J.J. Spaun wins the U.S. Open. Saves it, too.

A miserable bogey-fest becomes one of the most memorable Opens in history after Spaun's 64-foot putt on 18.

Spaun and caddy Mark Carens after the winning putt.

When the young John Michael Spaun wasn’t on a golf course, he was on a skateboard, and he didn’t always ride the sidewalk either. No, the kid was a performer. Most people can’t fall on concrete indefinitely without a problem, and J.J. Spaun eventually picked golf over fractures. But two things translated, both related to balance. He learned how to keep himself upright, and when he couldn’t, he learned how to get up.

Most of the fourth round of the U.S. Open, Sunday afternoon at Oakmont, looked more like The Pitt than Pittsburgh. The field began marching backwards from the starting gun. Spaun led the retreat when he started with five consecutive 5s, four of which were bogeys, and then bogeyed the par-3 sixth. He slid from three-under-par to two-over, but as the clouds hurried in and the body parts around him kept mounting, he realized he was really skating in place.

At that point the Open looked like a time-honored USGA fiasco, tailored by bureaucrats and encouraged by the Oakmont membership to make the best players in the world look like steelworkers after a graveyard shift. Anything that reached the rough was swallowed whole, and players faced 15-foot par putts on electric slides. During the rain delay, NBC showed highlights of Tiger Woods at his most mythical, winning the U.S. Open at Torrey Pines on a shattered leg 17 years ago. The viewership had to be disappointed when the rain stopped, and it was whisked back to grim reality at Oakmont.

Then, suddenly, joy dispelled the tedium. Spaun hammered a drive to the short par-4 17th and made a birdie to grab a one-shot lead over Robert MacIntyre, who was safely in the clubhouse. He hit an even better drive on the 18th and left his approach 64 feet from the pin, and when Viktor Hovland left his approach just behind Spaun’s ball, the 34-year-old from San Dimas, Ca. knew he would get directions to the cup. Spaun studied Hovland’s miss and then putted away, and away, and away, and the ball fell into the cup like a cliff diver. It was the longest putt Spaun had made all season. It also gave him the U.S. Open championship.

Inside the clubhouse, MacIntyre watched, nodded, and broke into applause. Tyrell Hatton, watching as he was discussing his round with the press, shook his head and said, “He holed it. Unbelievable. What a way to win it. Incredible.”

The crowd at Oakmont celebrated as if Rory McIlroy or even Arnold Palmer’s ghost had done that. For only the fifth time in tournament history, a champion had won with birdies on the 71st and 72nd holes.

Spaun saved the Open from itself. He rendered moot a bleak two-hole playoff on Monday morning, with MacIntyre. He made sure nobody was still talking about a 15th-hole ruling that forced Sam Burns, the most solid player in the field for two-and-a-half days, to play a ball out of casual water, or what playing partner Adam Scott described as a “hydroplane.” Burns took a double bogey and wound up shooting 78, but he refused to criticize the officials, although he was heard to mutter, “That’s ridiculous,” in the direction of caddie Travis Perkins when his shot out of the puddles squirted into more rough. Had Spaun not rewritten the day, there would have been critics galore.

So many things about this bordered on the-miraculous. Spaun shot 40 on the front. No Open champion had done that on any nine holes since (drum roll) Francis Ouimet in 1913, he of Greatest Game Ever Played fame. And Spaun shot 32 on the back. No Open champion had done that on Sunday since (cymbal clash) Tiger Woods in 2000.

Spaun had no double bogeys in the tournament, but he missed six greens on Sunday and saved pars on none of them. He was 58th, out of 66 players, in off-the-tee performance in Round 4.

Spaun was having an outstanding year by any standard, particularly his own. He lost a playoff to McIlroy at the Players Championship. He was second in Palm Beach and third in Hawaii. But this time last year he was underwater, worried that he’d lose his PGA Tour card as he did in 2021, thinking seriously about quitting and spending time with wife Melody and his two daughters. Always prone to self-doubt and tension, Spaun decided that he would merely quit worrying. Down the stretch he finished third in Greensboro, ninth in Minnesota and sixth in Japan, and thus was safe, although he still was ranked 112th in the world at season’s end. He is ranked eighth today.

This was only the seventh major championship appearance of his career and the first time he finished higher than 35th. He qualified for the Open Championship in 2020, but it was canceled by Covid. Barring another plague, he’ll be there this year, and he assuredly has barged his way onto the U.S. Ryder Cup team.

None of it was possible without his equanimity, or maybe his eerie confidence, or maybe he was just oblivious. He did indeed get punctured by golf’s fickle finger. On the second hole his approach shot hit the flagstick and bounced off the green and down the fairway. So? Spaun had to spend his first three professional years on the Canadian Tour, losing his card after the second year. He responded by breaking the tour’s money record his third year, and graduating to what’s now the Korn Ferry Tour, consisting of players who get to the edge of the velvet rope.

On the third hole Spaun’s approach shot appeared to settle on the back of the green, but it hit a bunker rake and disappeared into the jungle. Another bogey. So? Spaun for years had been diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes, but from 2018 to 2021 he kept losing energy, and weight. He lost his card in 2021 but found that his condition had been misdiagnosed, and he actually had Type 1. With his medicine straightened out, Spaun gained back the weight and began his career in earnest.

The luck turned when the storm hit, splattering Oakmont with rains too intense to play through. Spaun was just putting his tee on the ground at No. 9. He went inside, changed his clothes, rearranged his mind and apparently recharged his putter. Call it the Immaculate Suspension.

He made a 40-foot birdie putt on the 12th to get back in the game, and a 22-footer on the 14th. He and MacIntyre had been tied with Burns, Scott and Hatton, but everyone else peeled off.

“I remember Tiger Woods saying that all you have to do in that situation is stay there,” Spaun said. “You don’t have to do anything crazy. I made a couple of putts and all of a sudden I was tied. It’s like my whole career. You just keep putting one foot in front of the other. You never give up.”

Let’s not pretend Spaun was playing perfect golf when the bad mojo hit. He wasn’t. But nobody else was, and the bad breaks bounced off Spaun while they burrowed into the bloodstream of everyone else.

Burns was five-over for the day before he became waterlogged on No. 15. Scott, the people’s choice at 44, had four bogeys and one birdie on the front, then was four-over on holes 14-16 and finished 12th. He shot 79 and Burns 78. Hovland had periodic putting woes, as sometimes happens, and shot 73. Scottie Scheffler shot 70-70 for the weekend and finished seventh, but he missed five putts within five feet. MacIntyre, a 2-time winner on last year’s PGA Tour, was bidding to become the first southpaw U.S. Open champ and went 69-68 on the weekend with an eagle and three birdies Sunday. All of them, eventually, were looking up at Spaun, and a trophy that he found in the tall grass, among the abandoned Titleists.

Spaun is a well-known L.A. sports fan and he grinned over the possibility of throwing the first pitch at a Dodgers’ game. Presumably it’ll be down the middle, maybe with a little fade. He also was asked if Sunday had put him in Kobe Bryant’s category. He quickly said the win was more reminiscent of Derek Fisher, beating San Antonio with :0.4 to go, 21 years ago.

Fisher didn’t have to ring the bell from 64 feet, but he and Spaun both changed the legacy of an event with one stroke. For Spaun, it took a short memory to create another one long enough for a lifetime, and not just his.