The design of the Lusail stadium in Qatar was based on an Arab lantern. In the Argentina dressing room before the World Cup final in 2022, everyone assumed Lionel Scaloni lit a fire under his players.

The team talk he gave, as his players prepared to take on France, was the most important of his career. He started by telling Angel Di Maria to run at France’s full-back Jules Kounde. “Fideo,” Scaloni said. “You’re going to give him a massive headache down the left. Target him.” There were more tactical instructions to pass on. Scaloni, however, could not get his words out. As revealed in the three-part documentary, El metodo Scaloni, he choked up and started to cry.

Scaloni turned to Pablo Aimar for help. He asked his assistant to continue delivering the address. “I can’t, Pablo,” Messi recalled Scaloni saying. “I can’t.” Aimar was an emotional wreck too. All of a sudden, Walter Samuel, another member of Scaloni’s staff, felt the players all looking at him. A no-nonsense defender in his playing days, the floor unexpectedly belonged to Samuel. He didn’t want it. “No, no, no,” he protested. Looking back, Samuel considered it “the worst team talk of all-time”.

Argentina’s players have teased Scaloni about it ever since. They call him the llorona. The crybaby. Scaloni can’t control it. His vulnerable side has once again come to the fore at this World Cup. “It’s fine,” Scaloni insisted. He’s comfortable with it. He is who he is. The tears streamed when Messi scored his hat-trick in Argentina’s opener against Algeria. “I can’t look up, I’m sorry,” Scaloni said after the later comeback against Egypt. “I’m very, very emotional. What a group of players, man! I have to go.”

Elite sport is often framed around how well you can keep it together when the pressure is on. You are advised to not let anyone see what might once have been considered a weakness. This is particularly interesting when set in the context of Argentine football.

One of the assumptions that regularly gets made is it’s about machismo. Hard men. The sharp elbows Scaloni’s assistant Roberto Ayala used to wield. The way Samuel, sporting a buzz-cut like a commando, pushed opponents around and stuck his head where other defenders were afraid to put their feet. Make no mistake, some of that spirit lives on, to an extent, in this team. Rodrigo De Paul is known as Messi’s ‘bodyguard’. Cuti Romero is renowned for reckless behaviour.

While Scaloni insists Wednesday’s semi-final against England is “only a game of football” and not something bigger like another settling of scores for the 1982 Falklands War, many fear it could become a brawl as Copa Libertadores games often do. FIFA and local police are on high alert for clashes between fans at Mercedes-Benz Stadium. Hooliganism has largely faded from English football in the Premier League era. In Argentina, however, the Barras bravas remain a muscular, not-to-be-messed-with presence. Games can feel like the mosh pit at the last ever Soda Stereo concert.

All of this contrasts with the image of the llorona. But Scaloni did not lose the dressing room that day in Lusail, nor did he lose the final. In 101 games in charge, he has not only ended long waits for the World Cup (36 years) and Copa America (28 years), winning it in Brazil to make it all the sweeter. He has not only retained the Copa America, beating Colombia in 2024, and put Argentina in a position to do the same at this World Cup. He has also made a country feel like a club, turning a farrago into a family. And it’s in a family that you can laugh together, cry together.

“It’s not easy to have a squad of 30 players and keep everyone happy,” Leandro Paredes acknowledged. Scaloni manages it. Argentina win because of it.

The Copa America in 2021 took place in a COVID bubble. In Messi’s team talk before the final against Brazil, he did not shed a tear. Instead, he gave his famous ’45 days’ speech. “For 45 days, there were no complaints about the food, the hotels, the pitches. Nothing, boys. Forty five days without seeing our families, boys. Forty five days! El Dibu (Emi Martinez) became a father and he couldn’t see his daughter yet. He couldn’t hold her yet. And all this for what, boys? For this! For this moment!”

Efforts have been made to discern avant-garde tactical trends like relationism in Scaloni’s work. In truth, Argentina’s power lies in relationships. “Making the person better to make the game better,” De Paul observed. Throughout the World Cup, Scaloni has downplayed formations in favour of feelings. After the comeback against Egypt in the round of 16, he said: “I’m a head coach to experience that. Not because I like 4-3-3.”

That said, you can see the hand of the coach in this side. In Qatar four years ago, Argentina started the tournament with one team and finished it with another. Leandro Paredes, Papu Gomez and Lautaro Martinez lost their places by the end of the group stage. Alexis MacAllister, Enzo Fernandez and Julian Alvarez stepped up. Scaloni and his staff, which includes Matias Manna, the former blogger behind Paradigma Guardiola, continue to make tweaks. They recalibrate the team according to circumstance. Paredes, this time round, has gradually been introduced at the expense of Thiago Almada.

