– In a little over a month it will be four years since the last victory of Jordan Spieth (RBC Heritage, April 2022) and it seems unlikely that this week, at THE PLAYERS, he will end that long drought. Today, Saturday, he starts nine shots off the leader, Ludvig Aberg, a perhaps excessive gap that has much to do with the two double bogeys that ended each of the rounds played so far. On Thursday it came at the 18th hole; yesterday, on the 9th, a par 5, where he had arrived at -5 with a reasonable chance of finishing with a birdie and moving into the tournament top ten
– Let’s still give him the room for manoeuvre he deserves, with 36 holes to go, but unfortunately it is nothing new that Spieth is not in contention. He has won 16 tournaments in his career that count for the world ranking, but his first fourteen victories came between 2013 and 2017, including at that time the three majors that enhance his record. Since then more than eight years have passed to date, with more shadows than lights in his career, considering the formidable expectations raised by his overwhelming breakthrough
– It’s curious. At his first appearance in THE PLAYERS, in 2014, he arrived already inside the world top ten and, as so often in those days, the Texan met the challenge with flying colours, to the extent of being in the featured Sunday pairing, co‑leader of the tournament alongside Martin Kaymer, and finishing a very creditable fourth after a grey final round of 74, his first big headache in this corner of Florida. Since then…
– Since then, the Stadium Course at TPC Sawgrass has given him more headaches than anything else. In the following eleven editions he missed six cuts and never even finished inside the tournament top 15. It made no difference whether it was played in May or March (since 2019). “This course has gotten the better of me in the past, and I have already let it get the better of me a couple of times this week. That probably cost me four shots, although I hope it’s not too much to recover. But things are going really well and here I need to be even more patient than on other courses. This is the thirteenth straight time I’ve come here and something always happens… Something grabs me in this place and I simply don’t have the patience to handle it”, Jordan admitted yesterday immediately after finishing his round with that painful ending
– Spieth is only 32 years old. In 2015, to savour, he won the Masters and the US Open, finished fourth in the Open and second in the PGA. Okay: he may never again come close to those records in a single season. But he is not a player who is past his prime and by no means can one deny him the real possibility of completing his career Grand Slam, not even this year (he still has the PGA Championship to win). Is it a matter of faith? For now let’s stick with this remark of his just after finishing the second round:
“I’m doing everything right. The statistics don’t necessarily reflect how solid everything has been. I feel like I’ve hit a lot of shots over the last two weeks, especially second shots, where I thought, man, I’ve done my job well, even though I was then surprised where the ball ended up, short or long or whatever. I think that’s pretty normal last week and this week. But my game has been better than my results show. Yesterday I hit a drive off the toe at 18 and then today, on one of the easier holes, I carded a 7, and it’s a bit frustrating to finish like that. Those shots don’t really tell the story of how I’m playing; they were simply two swings where I only needed to miss the other way”
And he summarised: “I’ve mentioned it in recent weeks, in the last two or three tournaments: I feel things are improving each week”
– It is possible that during these years of drought the Texan has given similar optimistic speeches, but Spieth is not the sort of person who peddles hot air. Something very interesting is simmering. He knows it and so does his loyal caddie and friend, Michael Greller, who has been there through the highs and the lows, in chronological order. The serious wrist injury that required surgery in August 2024 is definitively behind him and, this time, something tells us that Spieth seems rehabilitated to get back on track, it’s not just a matter of faith
Among other things his twelfth place at Riviera and eleventh at Bay Hill tell us that. It is also shown by the fact that he has only missed two cuts in the past twelve months, because Jordan Spieth, not even in his truly splendid best years, was never an ultra‑consistent player, to the point that he never, even then, finished a season without having missed some cuts. These are real signs. Bets are welcome: soon we’ll see him fighting for a win on Sunday. God willing it will be in a few weeks, in that beautiful bend of Georgia, very near the border with South Carolina, just over a mile from the Savannah River. Augusta National, I think that’s the place
