The questions had subsided in recent years, but they’re back now: Is Jordan Spieth thinking about the career Grand Slam at this week’s PGA Championship?

Of course he is.

“It's always circled on the calendar,” Spieth said Tuesday ahead of the 107th PGA Championship at Quail Hollow Club. “For me, if I could only win one tournament for the rest of my life, I'd pick this one for that reason.”

There are dual reasons that Spieth’s quest to complete the career Grand Slam is back in the forefront at this PGA, compared to recent years, where he was minimally asked about the pursuit in the PGA lead-up. For one, Rory McIlroy completed the career Grand Slam at last month’s Masters in his 11th try as a three-leg winner, exorcising a decade-plus of mental demons at Augusta National and reframing so many close calls into a triumphant hero’s tale. It had been 25 years since a player had completed the career Grand Slam (Tiger Woods at the The Open Championship 2000). Now the conversation – “who could complete the Slam?” – has returned to the forefront of the discourse. Spieth, making his ninth PGA start since completing the Slam’s third leg at the 2017 Open Championship, is the next man up.

The second reason, perhaps, why he embraced the subject on Tuesday is that he believes his game is rounding into nice form. Spieth still hasn’t won on TOUR since the 2022 RBC Heritage – a drought of three-plus years – but he has stacked up encouraging results in his return from wrist surgery last fall, including a final-round 62 at THE CJ CUP Byron Nelson for a fourth-place finish. That marked his lowest round on TOUR since 2021, and THE CJ CUP marked his sixth top-25 in 11 starts this season. Spieth hasn’t ranked inside the top 25 on TOUR in Strokes Gained: Total since 2017, but he enters the PGA at No. 19 in the statistic.

“I think I’ve been trending really well,” Spieth said Tuesday. “I feel really good about some of the stuff I've been working on, some of the mechanics and traction of how I'm swinging the club or getting more sound and more consistent. I'm getting more confident in that, feeling like I can play all the ball flights that I'd like to. You need that around this golf course because you've got to work it both ways, different heights. … There’s no faking it.”

Spieth has seemingly lived a lifetime in this game – perhaps because any given round can feel like a roller-coaster experience for his supporters – but he’s only 31. Four years ago, Phil Mickelson won the PGA at age 50 – perhaps an extreme comparison, but the point is that he should have plenty more chances at this event. Still, marrying the form and the stakes while handling the immense pressure of scaling professional golf’s Mount Rushmore can be a high-wire act. Look no further than McIlroy’s pursuit of the career Grand Slam at the Masters, which built to a crescendo last month when he dunked a wedge into Rae’s Creek at Augusta National’s par-5 13th en route to a double bogey, as part of a free-fall from a five-stroke lead into an eventual playoff with Justin Rose. McIlroy prevailed with a birdie on the first playoff hole, and his unbridled emotions afterward (plus his words) showed that a gigantic monkey had been lifted from his back.

It wasn’t lost on Spieth in his own pursuit of professional golf immortality.

“Obviously watching Rory win after giving it a try for a number of years was inspiring,” Spieth said Tuesday. “You could tell it was a harder win than – most of the time he makes it look a lot easier. So that obviously was on the forefront of his mind. Something like that has not been done by many people, and there's a reason why. But I'd love to throw my hat in the ring and give it a chance come the weekend this week.”

McIlroy’s pursuit of a career Grand Slam included several times knocking on the door at major championships, the frustration building as his major drought surpassed a decade despite 21 top-10 finishes in majors between wins. Spieth hasn’t played nearly as much elite-level golf in recent years; he has reached the TOUR Championship just three times in the last seven years, not finishing higher than 13th on the FedExCup in that span. Since his last major win, he has seven top-10 finishes in majors but none in his last eight starts. He hasn’t notched a top 10 at the PGA Championship since 2019.

But this year feels different, he said.

“A lot of times, I wasn’t in very good form (entering the PGA),” Spieth said Tuesday. “I had a chance in 2019, and I was not in form. I was in the final group on Saturday with Brooks (Koepka, eventually finishing T3), and I was like, ‘I know what it's like to have control of my game. I've played with Brooks with control of my game, and I see what he's doing right now, and I don't have mine. Let's see if I can fake it these next two days.’

“I feel a lot better now.”

Between completing the third and fourth legs of the career Grand Slam, the first five players to achieve it (Gene Sarazen, Ben Hogan, Jack Nicklaus, Gary Player and Woods) all needed three years or less. Several of the game’s greats – like Arnold Palmer, Sam Snead, Tom Watson and Lee Trevino – got stuck on three, having ample chances to complete the Slam but never getting there.

McIlroy bucked that trend. Maybe Spieth will, too.