He had no idea what would lie ahead, but whatever it was, J.J. Spaun was ready to embrace it.<\/p>\n
Spaun first emerged from PGA Tour obscurity as one of its many rank-and-file members who\u2019d rarely reached anywhere near fame\u2019s doorstep when he vaulted himself into contention at the 2025 Players Championship at TPC Sawgrass.<\/p>\n
The 35-year-old Californian, who played the tournament of his life that week last March, lost to Rory McIlroy in a Monday playoff.<\/p>\n
Then, three months later, damned if he didn\u2019t go out and win the U.S. Open at Oakmont, one of the beasts in golf, putting a memorable exclamation point on the biggest victory of his life by holing a curling, twisting 64-foot walk-off birdie putt on the 72nd hole.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"He had no idea what would lie ahead, but whatever it was, J.J. Spaun was ready to embrace…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":706697,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[71],"tags":[427,301650,99,362,358,23234],"class_list":["post-706696","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-golf","tag-golf","tag-shinnecock-hills","tag-sports","tag-sports-columnists","tag-sports-plus","tag-us-open-golf"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/706696","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=706696"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/706696\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/706697"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=706696"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=706696"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=706696"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}