playing like a kid. 

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Fleetwood said that Wednesday afternoon. He’d been asked whether things, after 16 years as a pro, were starting to feel more like work. Or not a game. And Fleetwood said they hadn’t, and that he hoped they would never. “Yeah, I have my days where I feel it’s pretty rubbish, I don’t play well or the weather’s rubbish and I’m having a bad day or whatever it is,” he said. “I’m still, I think — yeah, it’s important to remember how much you wanted this life and how much you love it really.”

And perhaps there’s room for welcoming questions that are typically unwelcome. 

Fleetwood also said that Wednesday. He’d been asked whether his window to winning a major was now — and he said he was thankful for being asked that. “I always try and find the positives of whether it be, as you say, is this my window to win a major,” Fleetwood said. “Try and find the positives in that. Like I would rather you be asking me that question than not mentioning it at all because I would then not be doing that great.”

None of that makes Fleetwood sound much like McIlroy’s P word, does it?

He could have done it. He could have gone edgy. He could have buzzed off his near-shoulder-length hair. 

It’s just that it would have been, well, annoying. 

“I think it’s important to be yourself,” Fleetwood said. “I think anytime you’re trying to be something that you’re not, things get just like difficult. So again, I just try and be myself. 

“If that’s what I am, if I’m like a really nice person, then that’s great, like I’m happy with that.”

Sounds kinda nice doesn’t it? 

McIlroy be damned. 

“I don’t know what that stigma is about like too nice to win or nice guys — you know, nice guys can win, of course,” Fleetwood said. “I think I’ve always prided myself on being a good person, a nice guy, but I also love playing golf and competing. 

“I just, for whatever I hadn’t done before or hadn’t won tournaments or hadn’t gone my way, I felt like I just continued to learn and grow as a competitor as well. 

“But no, I definitely looked at things and tried to analyze what I did right and what I did wrong. Hopefully Rory still thinks I’m a nice guy.”

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PEBBLE BEACH, Calif. — Eighteen months ago, on a golden Sunday evening at the Presidents Cup in Montreal, Fluff Cowan’s mustache curled.

“Oh, I don’t know,” the legendary caddie said, his New England accent curdling the trepidation he felt behind a tuft of snow-white facial hair.

He paused, turning the idea over in his head once more. He’d been asked some strange questions in 47 years as one of the most prolific caddies in golf history, but none quite like this one.

How could he capture the entirety of his caddying experience … in a single song?

“Well, I guess the first one that comes to mind is — in the ways that it ebbed and flowed…”

He paused once more, agonizing.

“I guess I’d have to go with “Truckin’,” he said.

The conversation progressed, but Cowan seemed to linger on that title, pleased with his selection. It captured his spirit, his story, and critically, his favorite band: the Grateful Dead. A few beats later, his face spread into a grin.

“I was just a drivin’ fool.“

Cowan turned 78 on Saturday, two days before the start of the golf tournament that has also come to feel like the beginning of a new year: the annual AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am. But the start of this golf high season in Northern California has lost some of its tie-dyed luminescence in 2026. In early-January, the world learned of the passing of one of Cowan’s heroes: Bob Weir, the legendary Grateful Dead frontman.

Weir’s death has cast a strange pall over Deadheads like Cowan, who often wore a Jerry Garcia t-shirt to caddie for Tiger Woods. To those whose lives centered around the rhythms of Grateful Dead concert schedules and retirement tours (plural), the band was more religion than music. And in the church of the Dead, Weir was the heartbeat.

“In my mind, Bobby embodied the whole culture of the Dead, there’s kindness and there’s love,” Gil Hanse, the golf course architect (and lifelong Deadhead) said. “Obviously Mickey and Billy are still here, but it feels like the leader of the band has left the stage.”

Interestingly, Weir’s passing has also cast a strange pall over the golf world, where the Dead has quietly infiltrated many of the sport’s highest chambers.

“The Dead has probably been the soundtrack of 70 percent of the holes I’ve shaped and worked on in my career,” Hanse said. “So yeah, there’s a nice legacy there.”

Perhaps no place speaks to both Deadheads and golf lovers quite like the Bay Area. Pebble Beach is just an hour down the road from Dana Morgan’s Music Shop in Palo Alto, where Garcia and Weir met for the first time as teenagers, and just two hours from Golden Gate Park, where Weir played his last three shows in the summer of 2025 (coincidentally just feet from one of America’s most celebrated muni revival projects). Consciously or subconsciously, golf’s visit to the region this week has presented the sport’s legion of Deadheads with an opportunity to mourn.

