For the first time in six months, Jordan Spieth is set to tee it up in a PGA Tour event. Making his season debut at the 2025 AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am, the 13-time winner returns to the Monterey Peninsula on Thursday with a healthy left wrist and a healthy long-term mindset about his prospects in his corner.
“It feels good. I did [the surgery] the Wednesday after Memphis, so it’s been quite a while now. I was actually planning on making a start before this, and I just hadn’t gotten enough on-course reps in and wanted to — I was just kind of up in the air,” Spieth said. “… I got a couple great pieces of advice before and during recovery, and one of them was that no one’s ever come back too late from a surgery. So, I kind of took that to heart. As much as I wanted to just start getting out there, I’m glad that I’ve waited ’til here. …
“I’m very pleased with how everything’s gone. I wake up, it’s a little tight still after putting it to use a lot the last couple weeks to try to get ready, but it’s nothing that can do any damage anymore. I just loosen it up and it feels really good. … It’s all systems go now, and I’m excited to be back. I don’t feel like I missed much because I think I only missed — I maybe missed one or two events that I would have played in anyways. It kind of just feels like the start to a new season, which I think is a good thing.”
Spieth underwent left wrist surgery the week following the St. Jude Championship as he was an early exit from the 2024 FedEx Cup Playoffs in August. Repairing a nerve injury in his wrist that started to flare up and cause tension in his swing dating back to the 2023 Wells Fargo Championship, the three-time major champion hopes a healthy wrist will lead to healthy results.
His comeback trail begins this week at Pebble Beach — a site that has treated him well in the past. A winner of this golf tournament in 2017, Spieth has since added a podium finish in 2021 and a runner-up result to Tom Hoge in 2022 to his tournament résumé.
Spieth arrives following a season in which he was hobbled; he played through the wrist injury as it never ultimately caused him too much pain. Despite this, he posted some of the best strokes-gained-off-the-tee numbers of his career; however, when his club was forced to make contact with turf — on approach and around the green — his game suffered.
“I never felt pain during the swing or I would have done something the second I did,” Spieth said. “… The psychological part was done when it was hurting to hit a real ball and having to kind of push through a little of that week 12 to 16 post op.”
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Spieth, 31, finds himself in a precarious spot at this point in his career. Gone are the days of the Golden Child as his last major championship came in 2017. He has only added two other PGA Tour victories since raising the Claret Jug. Spieth understands it will take time to return to the peak of his powers.
Still, he has immediate goals for this year. He would like to contend in a tournament before the Masters. While he would be surprised to be inside the top 10 on Sunday at Pebble Beach, in his heart of hearts, he wouldn’t be at the same time. Spieth has eyes on making the U.S. Ryder Cup team but understands it will be a tall mountain to climb given how little success he had last season.
His game has dipped into a valley before — namely 2019 and 2020 — and he has come out the other side. With all this literal and figurative scar tissue built up, Spieth seems to have the tools, the wits, the health and the energy to go through that journey all over again.
“I just have more knowledge of what I need to do, and when I just couldn’t really do it, it was frustrating. Then, when I was able to kind of feel like, ‘OK, I can do it,’ I just feel some patience towards this next stretch,” Spieth said. “I know my mechanics, I mean, they were off where it was going to be really hard. Now, I feel like they’re going to get to where I should be a lot more of a consistent player. But I just didn’t have — I didn’t have or take the time to figure that out in the last stretch.”
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