Jordan Spieth enters weekend at U.S. Open under par despite five bogeys

PEBBLE BEACH, CALIF. – As if stunningly beautiful Pebble Beach doesn't provide enough sights and sounds itself, three-time major winner Jordan Spieth's second-round 69 at the 119th U.S. Open Championship became a swirl of color and clanking metal.

Golf's scoreboards are coded red for birdies, black for pars, green, blue or yellow for bogeys or worse. Spieth's Friday morning stroll along the Pacific and into the forest colored his 2-under-par scorecard that offered seven birdies, five bogeys — seemingly everything but primarily the banker's favorite, in the black.

"I made up one shot on the lead," Spieth said, referring to the 70 that playing partner and leader Justin Rose shot, "but it felt like more."

It moved him 1 under par for the championship and left him within eight shots of leader Gary Woodland entering the final two rounds of a major championship that Spieth won at Chambers Bay in 2015.

It also left him still optimistic about achieving a fourth major, nearly two years after he won his last in the British Open at Royal Birkdale.

"If I were 1 under with two birdies and a bogey, I wouldn't be as optimistic about the weekend," he said.

Instead, the seven birdies he made Friday — including an opening one at the long, tough 10th hole, his first — tell him his putter still can roll it like he did when he won those three majors before his 24th birdie.

"Today was a kind of could-have-been round," Spieth said. "Obviously, I don't want to paint as many bogeys on the scorecard as I have these first two days. To be under par at the U.S. Open with eight bogeys in two days means things are in a good place. I've just got to limit those mistakes."

Case in point was his 11th hole Friday, when he drove at the 516-yard, par-4 second hole into a fairway bunker. His ball rolled into an upslope at the bunker's front, leaving him an uphill lie with the bunker's foreboding lip lined with feathery grass facing him.

He drew a 6-iron from his bag, stepped down into the bunker and set his feet in the powdery sand below his ball. He took a mighty swing, attempting to reach the green 200 yards away.

It traveled 15 feet before there came a mightier thwack that resonated off trees and echoed back toward the ocean behind him.

"Oh, it hit the rake," Spieth incredulously said to both himself and caddie Michael Greller. "There's a rake there. It got over the lip, but it hit the rake."

The ball settled directly down in that tall grass, but from there he still saved bogey after he hacked the ball out 40 yards and still reached the hole's bottom in two more shots from 162 yards away.

"That's on me," Spieth said. "I've got to look at all the options ahead of me. If there's a rake in front of the bunker, typically we pull them out. But I couldn't see it. If I had seen it, I would have moved it. I was trying to clear it higher than that anyways. It's a tough break where it ended up. It happens. It's the U.S. Open. Things sometime bounce the other way.