Personnel is what’s important, but Scaloni treats his players as people, not as pawns on a chessboard. “That’s why he’s going to be the best manager in the history of the Argentine national team,” Emi Martinez said.

He is not an ideologue, like Argentina’s other World Cup-winning coaches Cesar Luis Menotti and Carlos Bilardo. Theory alone cannot explain why Argentina keep doing what they’re doing. “There are times during a game where tactics and strategies… They’re forgotten,” Scaloni admitted. Of course, game plans are important. It’s vital players know their assignments. “But football is also about heart, gut instinct and never giving up.”

This is what Scaloni trains. This is why he gets emotional watching his team. To him, being at the grill is as valuable a use of his time as standing at the whiteboard. Cooking a sizzling steak and some blood sausage, the unquestionable togetherness a barbecue brings, is worth as much if not more than hours of video analysis. “We shortened the training session so we can go and eat an asado,” Scaloni revealed on the eve of Argentina’s quarter-final against Switzerland. “This is the type of thing we do. We place a lot of value on it. It’s not just about what happens on the pitch.

“I still remember Malaysia, 1997 (the FIFA World Youth Championship that Argentina won). Pablo and Walter are here with me. We’ve been through a lot together. These things matter to me and this is what stays with you in addition to the results and the scoresheet. Twenty years down the line, you might get together again and remember that asado you shared, a mate together. It’s unforgettable and it’s something we do a lot. We think it builds a team and if we build a team, we become even stronger.”

Lionel Scaloni has a close bond with Lionel Messi (Patricia De Melo Moreira /AFP via Getty Images)

It’s identity over ideology. Emotional IQ over tactical nous. Spirit over strategy. This Argentina team doesn’t want to go home. They want to stay together. “For the Malvinas. For Diego. For Leo’s last (World Cup),” or so the lyrics of the fan chant go.

Vibes. How often do we attribute what we can’t see to that?

It’s what we put Zinedine Zidane’s success down to at Real Madrid. The aura radiating from him as a former Ballon d’Or and World Cup winner. Scaloni can’t count on that. “I was never one of the big players,” he reflected. “I was a support player. I was a nice guy.” A guy who, in De Paul’s telling, “knows which button to press in each of us”.

When things get loose, Scaloni is far more comfortable being uncomfortable than Thomas Tuchel appeared after England’s win over Norway. Scaloni has, by now, got to a place where he is able to embrace and accept that football matches sometimes come down to the non-football aspects, the stuff a coach can’t control.

“We knew that we were going to suffer and this is part of our blood, this is part of our DNA, and this brings peace of mind,” Scaloni said upon reaching the semi-finals with victory over Switzerland. “In Qatar, we were not that experienced, myself included, and those kind of situations were very difficult. However, now we are more experienced because we know what it feels like to be dominated by the opponent, to concede an equaliser, so today, we kept our composure. The team knew how to remain calm and, of course, we will never give up.”

Football in Argentina will put you in touch with your feelings. No one is more in touch with them than the one they call the llorona.

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Everything is carefully scripted.

An hour or so before kick-off in Dallas on Tuesday, France’s newest superstar will emerge from the tunnel to inspect the pitch.

Except this won’t be a normal pitch inspection. It will be a Michael Olise pitch inspection: a languid walk towards the fringe of the playing surface, a couple of scuffs of his trainers on the grass, and a quick glance around the stadium before returning to the sanctuary of the dressing room. Blink and you’ll miss it – at least until it goes viral on social media again.

Forty-five minutes or so later, when Olise returns for the warm-up, there will be pink boots, the colourway of choice for the sport’s biggest brands this summer – everywhere you look. But Olise won’t be wearing them – well, not unless France surprise us by playing in pink against Spain. Olise likes his boots to match his kit, which is easy to do when you don’t have a sponsor; wear what you want, when you want.

In the warm-up, Olise kicks the ball as high as he can into the air before controlling it effortlessly. On one occasion at Bayern Munich, he nearly took out his manager Vincent Kompany and a television crew with a wayward punt. Sprinting across the pitch in a rare show of panic, Olise arrived just in time, beautifully bringing down a ball with all the softness of your head hitting the pillow after a long day.

