About halfway through a 45-minute brain-bending session with Jordan Spieth, I ask what may be a very stupid question.
“If you could completely turn off your brain and just swing the golf club, what would happen?”
Spieth doesn’t hesitate, suggesting he’s already thought about this a lot. That’s always a safe assumption with Spieth, who has perhaps the most active mind in professional golf: he has thought about this a lot.
“It would be terrible,” he says. “If you said ‘don’t think and just swing’, I’ve never played like that. I’ve always had a manipulative feeling with my backswing.”
Spieth explains that he needs something to focus on when he takes the club away or something will go wrong.
“From a difficulty level of 10, going back, I always like to have a four or five somewhere for what I have to think about. And that normally determines the timing. That’s just in the backswing; from there it’s an athlete and shoots the shot. But if I don’t think about anything, I get all confused.”
We are filming Episodes of ‘Warming Up’ for two years now, and it might be the coolest thing I’ve gotten to do in this job: a series of bucket list interviews and pinch-hit moments. But I’ve also remained greedy and kept Spieth’s name at the top of my wish list since day 1.
Finally this winter, through a fortunate combination of perseverance, resignation and planning, we landed the big fish: Spieth agreed to spend some time with us at a driving range of his choice – and to open a window into his wonderful golfing mind.
You can watch the full episode below or on YouTube here. But if you’re in reading mode, below are 10 lessons—whether about his game, golf in general, or life in general—that will stick with me.
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10 lessons from Jordan Spieth
1. Be an athlete and an artist.
Don’t mess around, says Spieth, especially when you start your warm-up. He takes a 60-degree wedge and starts with some quarter- and half-swing wedge shots, hitting his first balls only about twenty yards, working his way up a few yards at a time.
What’s important in finding his feel is varying the types of shots he makes, even at close range.
“They’re not all the same shot,” he says. “I’ll work at different heights and when I get to about 200 feet, I’ll start hitting three trajectories at 200 feet.”
In the meantime, he fumbles with opening the face, creating spin, making a shot that he hopes will hit and stop, and another that he hopes will run out more. He uses different planes of motion, he says, to try out different shots.
“I’m just kind of an athlete, an artist with the wedge, and as you get more into full shots, you might have a little bit better club face control than if you started with it from the beginning.”
2. Have an intention.
When Spieth first played on the PGA Tour, he was a high school phenom with no real warm-up routine. One of the things he learned from watching the pros? Do everything with intention.
“I didn’t go to the gym until I was 16 [the round]no warm-up, and I just hit whatever I wanted [on the range]He says. That was the difference. “To see guys actually consciously setting an intention, even in their warm-ups, instead of just going wild.”
3. Practice real shots from the court.
“There are some shots you might need on certain holes,” Spieth says. Because it’s golf, you don’t know precisely which shots you encounter when you go on the court. But you know a few: “The par-3s, I’ll ask for that distance and I’ll make sure I get that club. You always say you’re ‘Second-team All-American’;” [when you hit two balls] That second ball is great. Well, I make sure my second ball is the first ball I hit on that par-3. So you try to hit the ball, you see it, you feel it, you know it’s right.
4. Work the ball towards the hole (at your own risk)
Spieth grew up with draws, but now the majority is fading. But when he’s playing at his best, he likes being able to move it in either direction so he can tackle any hole location – especially since the PGA Tour likes to put them in corners.
“They just have these pins where it’s like, when you play a fade, sometimes you just can’t get it close. It spins with the hill on a left pin and you just can’t get it close. And that’s probably OK, but it’s a pet peeve of mine. It bothers me that it doesn’t work towards the hole. So I always want to be able to hit the draw.”
But there is a protective measure Spieth takes to ensure he doesn’t become too risky as he picks up each pin.
“Every time I hit a draw or a fade, I train myself not to let the ball bend too much,” he says. “If the curve is too low, I’m in the thick part of the green. If the curve is too high, I’m short-sided.”
So under-curves is the goal.
5. Rate your 7 iron; it’s the best club.
I liked that Spieth was able to go full golf nerd — talking about planes of motion, degrees of rotation, swing DNA, etc. — while also making the simplest statement of all: he likes the way 7-iron looks the most.
