To players, Jordan Spieth’s return to quarrel faces a simple obstacle

Ponte Vedra Beach, Fla. – If you were hoping to see Jordan Spieth Old Thursday at the player championship, you left the TPC Sawgrass encouraged.

Jordan Spieth sees the results on the road Jackson Pollock Sharra Canvas, so there was nothing regular and regular about its opening two-year-old. His first golf holes were an exercise in Seesew’s art, displaying two eagles, two birds, two bogeys, one pair and only two pars. Even while those eagles and doubles faded into a nine routine, he gave birth to a man’s expression only a short distance from the loss of his mind, bothering and clashing about his mistakes with theatrical engagement. After all, he finished the day in Well within the striking distance a quarter of the road until its biggest start since last year’s open championship.

For the untrained eye, Thursday’s performance could seem like a sign of life from the great champion three times. For the first time in six months after a hand tendon surgery to fix an annoying injury, spieth looked like, well, spieth. He formed shots in both directions, he waved and wished, he withdrew some acts of genuine magic.

This is the golf style that has served as the distinctive sign of the Spieth game forever, its splendor determined by its unpredictability. Often, the closer he seems to lose, the closer he IS to chop it together.

In theory, then, the round of Thursday’s opening to the players seemed to be the closest spieth to be the older himself in an eternity. And yet, when it was over, the spieth himself seemed struck by how far he himself was old.

“I’m approaching,” he told Todd Lewis of Golf Channel with a painful expression on his face. “But I’m still there.”

It has been eight years since the last triumph of the great Spieth championship, three years from his latest PGA Tour victory, and almost for as long as his latest painless golf. After a prolonged break after surgery he spoke at AT&T Pebble Beach pro-am about his golf swinging feeling like “wet concrete“The goal, he said, was to restore Yore’s habits and tendencies.

Thursday in the player championship probably looked that way, but it didn’t feel like that. At least not for the man responsible for making the shakes. But this detachment raises a bigger question: if the old spieth is gone for so long, how do he KNOW When he is fully returned?

“When I stand on it and I’m not trying to avoid things. Instead (from what I’m doing now), I’m choosing a goal and I’m very sure it will start on that target and transfer where I love it, “said Spieth.” So much from where most of these boys are playing, I would like to get there. “

Spieth delivered it the last part of the line with only a bit of bitterness, and its subtext needed no explanation. Competing in the same plane as your competitors every week seems like a simple obstacle, but the reality has proven much more difficult for one of the most enigmatic players of this generation.

“I’m doing a really good job to fight it,” he said. “I had to rebuild things from a few months nothing, and it wasn’t like turning into something that was already great before. I was in some really bad habits for a year and a half.”

Battle It’s a good word for her. It is one thing to see and root for spieth through eight years of disappointment and tribulation, but it is quite different to live it. If Spieth really believes that the 2015-2017 golf lies somewhere inside it, it must dig through several difficult years to reach it.

Is afraid in that pursuit. But in Sawgrass, there is also hope.

“So it just takes double the balls I hit before,” he said on Thursday. “My meat feels really good this week, I’m very excited about it, so it allows me to feel like I can go out now and push it a little, when I couldn’t first, some of the first events of the season.”

If you were hoping to see the old Jordan Spieth, you left on Thursday at the championship of encouraged players.

However, Jordan New Spieth? He still has to be convinced.