Jordan Spieth will treat the Players Championship like the major it so desperately wants to be as he looks to improve on his curious record at Sawgrass.
On his tournament debut in 2014, Spieth played his first 58 holes in 14 under par without dropping a shot, but since then is a combined 10 over par for 122 holes with three straight missed cuts.
Asked to put his finger on the reason behind such strange statistics, the three-time major winner told a pre-tournament press conference: “I love this place, I love the golf course but if you’re not on it’s (about) a lot of small areas.
“Small areas to hit your tee shots, small areas to hit your second shots and you really have to think through the place and let it come to you.
This is not a place to go out and try and force birdies and I think that’s where I’ve gone the last few years that’s gotten me in trouble.
“A good example would be like on (hole) number one here, when the pin is front left. If you’re not in the fairway you can’t get anywhere near the hole, but I’ll miss it in the left rough and (still) try and land it on that tier right next to the hole.
“It’s just situations like that where the patience I seem to display at Augusta (National, venue for the Masters), out here the last couple years I just haven’t had that patience.
“I haven’t approached it like I approach the major championship-calibre golf and this tournament and this golf course are major-championship calibre and therefore I need to go in with a different game plan and mindset and stick to it on the golf course.
“The first year I played here I almost won it and so I just kind of assumed that it would come easy to me. I kind of looked at the last few years and just kind of came in thinking, ‘Oh, if I miss it in a tough spot I’ll get up and down’.
“Historically that’s happened, but historically now that hasn’t happened. I’m ready to kind of get back on that first-year path but doing it the right way.”
Spieth will partner Justin Thomas and Rory McIlroy in the first two rounds of the so-called “fifth major”, but even that star-studded group will be outshone by the combination of Phil Mickelson, Tiger Woods and Rickie Fowler.
And if Mickelson had his way, it would actually all be about a one-on-one shootout between himself and 14-time major winner Woods, whose improved relationship extended to a practice round together ahead of the Masters in April.
“(With) the excitement that’s been going on around here it gets me thinking, ‘Why don’t we just bypass all the ancillary stuff of a tournament and just go head-to-head and just have kind of a high-stake, winner-take-all match’,” Mickelson joked in his pre-tournament press conference.
“Now, I don’t know if he wants a piece of me, but I just think it would be something that would be really fun for us to do, and I think there would be a lot of interest in it if we just went straight to the final round.”