In another part of his matchday routine, Olise runs, leaps and performs a 360-degree spin in the air in the seconds leading up to kick-off, making him a photographer’s delight (some brilliant images are doing the rounds) and drawing praise from an unlikely source.

🐐 pic.twitter.com/ts4hdMvPc0

— Equipe de France ⭐⭐ (@equipedefrance) July 9, 2026

“He jumps higher than many professional dancers,” Francois Alu, a French ballet dancer, told the French sports paper L’Equipe. “And on top of that, he’s wearing boots on a pretty soft surface that doesn’t really allow for any spring. That’s quite… astonishing.”

Finally, the France kick-off. Olise always takes it and kicks the ball straight out of play. It feels totally at odds with how elegantly Olise plays football that he’s tasked with doing that, and yet it’s also strangely befitting of a man who seems full of contradictions.

Sean Conlon, who has known Olise since he was six years old and coached him at various stages during a football journey that was far from straightforward, smiles at the aura and mystique that surrounds arguably the most fascinating player at this World Cup. “It’s becoming marketable now, the whole nonchalant thing,” Conlon says.

“From a psychological point of view as well, it separates him. It means that he’s not putting pressure on himself. He’s just staying focused on his football and he’s got this mystery around him as well. I really like his Instagram. He’ll delete all his posts. He’s done that for 10 years. And whenever he does a post, it has no caption. It’s all connected to making him this enigma, I think.”

Enigma is a good word. There are so many layers to Olise and his extraordinary talent; just don’t expect him to explain them.

September 2024, Weserstadion. Bayern Munich have just won 5-0 at Werder Bremen in the Bundesliga. Making his fifth appearance for the club, following a £50.8million transfer from Crystal Palace in the summer, Olise was outstanding, scoring twice and assisting twice.

“Right, let’s go,” the Bayern midfielder Jamal Musiala says to Olise as the two of them reach the bottom of the stairs in Werder Bremen’s stadium.

It’s hard to suppress a smile as you watch the footage that follows, which was filmed by the Bild journalist Michel Schroer.

Unprepared for what’s around the corner, Olise takes one look and performs an emergency stop. He starts to stretch a hamstring that doesn’t need stretching and turns on his heel. It’s like he’s seen a ghost.

Musiala carries on walking, oblivious to the fact that his team-mate is no longer by his side until two of Bayern Munich’s media staff, one with a microphone and another holding a camera, scamper back to the stairs, where Olise is hiding.

Pointing towards the flash interview area, they gesture for Olise to come back – something that isn’t going to happen without Musiala’s intervention.

“You don’t have to say anything,” Musiala says to Olise, sounding like a lawyer briefing his client before the police turn on the tape recorder and the interrogation starts.

“Aight,” Olise replies, as he steps down the stairs for a second time.

“I’ll talk for you,” says Musiala, who played alongside Olise at Chelsea’s academy.

Wearing a pair of headphones, Olise shuffles back into view.

Musiala turns to Olise before the interview starts. “This is the start, you know. Part of the life.”

It’s “part of the life” that Olise would happily do without.

“As a footballer, you have to give your answers on the pitch first and foremost,” Olise told Bayern’s members magazine shortly after signing for the club.

Olise shuns the publicity that comes with being an elite footballer (Maddie Meyer – FIFA via Getty Images)

In 2022, Olise scored a stoppage-time winner for Crystal Palace against West Ham in the Premier League, making him an obvious candidate for a post-match interview. To give you a clue as to what’s coming next, when Sky Sports put the footage on YouTube, they titled it ‘The shortest post-match interview ever?!’

“Just talk us through it?” the reporter asked.

“Through what? The goal?” Olise said, deadpan.

“Hmm,” replied the reporter.

“I think Wilf (Wilfried Zaha) passed me the ball. Shot. Scored,” Olise said, not showing a flicker of emotion.

The reporter laughed. “Nice and brief,” he said.

Olise, looking nonplussed, nodded.

“It was a moment that captured the game, that won the game. What’s the feeling like when the ball does hit the back of the net?” the reporter continued.

“Yeah, it’s a good feeling,” Olise said.

“Do you feel you deserved it overall?”

“Yeah,” replied Olise.

The interview caused a stir at the time and, inevitably, led to all sorts of comments about a monosyllabic footballer. Some people wondered if Olise was being difficult, while others thought he wasn’t very bright.

For the record, Olise is quick-witted and smart. He scored 127 in an IQ test in 2024. As for his football intelligence, it’s off the scale.

