DUBLIN, Ohio – Following three eventful rounds last week at the Charles Schwab Challenge, Jordan Spieth wasn’t so much answering reporters’ questions as he was navigating his way through his own internal intervention.
“I just don’t quite trust it yet,” Spieth, who was tied for second place heading into the final round at Colonial, explained last Saturday. “I have confidence in what we’re doing. It’s just about going out and trusting it. I have no reason not to trust it. I don’t need to finish high. I don’t need to win. There’s no reason for me not to trust every swing tomorrow.”
Good talk.
Spieth isn’t good at pretending he’s playing good golf when he’s not, or hiding behind the normal clichés and platitudes that athletes find so useful. That’s neither an indictment or a virtue. It’s just who he is.
It’s also where Spieth’s game is at the moment.
That self-starting pep talk was followed by a 2-over 72 on Sunday at Colonial for a tie for eighth place. On this front, trust is earned and following another eventful round on Thursday at Muirfield Village it seems Spieth and his swing still have some things to unpack.
For Spieth Round 1 at the Memorial Tournament was very much a mixed bag. When he completed his shift he ranked 77th in strokes gained: approach the green, 66th in greens in regulation and 91st in proximity to the hole. If the line stopped there, his opening effort at the Memorial would count as infinitely forgettable.
But Jordan being Jordan, he shot 6-under 66. Leaving him alone in second place and just a stroke behind Ryan Moore after the morning wave.
“One of those days I didn’t necessarily play like a 6-under score,” he admitted.
Never shy to show his emotions on the course, Thursday was a tale of two rounds for Spieth, as his frustration boiled to the surface from time to time with his ball-striking and his well-established trust issues. Around the greens, however, he was his typical supernatural self.
There was a 50-footer for birdie at No. 11, his second hole of the day, after hitting what he described as a “horrible wedge” from 94 yards.
“I was not deserving of that birdie. I felt like I stole one,” he conceded. “What it does is it helps me kind of settle in, hey, we already stole a shot, let’s let it come to me.”
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Spieth added a chip in for par at the par-3 fourth hole following a particularly poor tee shot to an impossible position. He could manage only a shrug and a sheepish grin in caddie Michael Greller’s direction. Nobody rides the emotional rollercoaster better than Spieth.
He also added a 35-foot putt for eagle at the fifth hole and a 12-footer to save par at the seventh, the latter producing a wide smile from Rory McIlroy, who was paired with Spieth.
“It’s one of those cool ones that you start to see going in and there’s still a few feet to go,” Spieth said of his eagle at No. 5. “It was a nice boost in the round, for sure.”
All total, Spieth rolled in 99 feet of putts on Thursday which, by comparison to last week when he walked in over 500 feet of putts for the week, qualified as a “meh” round.
Where some might see smoke and mirrors, Spieth has embraced progress. On the tail end of a four-event stretch he’s very much at ease with the idea of playing through the pain. Where others might be more inclined to find answers to whatever swing ailments are holding them back in private, Spieth has taken a more public approach.
“Keep playing, trying to trust things on the golf course in tournament play is big for me now because it’s kind of a significant type of feeling through the swing that if I took a couple of weeks off and came back, it’s a little harder to trust that right away,” he said. “But if you’re used to trusting it, it’s almost like playing through the ... I don’t want to say slump, but playing through anything that’s been a little off.”
Whether Spieth is “little off” or in a bona fide “slump” is question of semantics, but what is becoming increasingly clear to those who have followed the peaks and valleys of his climb back to relevance is that he is close.
This is no longer a gut feeling or optimistic nonsense, this is quantifiable. As scrappy as things might have appeared on Thursday, he picked up 3.55 shots on the field in strokes gained: tee to green, which qualifies as his his best ball-striking round of the year.
The internal dialogue won’t end for Spieth until that trust he’s been searching for returns, but following a solid start at Jack’s Place and back-to-back top-10 finishes, there’s no longer grounds to question if he’s really as close as he keeps saying he is.