Jordan Spieth: “A couple tee balls away from really having a chance to win.”

Jordan Spieth fans take heart.  The 25-year-old former No. 1 thinks he’s on the road to recovery in terms of his golf game.  To borrow a phrase from any number of pro golfers, he thinks he’s close.

“What I’ve been saying about progression, week to week, my last four to six starts have been — I’ve been a couple tee balls away from really having a chance to win, and that’s without feeling like I had my best stuff,” Jordan Spieth told media in a press conference at the AT&T Byron Nelson.

His last victory was the 2017 British Open victory, nearly two years ago. Then he contracted mononucleosis and didn’t have a chance to recover fully before the start of the 2018 calendar year.  Since that time, he’s seemed to struggle with various parts of his game, although there have been occasional brilliant rounds. Once a leaderboard staple, he’s fighting to get there on any kind of a regular basis.  He gets a round going only to rack up double bogeys.

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However, from the sound of things, he’s not giving up.  He’s trying to fix what went wrong. He spoke to Jack Nicklaus about it at the Champions Dinner at the Masters.

“When one of the greatest ever to play the game, who obviously has had his share of a lot of highs and a couple lows and certainly knows a lot about the game, can come up and offer his two cents,” Spieth said, not quite completing the sentence.  But we know where he was going.  “It’s really cool to be able to speak with Jack Nicklaus about golf in any means. I feel very fortunate to be able to do so, especially in such a scene as it was.”

Nicklaus had some lows, as he has said in his autobiography, mainly regarding his pursuit of the calendar year Grand Slam. However, his record shows that there weren’t any years between 1962 and 1978 when he didn’t win, and in most of those years, he was a multiple winner, often winning between five and seven times. Finally, in 1979, the rest of the pros got a break and Nicklaus went winless.  He had only five victories after that season.  So, when Nicklaus speaks, you listen.

But back to Jordan Spieth’s game.

“Everybody is different the way they compensate for things, their tendencies are all different,” Spieth said about his game.  “It’s more of like a question and kind of just talking about the overall than it is instructional.”

Paul Marchand, who is one of Fred Couples’ coaches, explained to me many years ago what tendencies meant, using Couples game as an example.  Couples, he said, always had a tendency to get too loose in his swing.  While other people may wish for the kind of flexibility that Couples has in his backswing, he actually has to fight it.  It causes problems for his ball striking.

Every player has tendencies or habits that they fall back into if they don’t stay on top of them. Spieth may be fighting his.

“There’s always something you’re singling out, and you obviously put more emphasis on that to get it back up, but it’s not been in a place where anything else has dropped as significantly, and actually things that got off in putting are very similar to the swing. It’s amazing the correlation,” Jordan Spieth added without elaboration.

In working on his game, his process was to work his way up the bag. He started to fix the putting and from there, he said nearly everything fell into place.  The exception is the driver, which he said is improving.

“I think I’m working on the right things. Like I said, just tightening it up a little bit,” he noted. “I’m not looking at the strokes gained for the year necessarily.”

He pointed out that his best rounds have been on courses where the strokes gained are not measured.

“I know what I need to work on,” he insisted. “It’s not normally that hard for me. It just has been pretty hard for me lately.”

Now, realistically, if Jordan Spieth didn’t enjoy the competition, he wouldn’t need to do any of this. He never needs to play another round of competitive golf in his life. Financially,  he’s set.  But there’s a fighter inside that Under Armour shirt. There’s pride of workmanship. There’s a lot more than just swinging a club. So, it’s more likely that he’ll figure it out.