Jordan Spieth tries and fails to recover the brilliance of his carefree youth
Last Thursday afternoon in San Francisco three men were out alone on the range at TPC Harding Park: Jordan Spieth, his caddie, Michael Greller, and his coach, Cameron McCormick. Spieth had finished his opening round of the US PGA Championship three-anda-half hours earlier. He’d shot 73, threeover, and was eight-off the lead, tied 109th. Now he was sitting cross-legged, his arms draped over his knees, staring into the middle distance like the answers he was looking for were hiding somewhere down there at the far end of the range.
Earlier that day, the PGA Tour posted a short clip of Spieth talking about the one thing he’d like to be able to tell his younger self. “Let me think about this question for a second,” he says in the video, “the one thing about golf that I wish I knew then that I know now.” There’s a long pause, and then he comes up with his answer. “Honestly,” he said, laughing, “I wish I played with the mentality I had back then.”
Right now Spieth’s in the thick of one of the game’s most godawful slumps. “Back then” he was on one of its great hot streaks. His wire-to-wire win at the 2015 Masters, when he was just 21, is still one of the finest sporting achievements I’ve covered live. If he’d just made a last eight-foot putt on the 18th he would have beaten Tiger Woods’s record for the lowest score in Masters history. Afterwards he gave a 15-minute monologue in which he laid out, in meticulous detail, the thinking behind every decision he made, and every shot he’d played during the final round.
All that whirring and ticking, it was like opening up the back of a watch to look at the array of cogs. I’ve been a fan of his ever since. Two months later he won the US Open too, the youngest to do it since Bobby Jones in 1923. He was playing so well that, Larry David joked, his biggest worry was his hairline. “He’s going to be wildly bald,” David said. “This makes him way more appealing to me. It’s one thing to handle the pressure of the back nine at Augusta; let’s see how he does when he sees all that hair in the tub. That’s pressure.”
At Augusta the next year, Spieth didn’t handle that back nine pressure too well and he blew up coming around Amen Corner. It only made him more likeable. The game wasn’t that easy after all, it was just that he’d been playing so well he’d made it look that way.
You could see, then, that there was a wild streak in Spieth, something underneath a little unhinged and rickety which he was only just about in control of. It came out again during his victory at the Open in 2017 at Royal Birkdale, maybe the definitive Spieth moment. A wayward drive on the 13th left him an unplayable lie, and he spent 21 minutes stalking around that corner trying to figure how to get out of it, till he ended up playing from back off the practice range. He dropped a shot, but still won by three. It made him the second player in history to win three majors before he