Halfway through the 2020-21 season, Veljko Paunovic called Olise into his office to discuss his development. Paunovic, now the Serbia coach, was the manager of Reading — then in the Championship, English football’s second tier. As for Olise, he had not long turned 19 and was playing his first full season in senior football, one which would end with him being named the English Football League’s young player of the year after scoring seven goals and registering 12 assists.

Paunovic still has the seven-page document that he presented to Olise that day. There are separate team graphics showing Olise’s contribution (goals, assists and chances created) across three different positions – left wing, right wing and No 10 – as well as half a dozen or more areas for Olise to target for improvement, including working on his right foot, his heading ability, and becoming more ruthless in front of goal.

“Because we always thought that he could score more goals, and it looks like he prefers to assist rather than score,” Paunovic says. “But this is something that is a part of his character, I believe.”

What was Olise’s interaction like with that presentation?

“It’s a great question,” Paunovic replies. “He was very quiet. He would observe. He was focused. It’s not like he was looking around the room.

“As a player, I never had these kinds of conversations with my coaches, and I would like to have known what the coaches really thought about me. And I think this is what caught his attention – you’re talking about him, and there is no bulls–t in this. This is what he is, and this is what he has to improve, or can improve, if he wants to commit.”

Paunovic scrolls to the next page, which is titled ‘Set pieces’.

“What he liked more was this part — because he wanted to take penalties for us,” Paunovic says.

Michael Olise was determined to take penalties for Reading (Bryn Lennon/Getty Images)

“I said, ‘Look, I need you to practise. You can’t just show up and say: ‘Hey, I’m taking penalties’. I’m not gonna throw the coin in the air with you. I want to see if you’re capable of being efficient taking penalties.’

“And in my head was this: ‘Michael, if you want to take penalties, and you prefer to assist, who are you going to assist when you take a penalty?’.

“So I want to see that ruthless, killer instinct you have in order to take penalties. After training when you stay behind, I want to see that those balls really go into the net.’

“So, answering your question, ‘yes’, ‘no’, ‘maybe’ — a lot of those. But this was, I think, profound for him. He had something in front of him where he could evaluate our vision against what he had in his head, and I believe we were pretty close to what he wanted to hear from us.”

“Michael was a cool kid,” Martin Kelly, Olise’s former Crystal Palace team-mate, says. “He wasn’t interested in any of the fads of the modern-day game — playing FIFA (the video game) or getting caught up in social media. He let his football do the talking.”

Occasionally, that football talked him into trouble at Palace, albeit in strange circumstances.

“I remember he kept doing the same thing in training once — and which Patrick Vieira (Palace’s manager at the time) never wanted him to do: getting the ball, being direct and trying to beat a player, instead of playing it inside and getting it from a one-two off a No 10 to then break a line,” Kelly explains.

“Patrick ended up sending him in from training. I hadn’t seen anything like that for years. But Michael was that strong-willed at such a young age. You’re getting coached by someone who has won everything in the game, but Michael Olise was just not bothered in the slightest. He was so unfazed. A maverick.”

Olise spent much of his childhood training at professional academies in England, predominantly with Chelsea, who released him at the age of 14, and later at Manchester City, who also let him go. Clearly, those experiences contributed to his development as a young footballer, together with his time at Reading’s academy, where he blossomed.

Yet when you watch Olise play and you see the sort of things that he’s capable of doing with a football, you also can’t help but wonder how much of his ability is innate.

“I don’t think that coaching will have played an enormous part in Michael’s life really, or that he will need to thank coaching for a lot of what he’s able to do,” Roy Hodgson, Vieira’s replacement at Palace, says. “Whatever happened, Michael doesn’t need coaching now.

Olise’s balletic brilliance is a feature of his football (Justin Setterfield/Getty Images)

“What he needs now is to be put in the right position on the field of play alongside players who are good enough to play with him, to feed him with the ball and to make the necessary runs so that he can show all his attacking ability.”

That pretty much captures exactly what Olise has got with this France team at the World Cup and goes some way to explaining why he has been able to thrive. The fact that he has got what Hodgson describes as “God-given ability” helps, too.

“I was watching Messi the other night, and Messi reminds me of him a little bit,” Hodgson says. “He gets himself into positions and people feed him the ball under a lot of pressure, and he finds his way out of it, and finds the right pass, and of course, like Michael, he’s got that weight of pass.

“I’m now talking about probably the greatest player in the world, so if he considers himself close to that, he’s doing pretty well.”

