Jordan Spieth ready to kick off rebound season in Las Vegas

LAS VEGAS — When you get a free roll in Las Vegas, you take it. So it perhaps aptly comes to pass that Jordan Spieth feels like he’s “free-rollingâ€� it as he looks to kick start his season at the Shriners Hospitals for Children Open. The former FedExCup champion is coming off the first season of his career where he failed to make the TOUR Championship, being edged out by one spot thanks in the main part to his first winless season since 2014. Put bluntly, it was a very non-Spieth-like season. We’ve become accustomed to him winning. He’s done it 11 times on TOUR since his breakout rookie season in 2013 when he was a winner as a baby-faced 19-year-old. Even in 2014 — when he didn’t claim a TOUR title — he did win in the fall. It just happened to be at the Australian Open and then the Hero World Challenge. Most players who could point to a 31st place finish in the FedExCup as their worst in six seasons would be smiling. But with Spieth we expect more. And that external expectation used to grate on him a little. He was turning on sports commentary shows and seeing a heavy reliance on comparison talk. Comparing a player or team from now to before. Comparing one athlete to another. He has since come to realize that getting caught up in the, “what have you done for me lately,â€� crowd was not helping his psyche. “With the improved access that any person has via social media to an athlete, if you fall into that comparison talk it only hurts you,â€� Spieth explained as he prepares to make the first domestic fall start of his PGA TOUR career.  
“Using comparisons is unrealistic, especially in a sport like golf where you have so much that can happen so quickly. Seems like the questions I’ll get are people getting very caught up in a what have you done for me lately and your last tournament perspective. I’ll be honest, for a little while that kind of stuff got to me.â€� So has this now 25-year old matured past that now? Trying to force a win when you don’t have your best game is not going to work out. So rather than be overly frustrated with last season, he is trying to see the long-term benefits. He addressed some mechanical issues in his game — some he would talk about, others he will keep to himself. “It was a building year. I look back at last year as something that I think will be beneficial for me in the long run,â€� he said. “I really believe that. I know that’s an easy thing to say looking at kind of the positive in a negative, but there were tangible, mechanical things that I needed to address, and I was able to throughout the season. I feel like I’m free rolling this year.
 “Just having an elongated perspective, more patient view of things, helps free me up personally.â€� One of those tangible things was his putting. The guy who seemed to make everything with the putter all of a sudden wasn’t making everything. We saw nine misses from three feet. Nine. In the three full seasons prior to that, he missed just six of them combined. It left him ranked 136th on TOUR in Strokes Gained: Putting — unfathomable for a guy who ranked second in 2016 and inside the top 40 from 2014 through 2017. “It’s physical. It really is,â€� Spieth said. “It’s a discomfort in setup that takes away from commitment through the stroke. If you’re not committed through the stroke you’re not going to make putts. It doesn’t matter what range they are. “It was every single length I missed more than I did the previous years combined. So you just fix it into the more committed stroke and clears up everything.â€� The truth is his work on the greens was looking up in the back half of the season. While in nine of his first 11 measured tournaments last year he lost strokes to the field putting, seven of his last eight were in the positive — including ranking second at the PGA Championship. “When I’m kind of back into the same positioning, the same look, the same timing, same stroke feel that I’ve had for the last five, ten years, minus a bit last season, then my confidence is probably as high as anybody’s on the greens,â€� he said. “Certainly not ideal … last year’s putting stats. But necessary for elongated peak performance going forward.
 “It was nice to sit back and kind of go through the checks and balances and fix what needs to be fixed.â€�
 But the focus has not been solely on the putter. Spieth has put a huge asterisk on his driving accuracy, and feels just a slight improvement could bear plenty of fruit. He was ranked 54th last season in Strokes Gained: Off-the-Tee and 98th in driving accuracy at 61.29 percent. His mark of 67.8 percent accuracy in 2013 remains his career best. “My rookie season I think was my best statistical driving season,â€� Spieth said. “I think I ranked in the top 15 in strokes gained off the tee (he was 7th). I hit it five yards further now yet have not sniffed a top 15 in that category. So that’s a goal. “That’s something that I’m certainly focused on, is trying to hit more fairways. If I can get to 65 percent in my fairways I move up to the top 15 in strokes gained, and the rest of my game will come around to play from those positions and have a chance to win golf tournaments.â€�

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