While Xander Schauffele’s victory at the 2024 PGA Championship in Louisville marked the end of a lengthy and sometimes frustrating road to becoming a major champion, Jordan Spieth’s career path was far more front-loaded, with the Texan owning two pieces of golf’s Grand Slam by the time he was 22 and three before his 24th birthday.
But Spieth’s results have been widely scattered since he hoisted the Claret Jug after winning the Open Championship at Royal Birkdale in 2017, with just two PGA Tour victories and some stretches that have seen him plummet in the Official World Golf Ranking.
The most recent dip has come in 2024. After opening the calendar year with two top-10 finishes in his first three starts, Spieth has just one top-25 showing in his last 10 tournaments, and even that one — a T-10 at the Valero Texas Open — was best known for his shot away from the fairway and atop a clubhouse on his final hole of the event.
Spieth has dropped to No. 25 in the world, and had a spell in which he missed the cut four times in six starts. Not exactly what most envisioned when he took the golf world by storm in 2015 with five victories, including a green jacket and a U.S. Open.
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The Dallas native is hoping that another home game, this one at Colonial Country Club in nearby Fort Worth, will kickstart the second half of the season as he tries to put the pieces back together again.
This led to an interesting question on Wednesday in advance of the Charles Schwab Challenge when Spieth was asked if — unlike Schauffele, who had to keep grinding before securing his first major — he’d been a victim of his own success at such a young age.
“Yeah, certainly. But I think the healthy way to do it is that being of my own expectation, right, not of anyone else’s. But, yeah, absolutely. Once I know what I’m capable of, I want to obviously stay there,” Spieth said. “If you fall from that even a little bit it frustrates you, and then if you fall quite a bit from that you can be wondering what in the world is going on. It can overtake you, and it did for me for a little while. I think I have a better perspective now, but at the same time the drive to get to where I know my ceiling is at has never been higher.
“So every day that I’m not there it’s still, I still walk away, if I feel like I progressed towards it, I walk away really, really pleased with my day. But some days I feel like I didn’t…
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