In an interview with L’Equipe last year — a collector’s item — Olise cited the influence of Messi on his style of play as well as Neymar, but also explained that he wants to be true to himself, and that goes for how he lives his life off the field, too.

When Hodgson reflects now, he wishes that he’d had a chance to get to better know that person behind the footballer.

“He is quiet. He wasn’t easy to speak to,” Hodgson says. “I suppose, at times, I maybe respected a little bit too much his desire to be left alone. I certainly never pushed him. When it came to interviews, I knew that he didn’t like them. Occasionally, people would say to me: ‘You should tell him he’s got to do more’ but I respected who he is and what he likes to be.”

“Just pause it now,” Conlon, Olise’s former junior and youth coach, says.

It’s the build-up to France’s first goal at this World Cup, against Senegal. Olise is on the ball, on the right, about to set up Kylian Mbappe with a wonderful disguised pass.

“Did you know Michael plays a lot of chess?” Conlon asks. “Joe Shields, who’s the head of recruitment at Chelsea, when he was at Manchester City, he was the one that brought Michael to City. I remember having lunch with him and we were talking about Michael and what he was achieving. He was recalling when he was at City, it was Michael’s first day and he was in one of the waiting rooms and he’s reading a chess book. At 14, a boy who has come up from London! They were like:  ‘Who’s this kid?’.

“When you play a lot of chess, there’s moments when you see into the future. Sometimes (in football), it can become quite instinctive, you’re going a little bit off a feeling and you’re seeing pictures of attacks that are not necessarily obvious. When this happened against Senegal, I’m really wondering at what point did Michael work out what he was going to do.

“This shape here (shown in the image below); 70 per cent of players in the World Cup are delivering a ball to that back area for a header. I wonder, is he now having the connection with Mbappe and seeing that ball to thread through, and he’s already planned it at this moment, like a chess move?”

Some movement patterns are well-rehearsed on the training ground; others feel more instinctive — the product of improvisation and, in the case of Olise and Mbappe, a meeting of minds. “It seems that he and Michael have got really strong telepathy with each other,” Conlon adds. “Because class recognises class, they would feel that they’re the best and so they know how to connect with each other.”

A showreel of clips moves on to the Sweden game.

“Look at the little dance he does now, how he passes this,” Conlon says, as Olise rests one foot on top of the ball while offloading it with the other for a little one-two.

Why does he do that?

“Because he’s a west London boy and he cares about flair and he cares about style. He’s a showman!” Conlon says, laughing. “It’s unnecessary but isn’t it so beautiful?

“But this is also what I’m saying about his personality; to be a real winner and take the game by the scruff of the neck. The shot that follows: that won the corner that got France the first goal and unlocked Sweden.”

Olise is different, that’s for sure — different as a person and different as a footballer.

In the last-16 game against Paraguay, he played an extraordinary volleyed pass. It barely got a mention at the time because the clock was running down and everybody was far too preoccupied with Paraguay’s ugly tactics, but it’s a moment of artistry and beauty — a pass that was so good that Desire Doue didn’t start running until after Olise made contact with the ball because, quite frankly, how on earth could the France winger have expected it?

“Oh my God,” says Conlon, laughing. “It has come into his path so it curls for him to run inwards — it’s got backspin on it, too! It’s so nuts and it’s all done deliberately.”

Conlon shakes his head and smiles.

“Michael’s so special. The sky’s the limit for him.”

For now, it’s all about trying to navigate a way past Spain to have a shot at winning a first World Cup.

Just don’t expect Olise to get carried away if France are crowned champions. Celebrations, much like interviews, aren’t really his thing. At Bayern Munich, he hid behind the Meisterschale trophy when he reluctantly, and half-heartedly, lifted it after being cajoled by his team-mates, who couldn’t help but laugh.

Staying cool with the World Cup in his hands could be trickier but you wouldn’t put it past him.

Jordan Spieth woke up on just two hours of sleep. He had flown overnight across the Atlantic, passing around the Claret Jug full of booze with friends and family. He was a few days away from turning 23. He wouldn’t be married for another year. Being a father was still a dream. Golf’s next big thing had just won his third major championship in one of the most eccentric ways possible. Nothing but good times in front of him.

So, lying in bed in his Dallas home, sleep was not in the cards. Not on adrenaline like this.

He texted his caddie, Michael Greller, who was sleeping in his guest room before a flight back to Seattle that afternoon.

“Can you sleep?” Spieth asked.

