From the Brink
to the Trophy

A Sunday you'll never forget

There are final rounds in major championship golf you watch and immediately know you'll remember for the rest of your life. JJ Spaun's Sunday at Oakmont was one of them. He didn't just win the 125th US Open — he survived it, clawed it back from the jaws of disaster, and punctuated it with one of the most dramatic putts in major championship history.

For anyone who studies the art and science of putting, his back nine was a masterclass in clutch performance under the most extreme pressure imaginable. Here's how it happened — and what the numbers behind it tell us.

A front nine to forget

Starting one shot behind 54-hole leader Sam Burns, Spaun looked well placed. Then the wheels came off almost immediately. A bogey at the first after missing the fairway. At the second, a near-perfect approach clanked off the flagstick and bounded back off the green — a likely tap-in birdie turned into a demoralising bogey. Three more dropped shots at the third, fifth and sixth followed, and he made the turn in a shocking 40 — five over for the nine.

He'd fallen five behind Burns. His win probability had dipped below two percent. For most players, that's where the story ends.

The rain delay that changed everything

At 4:01pm, with greens flooded and the course unplayable, officials suspended play for 96 minutes. For Spaun, the timing could not have been better. During the delay his short-game coach Josh Gregory found him and cut through the noise: it was Father's Day, he had two beautiful daughters, and he still had a chance to win the US Open. His swing coach Adam Schriber followed with a pep talk that bordered on a scolding. By the time play resumed, Spaun was a different man.

What happened next was the stuff of legend.

A back nine for the ages

As Spaun walked back out, the leaderboard crumbled around him. Burns was unravelling, Adam Scott dropping shots, Viktor Hovland struggling off the tee. Oakmont was coming back to the field — and Spaun was ready.

The turning point came at the par-five 12th, where he rolled a 41-foot birdie putt straight into the centre of the cup. The roar said everything: he was back. Two holes later at the 14th he drained a 22-footer to take the outright lead for the first time all round. A bogey at the brutal 15th knocked him back briefly, but at the driveable 17th he pulled off the shot of his week — a 314-yard drive onto the green — and calmly two-putted from 22 feet to retake the lead with one hole to play.

All he needed on the 18th was a two-putt from 64 feet to become a major champion. He needed just the one. The putt crested a slope halfway to the hole, tracked perfectly toward the flag, and dropped. Spaun erupted. His caddie was lifted off the ground. At the scorer's table, Robert MacIntyre — who'd just posted a brilliant 68 — could only watch and applaud.

The stats behind the victory

Spaun holed a total of 401.5 feet of putts across the week — the most of anyone in the championship. His Sunday back nine told the story of a putter performing at its absolute peak when it mattered most:

That 64-footer on the last gained him +1.24 strokes on the field in a single stroke — more than the best putters on the PGA Tour gain in an entire round on average. His final-round Strokes Gained Putting figure of +2.29 was second in the whole field for the week.

Spaun climbed to 40th on the PGA Tour in Strokes Gained Putting in 2025 — a remarkable rise from 108th the year before, a transformation he credits largely to switching to a L.A.B. Golf DF3 putter, the first L.A.B. putter ever used to hole a winning putt in a men's major.

The putter is the great equaliser

Spaun entered the week at 120-1, having never finished better than 23rd at a major. Twelve months earlier he'd been contemplating walking away from the game after struggling to keep his Tour card. On Father's Day 2025 he stood on Oakmont's 18th green as US Open champion — the only player in the entire field to finish under par for the week.

His back-nine 32 was the second-best closing nine in Oakmont US Open history, behind only Johnny Miller's legendary 31 in 1973, and he joined Hogan, Nicklaus, Watson and Rahm as the only players to finish birdie-birdie to win the US Open. For putting students and coaches, his round is a reminder that ball-striking matters and course management matters — but when the pressure is at its absolute peak, it's the player who can read the green, commit to the line and roll the ball with conviction who walks away with the trophy. Line, speed and read. The 64-footer will be replayed for decades, but it was the 41-footer on 12 — holed with nothing left to lose — that truly won the 2025 US Open.

How does your putting stack up?

Want to know how your putting compares to the tour pros? Track every putt, measure your edge on the greens, and see exactly where you gain and lose shots — the same Strokes Gained numbers that told Spaun's story.

2025 US Open questions