“I’ve been feeling pretty upset about it,” Hanse said. “I wasn’t expecting that. It’s been a lot harder than I thought.”

Of course, there is a deep irony in Weir’s legacy extending over the Monterey Peninsula’s most tidily manicured cliffs. Golf is a sport of well-coiffed stiffs and fetishized cloisteredness, the kind of place where even the appearance of countercultural impulses can cost you a seat at some of the sport’s most reputable tables; Dead concerts feature the kind of individuals who call into open question the timing of their last shower. (It should also be noted that if you were to scientifically engineer the diametric opposite of Shakedown Street — the popular Dead pre-concert tailgate where sun-beaten roadies trade tie-dye T-shirts and psychedelic drugs with startling nonchalance — you might wind up with a place that looks a lot like 17 Mile Drive.)

And yet, like a particularly stubborn case of lice, golf can’t rid itself of the Dead. A flourishing underbelly of rejects and hippies floods the caddie yards and maintenance crews (and, in many cases, membership rolls) of the greatest clubs in America with Dead iconography; while golf’s own (gentle) countercultural moment of the 2020s has helped some clubs bring Touch of Grey greenside.

“Love ’em, need ’em, can’t live without ’em,” Cowan said, capturing the spirit of devotion that promulgates caddie yards across the country with impressive brevity.

From a distance, the correlation might sound trivial, but spend time near golf’s true Deadhead contingent and you’ll realize the sport and the band share a heartbeat. For all of golf’s occasional stuffiness, the sport’s best traits might be lifted verbatim from the central themes of a Dead concert: empathy, tranquility, creativity, artistry. And, hell, is there a better place to discover the wonders of nature than on a particularly psychedelic golf course?

“Everybody in our band, the Cavemen, we all have a role to play — and there’s sort of a foundation — but then off of that foundation, we can take it in any different direction we want to,” says Hanse. “I think that’s sort of the ethos of the Dead. Every night was different in the way the music was performed and presented. We want creativity to manifest itself in improvisation.”

The core audience helps too. Many of the original Deadheads have now aged into boomerdom, where golf is a national pastime, while many of the diehards responsible for keeping the sport afloat — those deranged enough to pursue a career in golf — have done so precisely for the opportunity to break the shackles of a desk job and a nine-to-five. To this group, the Dead is a siren song.

“I’ve often said what we provide for people is music with a little adventure in it,” Weir said in 2016. “The people who like our music, come to our music, are drawn to our music — they’re people who require a little adventure in their lives.”

Ultimately, the same spirit of adventure carried Weir through to the end. He played his final shows with the Dead at Golden Gate Park in August — part of a 60th anniversary celebration for the band that drew more than 150,000 people to San Francisco. Hanse was among the crowds for all three nights, having hopped “back on the bus” with his wife, Tracey, in the last few years of Weir’s life. Nobody knew it then, but Weir was waving goodbye.

“The first show was pretty rough, Bobby was obviously not well,” Hanse said, briefly slipping into Deadhead vernacular. “But then Saturday and Sunday night was just … the magic.”

If an anti-establishment bent brought the Dead into golf, memories like these are what have kept them. Beneath the logos and the hippies and the music is a spirit of something much bigger: kindness.

“From the outside, people kind of can draw whatever conclusions they want about golf, but real golfers find the same peace and tranquility when they’re out on the golf course,” Hanse said. “I mean, you had three nights where you had 50,000 people – and there were no crimes, no violence, no nothing. Maybe some people were … chemically altered in the way that they were feeling, but they were there to celebrate something that was pure. And I think we celebrate the game of golf and in the landscapes we play it in for the very similar reasons.”

For many Deadheads, this idea was the hardest part of Weir’s death. If the leader of the band was no more, what would keep the spirit of the Dead from passing with him?

Thankfully, there have already been signs to the contrary. One arrived on the morning of January 10, the same day news of Weir’s passing reached Hanse at a golf course in New Zealand.

As Hanse found himself confronting an unexpected swell of grief, he received a surprise visitor: His five-year-old granddaughter, Peyton.

Peyton heard that her grandpa was upset, and she’d taken matters into her own hands. She approached Hanse bearing a gift.

“She went outside and picked me some flowers from the little meadow in the backyard,” Hanse said. “And she said, ‘I know you’re sad, so I just want to give you some flowers for your friend.'”

Hanse cried at the gift. He cried again sharing the story.

They were happy tears. The kind that come after an unusual act of kindness. His old friend Bobby would’ve liked that. He would’ve liked it a lot.

But he would’ve liked most what came after, when Gil Hanse fired up his tractor, and kept on truckin’.

You can reach the author at james.colgan@golf.com.

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