Jordan Spieth stood on the 17th fairway at the Old Course late Monday afternoon with a 3-iron in his hand and history in his grasp. But the rain and wind that conspired to send the British Open to a fifth day weren’t finished with him yet.  As Spieth stared down his second shot, the skies above this seaside town dropped one more torrent of water on him. And suddenly, his bid to become only the second golfer to win the first three majors of the year started to slip away.  His approach shot landed in the rough. His par putt missed the hole. His next tee shot missed the fairway. His final birdie putt missed by inches.  And that is how Spieth went from sharing the lead to standing in front of the Royal and Ancient clubhouse about an hour later, watching someone else celebrate on the 18th green.  After Spieth finished just one stroke back, Zach Johnson beat Louis Oosthuizen and Marc Leishman in a playoff to win the Claret Jug on a riveting day of golf at the sport’s ancestral home. It was the second career major for Johnson, a 39-year-old American who also won the 2007 Masters. And it was an appropriately drawn-out ending for a tournament that included a 10-hour wind delay and its first Monday finish since 1988.  “Patience and perseverance” were paramount, Johnson said, and nobody embodied those traits better than him. After an opening-round 66, his next two rounds merely kept him in the thick of a jam-packed field of contenders. But he followed a second-round 71 and a third-round 70 with a six-under-par 66 on Monday to finish at 15 under for the tournament.  It was Johnson’s accuracy with his driver that put him in position to win. He hit 55 of 64 fairways, better by percentage than all but two other players. But it still took a 30-foot birdie putt on the 18th hole to send him to the playoff.  When the ball rolled in, his caddie, Damon Green, kicked the air, waved his towel and flapped his arms as he danced across the green.  Back on the 18th green for the end of the four-hole playoff, Oosthuizen had a putt from around 10 feet out that would have kept him tied for the lead. But after catching the lip of the hole, the ball stayed out to clinch the title for Johnson. As Johnson broke down in tears, Spieth went out to the green and hugged him.  “I’m very pleased with the way I played,” Spieth said earlier. “It’s just that’s the kind of golf that was played by the field this week. It just took some special golf. Whoever comes out the champion, that’s a hell of a major.”  The leaderboard was muddled enough when the day began, with three players tied for the lead and 11 others within three strokes. But a deep contest at the top became outright dizzying once everyone teed off.  At one point, there were 27 players within three shots of the lead. Eight players led or held a share of the lead for at least a fleeting moment. Six of them either had won previous majors or entered the tournament ranked among the top 10 players in the world.  “This to me was probably one of the most exciting Opens,” Oosthuizen said. “It’ll be great for golf if this is going to be the way forward.”  That Spieth fell short in his bid to win the third leg of golf’s Grand Slam was far from shocking. No golfer in modern history has done it. And only one, Ben Hogan in 1953, has won the Masters, the U.S. Open and the British Open in the same year.  The surprising thing was how Spieth lost. One of the major strengths that propelled him to stardom is his putting touch. He averages around 111 putts every four rounds, the fewest on the PGA Tour. But it took him 122 putts to get through the Open. “My speed control was really what cost me this week,” he said.  On Monday, Spieth got to 14 under with three birdies in his first seven holes, but his title hopes took a major blow on the par-3 eighth. After hitting his tee shot onto the 10th green side of the shared double green, Spieth hit his first putt past the hole and off the green. He then putted to within around five feet, but missed from there, resulting in a double bogey.  After picking his ball out of the hole, Spieth chucked it away in disgust. But he recovered with birdies on the ninth and 10th holes. And on No. 16, he sank a winding, 50-foot birdie putt to claim a share of the lead at 15 under.  That he stumbled in the end was less an indictment of his performance than an indicator of the improbability of what he was trying to accomplish. As he walked off the 18th green, Spieth waved and tipped his cap to the gallery, looking none the worse for what he had lost.  “I made a lot of the right decisions down the stretch and certainly closed plenty of tournaments out, and this just wasn’t one of those,” he said. “It’s hard to do that every single time.”  Write to Brian Costa at brian.costa@wsj.com
At the British Open, a shot at history inches away from Jordan Spieth, as he misses the playoff by one stroke. Zach Johnson would go on to win his second major.