Jordan Spieth

Whether you are a PGA pro or an average joe at the local municipal, golf is the same game. It’s a game that does not let you win all the time. The best PGA pros are losing a lot more than they are winning. It seems the average wins per season for them is 3, maybe 4 or 5 if they get hot. Of course, there are outliers in the game like a Tiger Woods or a Jack Nicholas. Every PGA player on tour makes golf look incredibly easy. The way they can make their hardest swings looks like any average player’s warm-up swing is something to behold. However, there are few golfers who can make winning at competitive golf as easy as those two beasts did. Seeing tiger woods step to the tee box on Sunday and knowing he’s going to contend is something you can’t say for many others in the game right now. There are players who get hot over the course of a season. Over the last 10 years, we have seen guys like Dustin Johnson, Rory McElroy, and Justin Thomas win the most. When it comes to the PGA, these guys are determined to be winners and of course, losers. All these guys step up to the tee box on Sunday and are most likely favorites in Vegas and at home. Dustin Jonson winning 22 times in the last 10 years gives him the lead over those 3. When looking at these numbers through any other competitive sport, it's hard to tell someone this guy is a winner. With almost 30 events per year, 22 wins over 10 years seems like a guy who is struggling. In golf. that guy is dominating.

There’s one guy who sits just outside of the top 3 for most wins in a 10-year span. This kid came into the Tour and managed to win 3 majors in his second season, 1 off from the grand slam. With a masters jacket and only 4 cuts missed playing 24 events, this kid had a run for the ages. The media took attention and gave everything they had to him. Everyone made this kid a god in their minds and couldn’t see a world where he was going to slow down. Then, as golf does to the best players, it slows you down. It stops you in your tracks and makes you backpedal, rethink your swing, your golf IQ, and anything else that was in place that let you win 5 times in your second season.

The kid was Jordan Spieth and now, he is thought to be washed up, a player who got lucky, and a player who has lost his media spotlight. When Jordan Spieth had an outlier of a season that was followed by years of reality for a PGA touring pro. Having 7 wins over the last 6 years is an impressive feat for most of the PGA and of course will get you a hefty amount of prize money to tell other people you are successful. But for Jordan, this isn’t enough. When you win 5 times and win 3 majors in your first real season on the PGA tour, it's impossible to keep that up unless your Tiger Woods. who came off a 9-win season in the year 2000 and didn’t seem to slow down until, you know. But why have fans not realized the reality of the PGA tour? Some say it’s because of other sports and how winning is expected, some lean towards the Tiger Woods type player who defies the odds of the game, and the people who know the game best say it’s because the PGA is set up for failure.

With around 50 million in career earnings, Jordan Spieth is the definition of success in any industry. There’s a reason these guys who don’t win like tiger are still rich as hell. The PGA is set up in a way that rewards players for things other than winning. They award huge amounts of prize money to the top 3 and even the top 25 in major tournaments. This allows players to play the game of golf, which is set up for failure, and still become millionaires. There are probably some guys on tour that have reached the level of multi-millionaire and not even the hardcore fans know their names.

With Spieth’s early career miracle, it's hard to see him as the same type of player. I don’t think he even sees himself as the same player. There’s something to be said in any sport when you win a lot. It takes a sort of skillset beyond the sport to do that. Golf is the one sport where that skill set is obvious. That skill set comes from your head, It’s your emotions. Learning to control emotions is a thing we see only in the greats of sports. Guys like Tom Brady and Michael Jordan are two athletes that are known for controlling their emotions in the arena. In golf, we see players doing this same thing at every single tournament. The game demands this mental state and if it’s not attained, you’re going to have a bad time on the course whether you’re playing in the masters or on your local track with your friends. When this sort of mental toughness is demanded at every single tournament, it's expected that most players won’t be able to sustain it for the entire season. The average players can hold this for a handful of tournaments in their career, the great players can withhold it for a season or two, and the greatest of all time have been known to hold this mental fortitude for most of their career. Jordan Spieth is in the great category. This guy had one of the best PGA tour seasons of all time in 2014 and since then has come down from that high to become a consistent PGA tour player racking up 13 wins and 75 top-ten finishes in his career. Looking at that stat as a golf fan not knowing who the player was, you would immediately see him as one of the great players of this generation. Because this player had that one miraculous season, those stats are overlooked and are seen as mediocre compared to the sample size. As tough of a pill that is to swallow for fans of Jordan Spieth, it’s the way it is and the way the PGA tour will always be.

With the recent success of Scottie Scheffler, fans are seeing the rise of yet another hot streak in this historic tour. Will Scottie become another Jordan Spieth and come to a much higher baseline, or will he become another Tiger Woods? This is one of the great parts of this tour, you get your hopes up for guys like Scottie and you get to live in the moment of one of these streaks knowing it won't last forever. While a part of you believes it just might last forever.

After Jordan's disastrous masters weekend, he went out and won the next week at the HBC heritage. Which gives some hope to the kid yet. To go along with this, we have seen Jordan change his swing to drastic proportions. The unique pre-shot routine of twirling his club in the air is weird to most but promising for all Spieth fans. New swing changes are like Tommy John surgeries. They either work or make you worse. Time will tell how this new swing change plays out for Spieth for the rest of the 2022 season. For now, Spieth and his fans have a win under their belt at an early stage in the season, but as this game has proven time and time again, we truly have no idea where Spieth will go from here.