“No.”

“Do you want to watch it?”

It being that tournament less than 24 hours prior. Over in Southport, England, just north of Liverpool. The 2017 Open Championship, which Spieth won despite — perhaps because of — a 22-minute ordeal of confusion, patience and a whole lot of running up and down a steep hill of thick, shrubby dune grass. That sequence would be remembered as one of the more famous, hilarious stretches in recent golf history, maybe even the core memory of Spieth’s ever-entertaining prime. An errant tee shot. A lengthy ruling and deliberation. One hell of a bogey save from the driving range.

Spieth and Greller had never rewatched a tournament together. Nor had they ever watched one alone. Even with the Open returning to Royal Birkdale this week, Spieth said he still hasn’t made it a point to watch again since that Monday morning. That impulse was as unusual as the day that had preceded it.

“I don’t even think I will for another 20-something years,” Spieth told The Athletic as he revisited that epic Sunday in Southport.

But just that once, Spieth and Greller knew they had lived through something wild. They sat on the couch and watched through the lens of “what just happened?” They remembered few details of what they said to each other. Greller confessed he fibbed about a crucial yardage to get the correct play. He lied about a motivational quote, too.

And, of course, they tried watching that famous hole.

“I had to fast-forward through the 13th hole,” Spieth said. “I couldn’t watch it. It was taking way too long.”

On the other hand, he learned from watching just how absurd this scene was to viewers at home.

“The aerial views were nuts. I was like, man, if I could have just had a drone, I’d have made this go a lot faster.”

What he rewatched that morning was what the world saw on TV: A surreal scene featuring Spieth standing and pointing atop the steep hill like a conquering general and maneuvering through equipment trucks on the driving range to establish a makeshift drop zone. All while the other competitor in the arena, Matt Kuchar, stood and waited, with the biggest round of his life on the line. So, before the Open tees off Thursday for the final major championship of the year, let’s relive that 13th hole with the help of the man himself.

Spieth sat down Saturday evening with a three-shot lead, a game in control and the sporting world still wondering if he’d blow it. Five of the 11 questions reporters asked Spieth that night centered around handling a lead. They asked if he could close. They wondered if he’d gotten over past failures.

Let’s be honest. They were asking about the 2016 Masters.

It was just 14 months earlier that Spieth, the best player in the world and defending champ, had a five-shot lead on the back nine at Augusta National, and he collapsed. Fell apart. Choked. Bogey, bogey, quadruple bogey with two in the water on No. 12 to seal his defeat. He played solidly the rest of the year, but it was a clear dip from his all-time 2015 run. He was the golden boy, the next one-name star, and the difficult part about everybody willing you to win is facing their disappointment when you don’t meet their expectations.

Spieth said the anticipation at Augusta National was what killed him. Contrary to what you might assume, he believes playing when you have your A-game is far more stressful than when you don’t. When you’re not swinging it well, expectations are lower. Just make it work.

“But when you have it, your own expectations go through the roof, right?” he said. “’Cause you’re like, I know that I have this, and so this is definitely mine to win.”

And he had to wait at Royal Birkdale. From 7 a.m. until he went to the course in the afternoon, he sat in the rental house with his buddy Justin Thomas and watched the early coverage. How was the course playing? What was the wind like? That anticipation got to him a little. He kept worrying about the first tee shot. The wind would be pumping off the left all day, and he couldn’t hit driver because there was out of bounds on the right. He knew if he could just nail that first tee shot, he’d be out of trouble until the sixth hole.

He had this “high toe power draw” with his 3-wood he loved at the time, where he turned down the face a little at address. He had full command of it. And with all the nerves, he hit it perfectly. What a relief.

Wrong.

Instead of bouncing off the side slope left of the fairway, it missed by maybe two yards and stuck.

“I waited all day for that shot,” Spieth said. “I hit it exactly how I wanted to, and I thought I was gonna kind of get paid off for it, and it kind of stuck in the side rough and I ended up making bogey.”

Jordan Spieth, right, and his longtime caddie, Michael Greller, had a plan of how to attack Royal Birkdale on that final round. (Stuart Franklin / Getty Images)

That set the tempo. Bogey. Par. Bogey. Bogey. Birdie. Three more pars and a bogey to enter the back nine tied with Kuchar, who was seeking his first major championship. Nobody else was within four shots. The winner of the Open would be one of the two.

