PGA Tour Needs Jordan Spieth

“I had some really bad habits for a long time,” Spieth said in a telephone interview Friday with the AP. “Whether it was something that would have happened anyway or whether anything in my wrist was causing me to not be able to get into certain positions, I don’t have that issue now.

“Having to take three months off swinging forces you to come back and be wet concrete.”

Spieth says he’s ready to return, coming back at the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am in three weeks, which will give fans the golfer they have been looking for, at least as a member of the field.

But when will Spieth return with the game that won 13 times on the PGA Tour?

At 31, Spieth should be in the prime of his career, but his last win came in 2022 at the RBC Heritage in a playoff, and know 55 events later, Spieth will return looking to break a winless streak that will reach 1016 days when he tees up on Thursday on the Monterey Peninsula.

“I think I’m trying to look big picture,” Spieth said. “I don’t want to put too much pressure on a hot start. I just want to get back into a rhythm. This is by far the longest I’ve gone between tournament rounds.”

Yet, a hot start is precisely what the PGA Tour and the fans want and need.

Spieth, like Rory McIlroy and even Rickie Fowler, are needle movers; they make a win more special and create more buzz than Japan’s Hideki Matsuyama two weeks ago in Maui or last week at Sony by Canadian Nick Taylor.

Both players had good wins in Hawaii, but if Spieth were at the top of the leaderboard, the win the spotlight would burn a little brighter on the future schedule, at least until the Masters and the focus would be on a superstar.

Spieth told the AP he’s been playing golf without pain for a month. However, shots from gnarly spots in the rough or an awkward lie in a bunker are still a work in progress, but pain is not the issue.

“One day, I hit a shot that should have hurt, and it didn’t,” he said.

Spieth plans to play three straight weeks, Pebble Beach, Phoenix, and Los Angeles, and then assess where his game is.

Spieth won 10 times from 2015 to 2017, a span of three years, but that was then, and this is now.

At the time, Spieth was on top of the world rankings and was the toast of golf.

Now 70^th in the same rankings, Spieth is looking for a way to climb back toward the top of a very slippery mountain.

“I think the biggest goals for me, I want to feel like I step on the tee and I know I’m one of the best golfers in the world — I have no doubts about that when I step on the tee,” he said. “I want things to be in place where I feel consistent enough to believe that day in and day out. It has to do with being on runs where you’re finishing in the top 10 or top 15 every week.

“I know that feeling,” he said. “That’s the feeling I want to get back to.”