After wrist surgery, Jordan Spieth finally sounds healthy again

This has been a badly-needed offseason break for Jordan Spieth, who we last saw swing a golf club in mid-August at the FedEx St. Jude Championship. Spieth finished tied for 68th that week, bowing out of the FedEx Cup Playoffs and doing so (mostly) happily. He needed surgery. ASAP.

That was the acronym he used. “I’m going to get operated on ASAP,” Spieth said. “We’ll go through the process from there.” 

That process was “recreating the tendon” in his left wrist that offers stability to keep it from occasionally dislocating. For years he has battled repeated pain at the bottom, contact-point of the swing that ultimately pushed some doubt into his swing. “Anything that impacted the ground was not a good situation for me,” Spieth said in August.

Now, in December, all seems to have healed. Spieth detailed his positive recovery status this week on Colt Knost and Drew Stoltz’ SiriusXM radio show. 

“Yeah, [the wrist is] good,” Spieth said. “Everything’s gone according to plan. I’ve been kind of hitting on a ball count the last couple weeks and then I got the full go this last weekend. The weather’s been good here in Dallas, I’ve been at it the last, well, really, I hit Nerf balls for a while so I could work on some mechanics and not have the contact. 

“Now I have zero restrictions. It feels good. None of the shots, you know, I don’t really have any problems with it. No pain, no anything. So now it’s kind of just taking care of it, continuing to do therapy probably through the new year, and just be prepared to go start playing some golf and be prepared to play three weeks in a row. I think that’s kind of the next step is actually getting out and playing, which will be fun. It’ll be a little rusty to start for sure.”

That three-straight-weeks indicator is one Spieth has often discussed, both with this wrist injury but also with his playing stamina in general. Getting his entire body ready to handle travel and the amount of practice involved with 21 straight days on the road is what he’s working toward. 

He’s also working on finding the center of the clubface again. Knost asked Spieth if, after the operation, he was still the same ball-striker he was before going under the knife.

“Yeah, yeah. I mean, now that I’ve been hitting for a while,” Spieth said. “At the beginning it was like kind of laughable, you know, three months of not hitting a ball and then the center of the face seems really hard to do and really far away. I could find fat toe and thin heel back-to-back shots pretty easily. And now it’s pretty good. 

“But yeah, it’s been really nice. I really needed to reset some mechanics, and now whether I was being restricted from my wrist or not, it’s been really nice to see some really solid productive days back-to-back-to-back and just be working the same thing, you know? Kind of meticulously, like, kind of annoyingly, right? Some of the paused reps, you know, stuff that you do when guys go through swing changes. But I just, mine was just kind of getting it into a really good spot, and then from now it’ll be working that onto the golf course.”

Spieth said that even if the full-swing, full-go blessing from his doctor just recently arrived, he has been able to chip and putt for awhile amid therapy sessions and do some mental work — all while carving out time for a potential role in “Happy Gilmore 2.” 

Spieth said that he wasn’t sure how much he could divulge about the movie, but he did have a speaking part filmed — it’s too early to know if it will make the final cut — and he had no problem sharing a list of other Tour pros involved.

“When I was up there it was like Lee Trevino, Nicklaus, Freddie, we had Corey Pavin,” Spieth said. “In our scene next to me was Rickie and Collin and Xander and Keegan. So, I mean, you know, yeah, it was really fun. It was super cool to see. There’s a lot of other guys that were there before and after that have bigger parts.”

We shall wait and see on all accounts. The fake golf scripted for the screen, and the real stuff, with Spieth expected to return to Tour action in January.