The footprints were there for Jordan Spieth to follow — the footprints of Arnold Palmer, Jack Nicklaus and Tiger Woods in their pursuit of golf’s most elusive prize, a calendar-year Grand Slam. Spieth has followed those footprints through the towering pines of the Masters and the tangled rough of the United States Open at Chambers Bay to the British Open, which starts Thursday on the Old Course at St. Andrews in Scotland.
But the British Open is where those previous footprints disappeared — Palmer in 1960 at St. Andrews, and Nicklaus in 1972 and Woods in 2002, both at Muirfield.