Much ink has been spilled on the role many fathers have played in helping to raise their PGA Tour professional sons. But what of the players’ mothers? What wisdom does a mother offer her son on the eve of a pivotal tournament? What small truths did she feed him over breakfast and afternoon snacks for the nearly two decades he spent in her care? At the heart of it, what is it really like to be a mother of a PGA Tour pro? We asked three of them. For the first installment of our three-part Mother’s Day series, Jordan Spieth’s mother, Chris, shared her story. Come back on Saturday and Sunday for Parts II and III.
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Chris Spieth — mother of a certain three-time major winner — remembers a cartoon her sister spotted years ago.
It depicted an elderly woman walking down the road, shoulders hunched, cane in hand. But on the wall just behind her, the woman’s shadow was dancing.
“My sister and I agreed,” Chris says. “That was our mom.”
Chris was born to Ginny and Bob Julius, in the middle of a large Pennsylvania family. When Ginny was 31 and pregnant with her sixth child, she had an aneurysm, which left her permanently paralyzed on one side of her body. Chris was 4 at the time.
“My mom raised six kids with half of her body,” Chris says. “She would fold laundry using her teeth and one hand, but she never saw herself as handicapped. She never complained. My mom was a saint.”
Also worthy of that designation was Chris’ father, who cared for his wife and children in the decades that followed.
“I would take my children to visit my parents in North Carolina for summer vacation,” Chris says. “They had a blast running around with their cousins while we were there, and they grew up watching their grandmom’s struggles. I think seeing how my dad cared for my mom helps Jordan and Steven to be better husbands and dads themselves.”
That would be Jordan, as in the über-popular 13-time PGA Tour winner; and Steven, as in Jordan’s younger brother, who briefly played professional basketball in Europe before settling into a sales job in the golf real-estate business.
Chris Spieth put herself through Movarian College in Bethlehem, Pa., where she played basketball and earned a degree in computer science in an era when it wasn’t common for women to do so. In 1988, she and her husband, Shawn, moved to Dallas, where she took a job as a network analyst with Neiman Marcus. Soon after, the couple had their first son, Jordan. Chris kept working because she felt it important that her children see her earn a paycheck.
During those little-kid years, Jordan and Steven played all the traditional Texas sports — basketball, football, baseball — often with their father in the coach’s jersey.
“My husband would take them to the driving range between the other sports seasons,” Chris says. “Back then, we didn’t have a club membership.” Eventually, the Spieths joined Brookhaven, a family-friendly country club that allowed the kids to play. “Still to this day, I don’t play golf,” Chris says. “My husband tries.”
A few years later, the Spieths had a daughter, Ellie, who was born prematurely with special needs. Chris quit her job and never went back. The profound impact Ellie has had on the lives of her brothers has been well publicized, but the road has not always been easy. Looking back, if Chris could tell her younger self one thing, it would be this: Everything will work out.
“I wouldn’t have listened 20 years ago,” she says. “But I’ve lived long enough now to see that it’s true: Everybody ends up where they’re supposed to be. Everything really will work out.”
She pauses for a beat.
“My mom always said that.”
Everybody ends up where they’re supposed to be.
Early in his development, Jordan played golf when he wasn’t playing anything else. But as he aged, his tee times accumulated. So, too, did his trophies.
“If it wasn’t first place, it went in the attic,” Chris says, alluding to her son’s fiercely competitive nature, inherited in part, she says, from his mother. “When his friends would come over, there were no trophies on display in his room. It was middle school, and kids would tease him for missing social events to play golf. So he hid his talent during those years.”
When Jordan was in 7th grade, his parents noticed a shift. Birthday parties, school festivities and even his treasured post on a competitive Dallas baseball team all took a backseat to golf.
“We took a chance and let him make the decision to give up being pitcher and first baseman on a team he really enjoyed,” Chris says. “We told ourselves, ‘If golf doesn’t work out, he can always go back to baseball.’” She and Shawn had grown up with the freedom of making their own decisions and living with the outcomes. They were committed to raising their children within that same paradigm.
Of course, golf did work out for Jordan. But had it not, Chris would still stand by this parenting philosophy. “It’s okay for kids to be disappointed,” she says. “We had other parents ask us how we could possibly let Jordan miss his 8th grade homecoming for the Ping Invitational, and we second-guessed ourselves. But we wanted our children to learn from the ways their decisions played out. So, when he wanted to leave baseball, we talked it over with him. When he wanted to miss homecoming, we let him choose.
“We let him decide, and left it at that.”
Once the Spieth boys reached high school, their parents encouraged them to lean hard into their dreams, which once again was influenced by Chris’s own upbringing. She recalls a car ride during her senior year of high school with her father, Bob. “When you are one of six kids, you rarely get your dad to yourself,” she says. “That conversation made an impact on me.”
While her father pushed all his children to get a college education, in the car he made it personal: “Chris, you need to get your education. You may not use it, but you won’t lose it.” A college education was a priority for Chris’ family, but they supported dream-chasing of any sort.
Chris and Shawn championed Bob’s message, and it guided how they encouraged their own boys as they became young adults. When Steven was considering taking college basketball to the next level, there was only one response: “Go. Try it. Do it. You’ll always regret not trying.”
When Jordan, midway through his sophomore year at the University of Texas, was considering the timing of his journey toward the PGA Tour, the same wisdom came echoing back, “Go. Try it. Do it. You won’t regret living your dream.”
These days, Chris spends her days doing pilates, babysitting grandchildren, helping with The Jordan Spieth Family Foundation and caring for Ellie, who is undaunted by the famous athletes she sometimes rubs up against.
“A while back, Ellie had a phone,” Chris says. “At golf tournaments, we would sometimes be invited back with other golfers and their families. When that happened, Ellie would work the room, taking selfies with Rickie Fowler, Rory McIlroy and lots of other PGA golfers. Then she would sit down, show us the photos and promptly delete them all. She didn’t understand that fans everywhere would love to have those selfies. These famous golfers were just ordinary people to her.”
In a similar vein, Ellie was given an autographed Dirk Nowitzki Mavericks jersey. To many fans, a piece of memorabilia like this would be priceless. Not so to Ellie. “She wears it like a T-shirt and runs it through the wash all the time,” Chris says. “She doesn’t care that the autograph is wearing off. To her, it’s just another shirt. People are just people — all the same. When you see life through Ellie’s eyes and you see fame the way she does, you start to realize, ‘I’m no big deal.’”
That’s one of the gifts Ellie has given Jordan. His sister’s perspective on fame seems to temper the way Jordan sees himself. The lessons he’s learned by being her brother play out in the way his foundation seeks to help other families with special needs children. “Jordan knows what it feels like to miss golf tournaments because his parents have to pay for therapies instead,” Chris says. “He knows how it feels to give up what he wants for what his sister needs.”
It’s hard to know with certainty what makes the world’s best golfers truly elite, what gives them the edge over thousands of other players with similar abilities, what gives them the mental fortitude to fight through missed cuts, winless droughts and self-doubt. Sometimes the answer is right there in front of you; but more often their secrets are hidden in their shadows on the wall.
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