Jordan Spieth: Sticking with a fade could be key to consistency

Jordan Spieth continues to talk about how close he feels in his game, but his inaccuracy off the tee is still a struggle. The answer could lie in some simple course management.

It’s no secret that Jordan Spieth watched his game fall off the face of the planet about two years ago, concurrent with contracting mononucleosis. Whether he needed to stay away and rest for a longer period of time, or he had some things going on in his swing that needed fixing anyway, or if he got caught up in chasing stats or whether his swing just got really off chasing distance, we will never know.

What we do know is that since the fall of 2017, he hasn’t been the player we got used to seeing. And that’s too bad because most golf fans and TV viewers like Spieth.

At the Wyndham Championship, while Spieth seems to be making a resurgence, you still have to ask a few questions.

His first round 64 included a tee ball hit so far right that they didn’t bother to look for it. It was in someone’s yard, presumably among the mulch and a few of last year’s leaves.

In speaking with media after round one, he said about the 18th hole, “I should have just played that, you know, the fade off the left side off the tee instead of trying to go to that draw with a driver trying to be the hero.”

In that case, the problem was in his head, not his driver. Just plain poor course management. He needs to be smarter than that if he wants to resume his assault on any championship, never mind major championships.

"“I think it’s still a week or two away as far as the control, full control off the tee and into the greens, but I’m starting to have kind of the same feels that I remember having when I struck the ball the best,” he insisted."

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In his second round, a surprising number of shots found the fairway or missed by just a nudge.  A miss means you are still hitting out of longer grass that reduces the chances of a second shot that gets close to the hole.

Spieth’s bugaboo, historically, is the tee shot. This season, he’s 197th in driving accuracy, hitting 52 percent of fairways. Last season, he was 99th, hitting 61 percent of fairways. So, while he thinks he’s better, he may be better this week, but not for the entire season. Even in his best seasons, he was never much better than the low 60s percentage off the tee.

What to do?  He says he’s fighting through it. In the past, what many who have a hard time with the tee ball eventually do is to take one side of the course out of play. They either hit a fade or a draw. It can work either direction. You need to pick one, though.

As Lee Trevino once said, you can talk to a fade but a hook won’t listen.

That is exactly the shot that Butch Harmon has advised many of his students to learn over the years.

Dustin Johnson, who has been a Butch Harmon student for years and now works with Butch’s son Claude, said he fought the idea of the fade for a while until, as he explained at the Tour Championship in 2016, he tried to hit cuts one day in the off-season.

"“Started playing a cut just on every shot,” he said at the time. “I think a few days in a row I shot like 62 — 61, 62 or something, three days in a row, playing a cut shot, and I said, ‘I guess it worked.’”"

So, Johnson stayed with it. It’s not that he can’t hit other shots. It’s just that he found it to his advantage to hit the fade.

“It just is a little bit easier for me to hit and definitely replicate over and over,” he explained.

Finding the repeatable, dependable shot is the secret to successful golf. It’s the Lee Trevino fade, the Jack Nicklaus fade. In some cases, it works the other direction, like the Rory McIlroy draw. But the secret is taking a portion of the golf course out of being a disaster.

One Texas fader was so good with it that he never practiced: The late Bruce Lietzke. Those who saw him play will tell you that his fade was so comprehensive that often his tee shots would start left of the left rough and land in the fairway. It looked crazy, but it was a shot he always had and could even play well without a lot of practice.

In fact, he was famous for not practicing, so much so that he swore he never practiced in the off-season. His caddie was sure Lietzke was lying. One November the caddie packed up the clubs and put a banana inside the bag cover, next to the woods, just to test Lietzke. In January, when the caddie unpacked the bag, it was an awful mess. The remnants of a rotten banana were there, and all the woods, which were, in those days, real wood, were ruined.

So, as Spieth searches for consistency off the tee and around the course, maybe he should think about another Texas pro and pick a shot that works day in and day out. Sure, you always want to be able to hit some additional miracle shots, but a great golfer doesn’t have to be a hero on every hole. He just needs to be consistent enough to stay out of trouble.

Once Spieth finds the fairway, he’s dangerous from there to the hole. So, will he pick the McIlroy draw or the Nicklaus fade? He should just pick one of them and make it his new best friend. It could be the key to making Jordan Spieth a major threat once again.