Jordan Spieth Views New Season as Fresh Start Going Forward

Jordan Spieth has had a less than stellar year in 2018, at least to date. However, it’s hard to say he didn’t do well when he finished 31st on the FedEx points list and made $2.7 million. He just didn’t win.

For a guy who was tracking on a victory path not too dissimilar from the early career of Tiger Woods, the shortage of victories led a lot of people to think there was something “wrong” with Jordan Spieth, which he discounts.

“I feel like I’ve got a fresh start to kind of put kind of everything from the last few months behind me,” he said to media at the Shriners Hospital for Children event in Las Vegas.

A big part of the 2018 doldrums on the golf course, if you can call winning $2.7 million being in the doldrums, was that he did not get to do his usual off-season preparation at the end of 2017. He was sick with mononucleosis. So, his off-season prep slid into the regular season, putting him behind the eight-ball every time he teed it up.

In addition, in 2018, Spieth suffered by comparisons to what he had already accomplished. In other words, as Linus of the Peanuts cartoon strip used to say, “There is no heavier burden than great potential.”

In his benchmark year of 2015, when he won the Masters and the U.S. Open and had a chance at the final two majors of the year, Spieth was first in putting average and first in one putts. He was not the best in three and four-foot putts, although it seemed like he never missed anything. His driving accuracy that year, just over 62 percent, was not significantly better than last season’s which was a little over 61 percent of fairways hit.

Yet the results were considerably different in 2018 than in 2015.

“I look back at last year as something that I think will be beneficial for me in the long run,” he noted. “I know that’s an easy thing to say looking at kind of the positive in a negative, but there were tangible, mechanical things that I needed to address, and I was able to throughout the season.”

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It seemed like the most recent 12 months was filled with weeks when he couldn’t get anything started. He had trouble getting close to the lead, and when he did, he couldn’t maintain it. Plus he had to keep playing to try to fulfill the required number of PGA Tour events.

“I stepped on the first tee knowing that I was playing a C-game instead of figuring where my game is at through the first couple rounds,” he admitted.

The issues, he insists were mechanics.

As Paul Marchand, one of Fred Couples’ coaches, explained to me one time, every golfer has his set of tendencies, things that he does that gets him off his game. When golfers are under pressure, the tendency can be to go back to a bad pattern instead of staying in a good one. That’s one of the struggles for golfers at the highest level.

There are also some things that Jordan Spieth would not discuss because as he says, they are proprietary, like trade secrets.

However, he does have a new driver that gives him about five more yards.

“If I can get to 65% in my fairways, I move up to the top 15 in strokes gained, and the rest of my game will come around to play from those positions and have a chance to win golf tournaments,” he said of a goal he has for this year.

The putting issues, he thinks, are behind him.

“A lot of it was mechanical,” he said. “When I’m kind of back into the same positioning, the same look, the same timing, same stroke feel that I’ve had for the last five, ten years, minus a bit last season, then my confidence is probably as high as anybody’s on the greens.”

When asked if it was mental with the putting, he denied that.

“It’s physical. It really is,” he noted. “It’s a discomfort in setup that takes away from commitment through the stroke. If you’re not committed through the stroke you’re not going to make putts. It doesn’t matter what range they are.”

He said that he missed more from six feet than in previous years as well as from 15 feet.

“People just focus on the three (footers) because of their expectations,” he added. “It was every single length I missed more than I did the previous years combined. So, you just fix it into the more committed stroke and clears up everything.”

After this week, Spieth will play the Mayakoba Golf Classic. If he does not win the Shriners or Mayakoba, he will not be eligible for the Sentry Tournament of Champions, which means the earliest we could see him play again is sometime after the first week of January.

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