Spieth hopes demands of Open will help him regain magic touch

"Coming to an Open Championship requires a lot of feel and imagination, and I think that's what I needed a bit of in my game," Spieth said yesterday. Photo: Reuters/Paul Childs

Brian Keogh

You only appreciate the good things in life when you don't have them any more. Health is wealth, as they say. And for a golfer who once made holing 30-footers look like child's play, Jordan Spieth's struggles with the putter have been hard for the Texan to take, especially now that the malaise has wormed its way into the rest of his game.

Handing back the Claret Jug to the R&A in a staged ceremony yesterday was the least of his worries but Spieth still said "it wasn't an enjoyable experience".

It brought home to him the fact that his 2017 Open-winning accomplishments now count for little in the voracious 21st-century media world of short attention spans and long memories.

After all, Spieth hasn't won since he lifted the Claret Jug 12 months ago and that's because he's been having a nightmare on the greens.

Once Picasso with a putter, he's now the artistic equivalent of a toddler with a crayon - 177th for strokes gained putting on a PGA Tour list that only has 205 names.

It's little wonder he took some time out recently to get away from it all, attending a Special Olympics event with his sister in Seattle before hitting the beach at Cabo San Lucas.

As a player who loves to analyse his game out loud, he's found himself becoming over-analytical and admitted yesterday that the chance to reset and come back to play feel golf on a links course he's never seen might be just what the doctor ordered.

"Coming to an Open Championship requires a lot of feel and imagination, and I think that's what I needed a bit of in my game," Spieth said yesterday.

"I'd gotten very technical and very into making everything perfect instead of kind of the way I normally play.

"This week kind of provides that opportunity where you don't know how far the ball is necessarily going to go off the tee.

"You need to play the spots, and then you have to use your imagination from there - hold the ball, ride the wind, a lot of different scenarios based on where pins are and the distance that you have."

He looked relieved to escape the usual round of questions about his putting and relive last year's incredible 13th-hole bogey, where he took a drop on the practice ground and made a five that felt like an eagle.

He closed with a 69 to beat Matt Kuchar by three strokes but he hasn't won since and if he's to win this week, he'd happily take a boring win over last year's back-nine dramatics.

"For me, I would've been more proud if I had made no bogeys and three birdies - and that would be the goal of what to do next time," he said.

When you make a habit of making the extraordinary look ordinary, plain old boring would do very nicely right now for the world number six.