Jordan Spieth has been on a long vacation.
Notice you haven’t seen him play since the Ryder Cup matches.
It’s by design. Jordy needed an off-season and he created one for himself after having what most consider an “off-season” in 2016.
It didn’t look like it was going to be that way early in the year. He won the Tournament of Champions and there he was, primed and ready to win back-to-back Green Jackets at The Masters.
Spieth bolted into the lead and through 11 holes, looked like his was ready to turn on that marvelous Spieth Cruise Control.
Then came the par three 12th, perhaps the most famous short hole in American championship golf.
The hole is only 150-yards long. “You hope a lot on that hole,” four-time Masters champion Tiger Woods once admitted.
Spieth stood there and planned on hitting what he would call “a stock nine-iron” into the traditional Sunday pin placement on the right side of the green. Instead of a solid, slight fade, Spieth fanned it and to the horror of the huge crowd surrounding the tee, Spieth ball trickled down the bank and into Rae’s Creek.
No problem, with his short-game prowess, Spieth would get it up-and-down for bogey.
Then the train-wreck got worse.
Spieth laid the sod over a sand wedge and hit a second ball in the creek. He’d walk off the green with a triple-bogey seven and finish tied for second behind Danny Willett.
Spieth’s year went in the crapper despite a victory at The Colonial in Fort Worth, despite winning $5.538 million in 2016, we lost the Jordan Spieth of 2015, the Jordan Spieth that won the Masters, the U.S. Open, nearly won the British and was there at the PGA.
This past season we saw a Jordan Spieth who found more distance off the tee but lost his accuracy in the process.
You’d often see Spieth launching drives past the 300-yard mark but his driving accuracy dropped him to 123rd on the tour and his Greens-In-Regulation was even worse — 145th. With stats like those, you’d expect a guy to finish outside the top 40 but Spieth’s marvelous putting stroke was still pretty marvelous most of the time, ranking him second on tour in putting.
But outside those wins in Hawaii and Fort Worth, he didn’t do much at all. In 21 events, he had a second and a third. After his Masters meltdown, he promptly missed the cut at the tour’s showcase event — The Players.
Spieth’s driver was finding the wrong zip codes and he was missing greens with short irons. He was a non-factor in the rest of the majors — T37 at the U.S. Open, T30 at the Open Championship and T13 at the PGA.
There was a rumor that he injured his right hand on Saturday at the Ryder Cup when he and teammate Patrick Reed got a little too fired-up with some hand slaps. Spieth didn’t look so hot on Sunday when he lost his singles match to Henrik Stenson — 3-and-2.
His long hiatus may lend some credence to the rumor.
Spieth will make his return in a few weeks in the Bahamas at Tiger Woods’ little gathering.
But he has had a long vacation for him.
Hopefully for Spieth, he can go back and figure out how to hit the golf ball straight again and how to keep it out of the water on No. 12 at Augusta.
