Introducing Dallas’ Jordan Spieth

By Jesus A. Garcia Jr.

DALLAS, TEXAS—-Dallas sports fans here including some of our countrymen who are golf lovers were so ecstatic last Sunday upon learning that their homegrown kid, the unheralded and little-known Jordan Spieth had won the world’s most prestigious 2015 Masters Golf Tournament in Augusta, Georgia. Dallas resident Leo Palaganas formerly from Dagupan City who watched the final day of the competition was so elated when he told us the news when we met for a dinner hosted by the ageless Ms. Eleanor Ignacio, formerly from Calasiao.

Spieth, 21, who will be given a hero’s welcome by the city government for bringing honor to Texas, is the second youngest golfer to win the Masters, next to Tiger Woods who won the Masters in 1997 at the age of 21. Spieth, will be 22 years old in three months. The Masters is Spieth’s first major victory that earned him $1.8 million and it catapulted him to No.2 in the world’s PGA Tour ranking. He is the fifth man in the history of the 79 year-old Masters to lead from the start to finish and ended with 270 to edge world elite golfers Justin Rose, Phil Mickelson and Woods, to name some. (Humility aside, Spieth’s feat reminds me of how I won the 1973 Tour of Luzon, by ruling it from the first stage to the tenth and final day of the bikathon. That record still stays.)

Sports runs in the veins of the Spieth’s family. Jordan’s father, Shawn, was a baseball player while his mother Chris as cager during their college days. His brother Steven, a sophomore in Brown University, is a starting guard in Ivy Basketball League.
The Dallas Cowboys were a five-time Super Bowl champions while the Dallas Mavericks and National Basketball Association’s (NBA) 2011 champions while the Dallas Mavericks won the NBA in 2011. Sual-born, now San Diego-based Gerald Valdez said Speith “will be golf’s Michael Jordan, being young, talented, inspired, disciplined and determined to dominate the world of golf like what Woods did in his younger days.” I agree.

What say you my cumpadre and Punch colleague Al S. Mendoza?

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I was at San Diego International Airport bound for San Francisco last April 8 when the TV report flashed the news that the 2013 Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was found guilty in 30 counts by 12 jurors. He had that coming since the pieces of evidence gathered proved he had planned it with his brother who was later killed by the police.  

I don’t understand why sports cannot even be spared from terroristic acts. It also happened during the 1972 Munich Olympic Games where eleven Israel Olympic team members were taken hostage and eventually killed along with a German police officer. Sports serve friendship, harmony, unity and camaraderie among people, but I guess terrorists find killing sportsmen as another path that leads to their paradise.

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QUOTE OF THE WEEK: Because “All flesh is as grass, an all the glory of man as the flower of the grass. The grass withers, and its flowers fall away. But the word of the Lord endures forever.” Now this is the word which by the gospel was preached to you. 1 PETER 1: 24-25

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