Valero Texas Open Round 2: Spaun Shares the 36-Hole Lead as the Augusta Countdown Colors Everything in San Antonio
Every conversation at TPC San Antonio this week has a secondary track running beneath it, and that secondary track sounds like Amen Corner. The Masters starts one week from Thursday. The Valero Texas Open is a legitimate professional golf tournament with real prize money and real consequences — and several players in this field are treating it exactly like that. But the background hum of Augusta National, four days and 500 miles away, is audible throughout the week whether the players want to acknowledge it or not.
J.J. Spaun is one of the players treating the Valero as an end in itself rather than a prelude. He added a 68 to his opening 67 to reach 11-under and share the 36-hole lead with Andrew Putnam, who has quietly assembled one of the cleaner first halves of the week. Behind them, the leaderboard is tight in a way that suggests Saturday's moving day will produce genuine drama rather than just rearranging deck chairs.
Spaun's Case for the Trophy
Spaun won the Valero Texas Open in 2022. He has since added a U.S. Open title to his résumé, which places him in a category of players whose case for sustained excellence is no longer theoretical. His 68 Friday at TPC San Antonio's AT&T Oaks Course was exactly the kind of round his game profile predicts: fair fairway percentage, elite proximity from the 125-175 yard range, and enough made putts to convert opportunity into score. He doesn't make 25-footers very often. He makes 12-footers more often than almost anyone in the field, and TPC San Antonio tends to serve up a lot of 12-footers if your approach game is sharp enough to create them.
Three shots back are Robert MacIntyre and Ludvig Aberg, both of whom have been too good this week to dismiss as peripheral figures. MacIntyre's ball-striking in particular has been exceptional — he's ranking in the top five in the field in strokes gained: approach after two rounds, which on this course is a number that correlates very strongly with winning.
The Cut and What It Tells Us
The cut fell at 2-over, which is slightly more generous than TPC San Antonio's reputation suggests it should be, primarily because the morning wave caught better conditions than the afternoon wave on both Thursday and Friday. Several Masters contenders found themselves on the wrong side of the line after two rounds, which simplifies their Augusta preparation considerably (they'll have the week off) but complicates any narrative about San Antonio as a useful pre-Masters tune-up.
The players who made the cut — and who are contending at various distances — include the core group you'd expect at a course that rewards specific skills. Matt Wallace is at 8-under in fifth, having played the Oaks Course with the kind of workmanlike consistency that doesn't generate headlines but generates scoreboards. Michael Kim is at 7-under. Both are close enough to have weekend relevance if the leaders wobble on Saturday.
Spaun leads or co-leads entering the weekend of a tournament he's won before. His form is good. His game suits the course. The only real question is whether the one-week-until-Augusta mental undertow pulls at him the way it pulls at players who haven't yet won at the majors level — and the answer to that question, for a U.S. Open champion who's already been there, is probably no.