Everybody loves getting their favorite players’ autograph, but some folks are in it for different reasons. Autographs are a big business, and Jordan Spieth made it clear he would prefer to have nothing to do with it. On Wednesday after his practice round for the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am, Spieth got into a verbal altercation with a group of grown men who he deemed to be professional autograph seekers.
After finishing his round, the group of adults started to heckle Spieth after the 23-year-old walked past them without signing for them. The two-time major winner then accused the men of trying to profit off his name by selling the items online and that he’d investigated evidence of it.
“It’s not really worth me spending time arguing, but I’m just not really appreciative of people who travel to benefit off of other people’s success,” Spieth told reporters after the incident. “I enjoy signing and I sign for kids whenever we get the chance. But these guys have these items that you’ve already seen online.
“Our team keeps track of that kind of stuff, and these guys just have bags of stuff to benefit from other people’s success when they didn’t do anything themselves. Go get a job instead of trying to make money off of things we’ve been able to do.”
Jordan Spieth’s autograph vs Spieth’s autograph if he thinks someone is a professional autograph chaser pic.twitter.com/RMRBxmEcML
— GreenJacketAuctions (@BidGreenJacket) February 9, 2017
When Spieth stopped to sign an autograph for a young boy, things got worse. Spieth said one of the men used an “F-bomb in front of three kids,” and that caused him to get angry and confront the men by starting with, “C’mon, guys, there are children here.”
“I felt the need to turn around and tell them that wasn’t right,” Spieth said. “A couple of them were saying, ‘You’re not Tiger Woods, don’t act like you’re Tiger.’ But here he’s still trying to benefit off me and I’m not even Tiger Woods. What does that say about you? So yeah, I get into it here and there. I was just a little frustrated at the end, and I didn’t appreciate the language that was used. It was just some scums that bothered me.
“If you ask anybody universally, it’s frustrating and they frustrate us,” he said of those types of autograph seekers.
[ESPN]
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