SCOTTSDALE — If progress is measured incrementally, then Friday wasn’t entirely a lost day for Jordan Spieth. Granted, he missed the halfway cut at the Waste Management Phoenix Open, but his second-round 69 at TPC Scottsdale was only the fourth time Spieth has broken 70 in 22 competitive rounds on the PGA Tour this season.
Such is the depressingly modest comfort available for a 26-year-old superstar with three major championships to his credit.
Other numbers provide added succor. At TPC Scottsdale Spieth drove the ball better than his season rank would have predicted — he stands 173rd in Strokes Gained Off the Tee — and on Friday he gained almost three strokes against his first-round performance in Strokes Gained Approach the Green, in which he ranks 199th for the season. If those are signs of improvement, they are also signs of how far he has fallen. Five years ago, when Spieth won both the Masters and U.S. Open, he was top 15 in both categories.
“I drove the ball really well, just hit my irons poorly yesterday, which set me back,” Spieth said. “And then, man, I just historically I’ve had a really hard time putting, reading these greens and it just continued this week. Felt like I put good strokes on it and then I would look up and I missed them by like a foot off line, which was very unusual for me.”
Despite his woes with the flatstick, he was determined to draw positives from a short week. “Overall I’m really happy with the progress I’ve made off the tee. I mean, that was the best I’ve driven the ball in a couple years,” he added. “So when that happens I know the rest of it’s kind of coming behind.”
Spieth has registered just one top-10 finish all season — T8 at the CJ Cup in South Korea — and only two since last May. He is now two-and-a-half years removed from his last victory at the 2017 Open Championship at Royal Birkdale. Four years ago he spent a total of 26 weeks as No. 1 in the world, but earlier this week dropped outside the top 50 for the first time since 2013, which will leave him ineligible for some elite PGA Tour events.
He does at least know where he will play next week: the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am, where he has consistently performed well. His win in 2017 was evidence of the player Spieth was then, just as his showing last year illuminated his struggles now. He was tied for the lead Friday night, but a miserable weekend left him tied for 45th. And that was a familiar story for his 2019. His first-round scoring average was 9th on Tour, and no one scored better on Fridays. But few were worse at the weekend. He ranked 170th in third-round scoring and 187th on Sunday, a precipitous falloff that suggests the 11-time PGA Tour winner is more fragile the closer he gets to the business end of a tournament.
He won’t even get a chance to improve on those numbers this weekend, disappointing a group of friends he had visiting for the most raucous scene on Tour.
“I just really wanted it. I wanted to play the weekend. I had a bunch of buddies come in town. I wanted to kind of give them something to watch the next couple days,” he said. “Once I started hitting those tee balls down the fairway to start the round today, I knew I was going to give myself plenty of opportunities. So when I couldn’t do the easy part for me, which is the putting, that’s what was so frustrating. It hasn’t been like that. It’s been putting saving me and today it was kind of a little bit of the opposite.”
Through two rounds at the WMPO, he lost almost three strokes to the field on the greens.
His early departure led to the usual social media chorus: expressions of support, offers of swing counsel, and demands for change in everything from equipment to coaching to attitude. The latter is unsurprising, since Spieth has long been one of the most compelling guys on Tour from the neck up, his expressions, body language and fidgety commentary providing a floor-to-ceiling window into his febrile mind.
But as he headed for the car park in Scottsdale, Spieth wasn’t admitting to any lingering issues on the mental side of the game. “Any emotion was just kind of a want or a will. It’s not like overall frustration. I’ve got,” he insisted. “I’ve had plenty of that. I’m done with that. I’m on the rebound now.”
Publicly at least, Spieth is maintaining a positive face and hoping the numbers will soon support the optimism.
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