A five-hour rule? This pro’s wife introduced him to the clever move
J.J. Spaun hits a shot on Friday on the 4th hole at the Plantation Course at Kapalua.
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Melody Spaun gets golf. Though, maybe at first, it was all a bit peculiar.
“I was like, yeah, I’m a pro golfer. Because I thought I was cool,” her husband, J.J. Spaun, said, recalling their first date. “But she’s like, ‘I don’t even know. What does that mean? Like, does that mean you’re like rich or something?’ I was like, no. And she’s like, I don’t really care. And I was like, all right.
“And we went like mini-golfing or something, and she’s like, this is lame.”
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Good stuff. Still, they got married, in 2019, and they have a 2-year-old daughter, Emerson. This week, the gang’s all in Hawaii, at the Tournament of Champions, where Spaun co-led after Thursday’s first round. And that brings us to J.J. Spaun’s five-hour rule. And Melody Spaun’s newfound understanding of golf.
J.J., you see, can work on his game. Or not. He can slack too. But with wife and daughter in tow this week, he was told by Melody he had 300 minutes at the Plantation Course at Kapalua. Five hours. Though, truthfully, how much more do you need sometimes?
“It was good,” he said Thursday. “Maybe I should stick to it. Five hours allotment of like, OK, you get five hours. You got to be back by this time, because sometimes I can get like stuck out here for a long time.”
“That’s kind of high pressure, though?” a reporter asked.
“Yeah, so it kind of makes me productive,” Spaun said. “I don’t mess around and fraternize or socialize with everyone. Kind of just do my thing. Get it in there.”
The results speak for themselves. On Thursday, he carded nine birdies. And J.J. said he and fam have had their time — “beach and like just being a dad, having fun, mai tais, chilling at the beach.” And that begged this question from a reporter:
“It worked today. Does she think the rule should be five hours going forward?”
“I’m like maybe five hours, if I know like my game is like really good,” he said. “Which I felt confident where I didn’t need to be searching or grinding on too much stuff.
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“So it’s going to be hard. She said, well, yeah, if you start missing some cuts, we can adjust; we can add a couple hours there. This is, these are the conversations I have. I’m not even joking. I mean, this is how, our marriage, we don’t, you know, it doesn’t get too sideways. Happy wife, happy life.”
Indeed. Notably, PGA Tour pros and their wives’ knowledge of the game has been a popular subject this week in press conferences. Scottie Scheffler dished that his wife, Meredith, knew “zero” about the game when they met in high school. Justin Thomas said wife Jillian’s understanding was “very low.” Each player had stories.
“So her level of golf knowledge was very low,” Thomas said Wednesday. “So she went to college with all my friends at Kentucky, and that’s how I met her. Whenever I would go back home, I would visit my friends at UK, and she was best friends with all my best friends.
“So I met her and she tells a funny story of, earlier that year was when I think I had won Malaysia [in 2015 and ’16] or something like that to where all my friends, being the good friends that they are, had the bar put the golf on. Because of the time change, it was 12 o’clock, 1 in the morning, the golf was on. She tells the story of, I was so confused why my friends wanted to put golf on at the bar at like 12 or 1 o’clock. Like it made no sense. Like she didn’t really ask, but just was, in her head, was like, that’s really weird. And then once we met and we became friends, she understood; OK, this makes sense.
“And to the level of her golf knowledge, I was texting with her today and told her that the pro-am might be a little bit longer because it’s cart path only. And she asked: What is cart path only? So I had to explain cart path only to her.
“But it’s — she’s learning.”
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And Scheffler’s?
“I remember specifically when we dated in high school I got an opportunity — I won the U.S. Junior in 2013,” said Scheffler, who married Meredith in December of 2020. “And in 2014, I had the opportunity to play in the Byron Nelson as a high school student. And Meredith, like I was at her house one day, we were hanging out with her dad or something, and the commercial came on TV. And she was kind of looking around, she was like, wait a minute, isn’t that next weekend, isn’t that what you’re doing? And I was like, yeah, that’s what I’m doing. She’s like, wow, that’s cool. And I was like, OK.
“And she’s learned fast.”
What about Melody Spaun? On Thursday, J.J. was asked: “On a scale of 1 to 10, what would you give her now?”
“She’s a 10. She’s a 10. A 10,” Spaun said. “Like as far as like accepting the lifestyle.”
“Does she know what TIO means?” a reporter joked, referring to the initials for temporary immovable obstruction.
“I don’t even know what that means,” Spaun said, laughing. “No, but, yeah, she’s really big on me having a balance in my life. So it works.”
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