Quite likely you hadn’t heard of J.J. Spaun before his come-out-of-nowhere-and-behind heroics Sunday to win the U.S. Open.
But I’ll tell you this: Everyone who happened to be near a San Dimas High School golfer – past or present – on Sunday likely heard about what Spaun did.
Because the Saints have known about Spaun for years, and they’ve been following closely, all the way until his 64-foot birdie putt that punctuated his fairytale Father’s Day finish at Oakmont Country Club in Pennsylvania. And “once he hit that put,” said Madison Haas, a former Saint who was home after her freshman year at UCLA, “me and my family went crazy.”
“It was just a constant back and forth with players,” said Jason Clark, San Dimas’ golf coach. “During the weather delay, on the edge of our seats, and then everybody’s neighborhood was woken up when he made the 64-foot putt on the 18th hole.”
“It was electric,” said Adrian Nazzal, who is now at the University of San Diego, studying math and computer science and golfing recreationally whenever he has time, using the Srixon clubs that Spaun gifted every member of the 2023 San Dimas team.
Clark knows he sounds like a broken record, continually telling people, “It couldn’t happen to a nicer person.”
But what else can he say about Spaun, the Dodgers- and Lakers-loving #GirlDad, the hard-working, (previously) unheralded underdog?
About the 34-year-old who turned pro in 2012 and didn’t forget his roots, showing up after he won his first PGA Tour event to pay homage to his late high school coach Doug Shultz, donating a bench on campus in his honor?
About the former San Diego State Aztec walk-on who, in this weekend’s instant classic, was the only player to shoot below par, the Southern Californian solving soggy Oakmont as it confounded so many of the world’s best golfers?
Sometimes a nice guy finishes first.
Because, oh, what’s possible when a nice guy doesn’t give in!
“As bad as things were going, I just still tried to just commit to every shot,” Spaun told reporters at the event, where he had found himself four shots behind when he was saved by the rain delay that allowed him to reset and finish his second U.S. Open at 1-under 279.
“I tried to just continue to dig deep,” the 34-year-old said. “I’ve been doing it my whole life.”
Listening to Spaun string together pearls of motivation during his championship news conference, I would have believed it if you’d told me he was a swing coach or a life coach. Either one, because the message was clear: Don’t give up.
“I just felt like you keep putting yourself in these positions, like eventually you’re going to tick one off,” he said. “I don’t put myself in this position often, or at all, for a major, that’s for sure. This is only my second U.S. Open. But all the close calls that I’ve had on the PGA Tour this year has just been really good experience to just never, never give up.”
That was true during Sunday’s round.
It was true after being cast as Rory McIlroy’s playoff victim in this year’s Players Championship in March, when the 39-time winner made short work of Spaun, whose only win, then, had come in 2022 at the Valero Texas Open.
And it was true when Spaun was much younger, too. Clark said locally, at San Dimas’ Via Verde Country Club and Pomona’s Mountain Meadows Golf Course, Spaun is remembered as a diligent kid who put in a lot of time working on his game. Nonetheless, “I wasn’t really groomed to be a professional golfer,” he said Sunday. “I didn’t get put through academies. I didn’t play the AJGA. I played local stuff.”
So he found himself at San Diego State, where longtime coach Ryan Donovan remembers, “I didn’t even give him a scholarship, just offered him a spot on the team and said, ‘See if you can get better.’” You betcha. He became the Mountain West Conference’s best player in 2012, and a two-time all conference selection and a five-time college winner, someone who Donovan assumed would have a steady career making $1.5 million a year or so after beginning his pro career in Canada and then joining the PGA Tour in 2017.
So when, a few years later, Spaun was toiling on Tour, lonely and grinding and feeling the urge to focus instead on family, he called Donovan and told him: “I think I’m done.”
Donovan understood, he said, but his honest advice: “If you can still do it, you’re very gifted and talented, and hopefully you can overcome this.”
He took his coach’s counsel, put the idea of teaching to the side and kept competing, kept fighting, kept pushing and until he found himself in contention this past weekend at the U.S. Open, where he weathered the weather and came out on top, having a day that changed his life – as some days will.
Clark, San Dimas’ coach, said Spaun’s unsolicited, unexpected outreach in 2023 changed the lives of not just the players in his program – which has, since then, added a girls’ team and moved up four divisions in four years after winning three consecutive leagues titles on the boys’ side – but that it changed his, too.
In 2023, Clark had recently lost his older brother. He remembers feeling the weight of grief and new responsibilities, thinking he wasn’t the guy to lead a team of young golfers.
“I felt like if I wasn’t going to be helpful, then I shouldn’t be doing it,” he said.
But then Spaun showed up and lit a fire – or in Clark’s case, rekindled it.
It wasn’t just getting new clubs that gave San Dimas that “booster shot,” Clark said. It wasn’t even necessarily the behind-the-scenes VIP tour of the Srixon corporate facility that Spaun arranged for, either, though that was “very cool,” Haas said.
“It was just meeting him,” Nazzal said. “Really a pure-hearted guy … it wasn’t like a ‘higher person’ coming and giving something for the good of his image. It felt like a personal, genuine act of duty.”
It was that he took time on his visits to campus to share memories of playing the same courses the San Dimas players did, to answer questions about college and pro golf, what to do and what not to. To chat with Haas, who had been the only girl on the then-all-boys’ team, and when he learned she also played three other sports, tell her she reminded him of a Mookie Betts, the Dodgers’ all-around athlete: “Honestly, I live off that,” said Haas, who had been a sophomore short on confidence. “I was like, ‘Wow, that’s such a compliment.’ It was something I needed to hear.”
A literal San Dimas Saint, Spaun.
How could Clark quit after witnessing that?
“I remember it like it was yesterday, how much it hit home for me,” Clark said. “He gave me the love back, that feeling I needed again: ‘I can do this, I’m going to stay committed and let’s rock and roll.’”
The Saints haven’t looked back, and they haven’t quit golfing either, Clark said, continuing to play in various capacities as collegians, better for having golf in their lives.
Not only because it’s bred confidence and given them social connections, Nazzal said, but because it’s inspired him to pay it forward too.
“I’ve always thought about being able to bless people with the blessings I have myself,” Nazzal said. “But seeing someone doing it for me, being on that end and knowing how great it feels, that makes me want to do it even more. I want to give that same feeling.”
