Is Jordan Spieth Now Favored at the Masters?
After almost four years without a victory, Jordan Spieth, the phenom of 2015 and 2017, is back in the victory circle.
“I honestly thought that I would be more emotional at the end, but I’m kind of glad I’m not,” Spieth said to media after winning the Valero Texas Open. “There’s peaks and valleys in this sport. I never expected to go this long.”
According to Spieth, it was a hard climb. It sounds like it was more of a canyon than a valley he was in with his game. He admitted he had times when he hit balls until his hands were bleeding. He couldn’t sleep. While he kept trying, things were not working.
“It’s been a road that’s had a lot of tough days,” he added. “I’ve had people in my corner that have always believed in me, even when I’ve kind of believed less in myself.”
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Losing his game was an unexpected situation for the man who won the Masters and U.S. Open in just his second year on the PGA Tour, then two years later won the British Open. But after 2017, he didn’t just slide. He plummeted.
In 2018, he was third twice. That was his best for the season. In 2019, his highest finish was a third at the PGA Championship. He was encouraged by that, but he was only in the top 10 four times out of 23 events. It’s hard to know what to think about 2020, but his best finish was T8 at the CJ Cup and next best was T9 at the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am. Not good for a former No. 1.
Hank Haney, the golf instructor first known for remaking Mark O’Meara’s swing and giving Tiger Woods an assist after Woods left butch Harmon, knows a thing or two about golf. He worked with Woods from 2004 to 2010 and was the watchful eye for six majors and a victory rate of 33 percent.
On Haney’s podcast after last June’s RBC Heritage, Haney predicted it would take three years from the depths for Spieth to get to get back to where he was.
He said at that time that Spieth “cannot hit the ball right now.” And of course, at that time, Haney was right.
As Haney explained, sometimes players get to the top of the mountain and then have a little slip, and it’s not hard for them to get back up to the top or near it. But Spieth, he said, had fallen all the way down the mountain and basically had to start all over again.
If year one was 2019 and if year two was 2020, then year three could be 2021. But Haney sounded like it would take another season for Spieth to reach the heights he had achieved before the slide. That would make it 2022 at the earliest.
Now, Haney’s idea of Spieth coming back and Spieth having one victory are two different things. Haney meant to get back to the point where Spieth was No. 1 player in the world, that kind of level of performance. And any professional golfer knows that one victory does not a No. 1 world ranking make. As Tiger Woods famously said over and over, it’s a process.
In December of 2017, Jordan Spieth was 2nd in the world rankings. In December of 2018, he had dropped to 17th. At the end of 2019, he had fallen to 44th. At the end of 2020, he was all the way down to 82nd. As Haney said, he fell pretty far from where he was.
Haney had every confidence that Spieth would eventually right the ship, that he was too good a golfer not to. Spieth, according to Haney is a real grinder. He doesn’t give up. And it looks like Haney is right about that.
Does Spieth think he’s “back?”
“I really didn’t have great control of the ball this weekend at all,” he admitted after winning.
In the past, that might have caused him to change what he was doing, but he felt he was on the right road, so he didn’t make mid-round adjustments. He tried to find a shot he could play, which is the skill the best golfers develop. They find something semi-repeatable that gets them through the round. Perhaps that’s what Spieth meant recently when he said that Butch Harmon told him he what he was working on was the right track.
Spieth said he channeled Bubba Watson and hit some shots that curved this way and that to get himself away from being too technical.
“That’s been a learning process over the last kind of few Sundays in contention,” he added. “When you get a little anxious and you’re a little tighter and you’re not kind of swinging as freely.”
However, Spieth was confident in his ability to close once he had the lead. Certainly with 11 PGA Tour victories, three of them majors, he has that ability buried somewhere in his brain. He’s not afraid to win.
In the final analysis, he said it was about overcoming the expectations others have had about him, and as he said, giving himself the freedom to do what he loves to do, play golf at a high level.
“I don’t know if there’s anybody that plays better golf–anybody in their own game– that plays better golf under pressure than when they’re just totally comfortable,” he said. “So, it’s all about that fight of learning how to control that.”
Does this victory make him a favorite for the Masters? Spieth is still working on perfecting things.
“I’ve got quite a bit to piece together in my game,” he said. “Until I get to hitting, you know, eight out of nine or nine out of ten shots the way that a couple of them felt on Friday, I’m not done working at what I’m working on.”
Somewhere between this latest victory, Spieth’s 12th, and his memories of being No. 1 in the world, there’s a great golfer struggling to find himself. At least he knows where he’s going and what it’s like when he gets there. For him, after the last three years, this was a great start.