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.
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.
‘Everything will work out’
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.
Chris Spieth