“People think about kind of 13 on, but that front nine was a big-time roller coaster,” Spieth said. “I had lost the lead, tried to get it back. Got it back a little, lost it again, and all of a sudden we made the turn, and it was like, man, what just happened?”

Spieth and Kuchar remained tied at 8-under as they approached 13.

Spieth was not aiming for the 13th fairway, but instead the right rough.

“We kind of had this strategy when the wind goes off the left and helping,” he said. “It’s a long hole, so you’d have to hit less than driver down the left side, and there’s bunkers guarding the whole thing. Or you could just blow it over the right bunker in the rough, and it was some of the lightest fescue.”

It was raining. Water was accumulating. Kuchar was in the fairway. Spieth was already lining up pretty far right, as was the intended strategy.

Then, he swung.

“There’s a chance it was a little bit of a water ball,” he said, “there’s a chance that I was late into it or whatever.”

Spieth immediately stepped back and held both his hands over his head, his mouth agape, like a little kid who just broke his parents’ window.

“When you’re watching guys hit, especially pros, you have a window where you expect the ball to be,” said John Wood, Kuchar’s caddie at the time. “I looked up, and I didn’t see it.”

The ball kept going right. And more right. And then even more right.

What’s right of the right rough? “It never even crossed my mind,” Spieth said.

When it was all said and done, Spieth’s third shot on the 13th hole came from the right of the Titleist truck. (Richard Heathcote / R&A via Getty Images)

The scenes that would soon unfold were unclear as Spieth picked up his tee and started walking, all while a hundred or so fans in rain jackets flocked toward a large hill. Spieth thought, “Just give me a swing.”

Spieth kept walking even when an R&A official told him they couldn’t find the ball. He wasn’t going to hit a provisional. The stubbornness that makes such an elite golfer doesn’t accept that.

Eventually, some fans told the official it hit somebody in the head and rolled down the bank. Another official pointed out another ball. Mass confusion ensued. There was more talk of hitting a provisional, but Spieth refused. The crowd brought at least three random balls to Spieth’s attention, but they weren’t his. “We cannot make a double. Doubles are killers,” Spieth told himself, as frustration mounted.

Spieth had to stay calm as he went through the proper steps. When they finally located his ball, it had indeed first landed atop a gentleman’s head and rolled down this thick, shrubby mound.

“The ball’s gonna roll ’til it comes to something that’s gonna stop it,” Spieth said. “Well, whatever’s gonna stop it isn’t gonna be good, unless it’s a person. And this was past the people.”

Spieth decided the ball sitting on a steep slope and potentially on a terrible lie wasn’t playable. “Then I just started to kind of go into problem-solving mode,” he said. “Like, all right, what are my options? What can I do here? Because we’re gonna try to do everything I can to make a five.”

He looked around at his options, and two club lengths in either direction for a drop would still be problematic. So he ran back up to the top of the hill. It cannot be overstated how tall and steep this hill is. Everybody else on the terrain took each step with extreme care to avoid a tumble. Spieth? Full speed up and down. To be young.

Greller kept suggesting he re-tee and, worst case, score a double-bogey six, but Spieth couldn’t accept that.

Those were the two most common applications of the rules concerning an unplayable ball, but a third option was available to Spieth. He could drop the ball back as far as he wanted on a straight line, as long as the original ball’s position remained directly between the new drop spot and the hole.

So as he stood on the hill, he found his path — back. Farther and farther back. Until, a thought: What about the driving range?

“I was 23, but I had been through already essentially a career’s worth of major championships in all kinds of positions,” Spieth said. “I remember being calm. I was just trying to be super efficient. Let’s just get moving; the more this is becoming a thing, the worse it is for me, for everyone.”

Meanwhile, Kuchar had already hit from the fairway, a great shot to 20 feet for a chance at birdie. Then, all he could do was wait. There were no hard feelings or annoyances. He and Wood knew everyone was just trying to get it right. But you also don’t know it’s going to go on for that long until it does.

Once Spieth took the unplayable, the hill blocked any view of what was actually going on. But there was a large broadcast screen down the left of the fairway. So they saw the situation unfold like everyone watching on TV.

“Matt was cool as a cucumber through the whole thing,” Wood said. “He wasn’t antsy, he wasn’t hurry up. He wasn’t, ‘What kind of a drop is this?’ He was just chatting. Telling stories.”

Matt Kuchar, left, inspects the Claret Jug alongside Spieth. (Stuart Franklin / Getty Images)

Once Spieth knew the range was in play, he knew exactly what he wanted to do — go way back to the range where the equipment trucks were, then get interference from the trucks to take a drop with a clear line. What really took so long was the officials deliberating over the nearest point of relief on the practice ground side. “I don’t think that was in the local rules sheet on potential options,” Spieth said.

