At Players, Jordan Spieth’s return to contention faces a simple obstacle

PONTE VEDRA BEACH, Fla. — If you were hoping to see the old Jordan Spieth on Thursday at the Players Championship, you left TPC Sawgrass encouraged.

Jordan Spieth sees scorecards the way Jackson Pollock saw canvasses, so there was nothing neat and tidy about his opening-round two-under 70. His first nine holes of golf were an exercise in the art of the seesaw, featuring two eagles, two birdies, two bogeys, a double and just two pars. Even as those eagles and doubles faded into a more routine back nine, he bore the expression of a man only a short distance from losing his mind, grunting and flailing over his mistakes with theatrical commitment. In the end, he finished the day at well within striking distance a quarter of the way through his biggest start since last year’s Open Championship.

To the untrained eye, Thursday’s performance might have seemed like a sign of life from the three-time major champ. For the first time in six months after a wrist tendon surgery to fix a nagging injury, Spieth looked like, well, Spieth. He shaped shots in both directions, he waggled and wished, he pulled off a few acts of genuine magic.

This is the style of golf that has served as the hallmark of Spieth’s game forever, his brilliance defined by its unpredictability. Often, the closer he seems to losing it, the closer he is to piecing it together.

In theory, then, Thursday’s opening round at the Players seemed like the nearest Spieth has been to his old self in an eternity. And yet, when it was over, Spieth himself seemed struck by how far away that old self still felt.

“I’m getting closer,” he told Golf Channel’s Todd Lewis with a pained expression on his face. “But I’m still not there.”

It has been eight years since Spieth’s last major championship triumph, three years since his last PGA Tour victory, and about as long since his last pain-free golf. After a prolonged break in the wake of surgery, he spoke at the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am about his golf swing feeling like “wet concrete.” The goal, he said, was to bring back the habits and tendencies of yore.

Thursday at the Players Championship sure looked that way, but it didn’t feel that way. At least not to the man responsible for making the swings. But that disconnect raises a bigger question: If the old Spieth has been gone for so long, how will he know when he’s fully back?

“When I stand over it and I’m not trying to avoid things. Instead [of what I’m doing now], I’m picking a target and I’m very confident it’s going to start on that target and move to where I want it,” Spieth said. “So pretty much where most of these guys are playing from, I would like to get there.”

Spieth delivered that last part of the line with just a dash of bitterness, and its subtext needed no explanation. Competing on the same plane as your competitors each week seems like a simple obstacle, but reality has proven much harder for one of this generation’s most enigmatic players.

“I’m doing a really good job of battling it,” he said. “I had to kind of rebuild stuff from a few months of nothing, and it wasn’t like I was coming back to something that was already great right before. I was in some really bad habits for a year and a half.”

Battle is a good word for it. It is one thing to watch and root for Spieth through eight years of frustration and toil, but it is quite another to live it. If Spieth truly believes the golf of 2015-2017 lies somewhere within him, he must dig through several hard years to reach it.

There is fear in that pursuit. But at Sawgrass, there is hope, too.

“So it just takes maybe double the balls that I hit prior,” he said Thursday. “My wrist feels really good this week, I’m very excited about that, so that allows me to feel like I can go out right now and push it a bit, when I couldn’t the first few weeks, first few events of the season.”

If you were hoping to see the old Jordan Spieth, you left Thursday at the Players Championship encouraged.

The new Jordan Spieth, though? He still needs to be convinced.