“I have a 7-iron in my hands. I love my 7-iron,” he says. “It’s my favorite iron to look at. It’s the perfect rectangle. To me, it just has that look.”
For the curious, Spieth generally hits a 7-iron somewhere between 175 and 190 yards, depending on the conditions – although in the Open Championship, all rules are ignored and he can hit 7 from 150. As for when to hit 7 on 6? That depends not only on the distance to the hole, but also on the pin position; when he needs to stop the ball quickly, he’d rather step on a 7-iron than try to hit a baby 6. This also looks the best.
READ: This is what Ludvig Åberg taught me in half an hour at the shooting range
6. Remember: Golf can have opposite effects.
While explaining his current feeling, Spieth comes up with something interesting:
“Often the game works in opposite directions,” he says. “You gotta feel good about turning left, you know? Like, every time someone cuts across the road, [tell them] swing to the right. They say, ‘No way, things are going well,’ but they are doing well.”
I wonder if Spieth gives anti-slice advice at every pro-am hole he plays. He says he will wait until asked.
“I try to wait until someone asks because I don’t really want them to give me advice unless I ask for it,” he says. Wait – Jordan Spieth is getting advice?! “Between pro-ams and mail and all that, I promise I’ve had all kinds of advice. I don’t see or hear it all, but yeah.”
7. Making a swing change? Run a stress test.
While Spieth has chased a complex hybrid of his past and current golf swings (his 2017 self’s backswing depth, his younger self’s hand path, his current self’s gym routine, etc.), he has attempted to first work into that new swing in a controlled range environment and gradually prepare it for competition.
“I went from taking most of the shots in a battlefield on video for the first eight weeks to doing checkpoints inside the battlefield and then outside of it… and then performing,” he says. Performance means setting up a combine for oneself, testing specific shots on command, three-quarter shots, different feelings and shapes under different conditions.
“It had to be focused on the swing for a while… and while it takes a little more focus than I would like to play at my best, I can make really good swings on the course, which – it took a while to get to that level.”
8. Find a good measuring stick.
For Spieth, that’s world No. 1 Scottie Scheffler, who happens to live near Spieth and regularly serves as a sparring partner.
“When we play games at home, I play with Scottie quite a bit at home and we play with guys who are somewhere between a plus two and a two handicapper, and the separation is not what it would be when we play outside. [on Tour] just because of what you say, [tucked] pin positions,” he said.
As for playing with Scottie?
“Obviously when you play with Scottie you have a pretty good idea of where you compare to everyone else, right? So it’s helpful.”
9. Forgive the past.
This is perhaps Spieth’s most profound answer, one that I’m thinking about more and more. What is it like, I wonder, to have set such a high standard at such a young age that he is constantly compared to his own greatness? Here is his answer in full:
“It can be very difficult sometimes,” he says. “Like, I wouldn’t wish a few years of the last five, 10 years on a lot of people. You’re living in problem-solving mode and trying to figure out how to be, whatever. And to know that a lot of it is mechanical is even more frustrating, because it’s not like everything is fine and it’s just going to work out. It’s like, no, I actually have to…
“But at the same time, knowing that once I get the club position like, at least the way my DNA is, the way I want it, good things are around the corner. Golf is funny, right? I’m 32, so I could play at a very high level for another ten years, and that’s a long time. That’s a full career for pretty much any other sport. scar tissue that can help, you know. So as long as I stay in that mindset, I believe good things will come.
10. Be a goldfish.
I didn’t expect Spieth to quote Ted Lasso, but he says he’s leaning on a mantra from the show: Be a goldfish.
The special thing about goldfish is that they have a memory of 10 seconds. Their past does not determine their future. And they have a simple, calm spirit.
Spieth is, of course, the anti-goldfish. That’s what makes him such an interesting golfer and thinker. A goldfish wouldn’t comb through the waves of different points in its career, looking for the best things. A goldfish would have no idea standing over the ball. Maybe Spieth knows that he – like most of us – could use a few more goldfish.
My feeling leaving the interview? I like Jordan Spieth just the way he is.
Dylan Dethier welcomes your comments at dylan_dethier@golf.com.
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