Spieth asked about going another 30 yards past the trucks, which he could. He also got approval to drop in between the trucks, which would allow him interference. Then another official rushed over and established that they needed to go farther left and closer to the hole. Spieth was disappointed because it removed some room for error, but oh well. At least he didn’t have to climb on the truck for the drop. All involved agreed he could drop to the nearest side of the trucks.

Keep in mind, this all seemed like lunacy to those watching. NBC analyst Johnny Miller, who won the 1976 Open Championship at Royal Birkdale, said he would have gone back to the tee. But this is Jordan Spieth. He doesn’t do normal.

The next challenge was the yardage. There’s no yardage book from the range.

The one thing Greller knew for sure was that long was bad. Gorse bushes behind the green would mean another drop. Short was better. Spieth suggested it was 270 to the front of the green. Greller thought more like 230, maybe 240. Greller paced out a walk to the top of the dune to get at least a sense, and it further confirmed his belief that Spieth was overestimating the distance. Greller talked Spieth into switching from the 3-wood to a 3-iron.

“He was trying to hedge on the short side, and fortunately, he did,” Spieth said.

When Spieth finally hit, after all that time, he was not happy. He was frustrated and turned around in annoyance.

“I hit it a little high on the face,” he said. “So it was definitely coming out, and again, remember I thought I had further.”

That’s the key. In Spieth’s mind, he thought even a good shot would be short. So when he hit it a little fat, he thought the worst. In reality, Greller’s read was right. If Spieth had hit it well, it would have rolled right up to the green. Instead, his shot cleared a shrubby ridge and rolled to the first cut for a short chip.

Spieth immediately went to Kuchar, explaining the entire ordeal. The latter was understanding, which made the former feel a little better.

From there, Spieth still had a difficult chip with a bunker in front of him and a mound working down toward the pin. And he performed Spieth magic. He clipped it. Zero divot. A floppy little chip that bounced off the top of the mound and slowly rolled down the slope for an eight-foot putt. Once Spieth made it to save par, Greller knew what was about to happen. He visibly laughed as Spieth handed him his putter. “I knew that this was going to be just an absolute blast to the finish line — a total peace, and just buckle up. And I sensed it in him,” Greller told Golf Digest in 2018.

One moment, it looked like Spieth would double while Kuchar had a chance at birdie, a potential three-shot swing. Instead, Spieth trailed by just one with five to go.

“It felt like I gained a shot off of what I deserved,” Spieth said. “Which is typically mentally, you know, it’ll make you feel the same way going to the next.”

From there, Spieth played five of the best holes of his career. A “flow state,” he called it.

Kuchar had never won a major. Spieth respected the man 16 years his elder, but Spieth knew he had this edge. He kept telling himself, “Just have the closer putt on every hole.”

And he did exactly that, hitting approaches inside of Kuchar on each remaining hole. He put his approach on 14 just four feet from the pin for birdie. On 16, he made a 30-footer. On 17, it was seven feet. And on 18, he had an easy par while Kuchar bogeyed.

But it was on the par-5 15th that Spieth unveiled the most famous line of his career.

Spieth made a miraculous 50-foot eagle putt to give himself a two-stroke lead. But amid the roar of the Royal Birkdale crowd, Spieth didn’t celebrate. He backed away, pointed at the hole and shouted, “Go get that!” to Greller, a grin across his face the whole time.

“Go get that,” Spieth said, pointing to his putt that essentially clinched the 2017 Open. (Stuart Franklin / Getty Images)

The story goes that Spieth was working out earlier in the Birkdale gym while old Opens played on the TV, and he noticed the caddies would grab the ball out of the hole for players. For some reason, that stuck in his mind and he couldn’t help himself in his biggest moment.

At some point on those final holes, Spieth also went to Wood to apologize for 13. Wood replied that he should apologize for making all those putts.

What seemed like a Spieth collapse in the making turned into a three-shot win at the Open Championship.

Kuchar’s wife and kids were waiting on the 18th green, there to surprise him during what they hoped would be his moment of triumph. Instead, their reunion was filled with hugs and tears.

And Spieth, the boy wonder, got his third leg of the career Grand Slam. As he sat down for the Open Champion news conference, he had some jokes.

“We’re going to skip the first 12 holes, right?”