Poor Jordan Spieth, right?  Maybe.  The beginning of his trouble on Masters’ Sunday began on Thursday and probably before that.  What we saw him go through on the twelvth hole was nothing more than stress-induced uncertainty.  After a week of consideration and psychological and athletic synthesis, my answer may put a little different slant on the situation.

Jordan made the same error he was making before last year’s U.S. Open.  He was setting up closed.  Prior to the beginning of that event, he had identified his error and had non-competitive opportunity to repair himself.  But by the time he identified it at The Masters, he was three rounds into the event.  This created a very difficult feedback loop to assimilate under the gun, so to speak.

With his driver, he missed badly to the right all week.  He constantly had to scramble and put tremendous mental energy into managing a less-than-optimal driving game with the remainder of his razor-sharp game.  He repaired his driving error to some degree on Sunday, but the psychological damage had been done, and the sharp edge on his irons and short game were dulled by the stress.  Consider the following:

His errant driving had put such stress on his iron game, short game, and putting throughout the week that, under the exacting pressure of the final nine holes on Sunday, he was mentally unprepared to make good shots and recover from any more bad ones.  Even the best player in the world cannot recover from a poor set-up in the midst of tournament play.  The result is what we witnessed with a lump in our throats.

The tragedy we felt was a loss of four shots on one hole at twelve.  What some may have missed in the larger picture is that Jordan, while a ridiculously great golfer, spent three times that number of strokes recovering from tee shots to the right due to a closed set-up.  Choose just the last two holes and count his strokes over par and the drives he hit in the trees to the right of the fairways.  There’s the tournament.

Jordan will learn from this, as any professional would.  The permanence of his solution will depend on his set-up routine going forward.  If he can put his ball in the fairway, he will dominate again very soon.

John Wright – Founder
The Open Stance Academy

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