20-year-old steals thunder, joins Bubba

AUGUSTA, Georgia – Even without golf’s biggest star, this suddenly is shaping up as a Masters for the ages.

Jordan Spieth, playing a brand of big-time golf that belies his 20 years, kept his cool amid the chaos of Saturday at Augusta National. He was too busy trying to handle a lightning-fast golf course to even look at a leaderboard until he couldn’t avoid them over the closing holes of a wild round.

His name at the top with Bubba Watson was compelling enough.

It’s been 83 years since a player this young won a major, and 35 years since anyone won the Masters on his first try.

Two shots behind was 50-year-old Miguel Angel Jimenez of Spain, rattling off seven birdies for a tournament-best 66 that gave him a shot at becoming the oldest winner in 154 years of championship golf. And still very much in the picture is Fred Couples, the 54-year-old who won his green jacket a year before Spieth was born.

The only mention of Tiger Woods, absent from Augusta National for the first time in 20 years, was whether Spieth could replace him as the youngest Masters champion.

“For a 20-year-old, he’s pretty savvy. Not much bothers him,” said Couples, who picked Spieth for the Presidents Cup. “Tomorrow obviously is going to be a really, really hard day to try to win this. But he’s well qualified to do it.”

Spieth managed one last par from the deep fairway bunker on the 18th hole for a 2-under 70. In his first Masters, he has broken par all three rounds.

That gave him a share of the lead with Watson, whose five bogeys in a round of 74 brought so many players back into the mix. Watson had a three-shot lead at the start of the third round. When he walked off the 18th green with a par, nine players were separated by three shots.

Spieth and Watson were at 5-under 211.

“Today was moving day,” Spieth said. “And tomorrow is about seeing how I can control my game and emotions out on the golf course against guys that have even won here recently. So they have been in the position I haven’t. Doesn’t necessarily mean - I don’t think - that they have an advantage in any way. I think that I’m very confident in the way things are going. And really looking forward to tomorrow.”

Woods was 21 when he won his first Masters in 1997. Spieth would be the youngest major champion since Tom Creavy, who was a few months younger than Spieth when he won the 1931 PGA Championship.

But there’s a lot of traffic on the road to a green jacket, mostly because of Watson. He stretched his lead to five shots with a 7-iron to 6 feet for eagle on the second hold. He made only one birdie the rest of the way, a round sprinkled with putts that he either rammed too hard or left woefully short. Even so, the former.