The end arrived quickly for Jordan Spieth’s 2024 season. Too quickly.
Spieth walked off the 18th green at TPC Southwind on Sunday evening with a 72-hole score of nine over, good for 68th in the 70-player field and a first-round exit from the PGA Tour postseason. For the second-straight season, and the fifth season in the last seven years, his season ended winless.
These are difficult sentences to grasp, particularly after the two-year flurry that started Spieth’s professional career in 2015. He was must-watch TV then, an electrifying talent who’d landed on the doorstep of the career grand slam before his peachfuzz faded. Now, on Sunday in Memphis, he faced reporters looking like a much older man. With voice sullen, he admitted the truth he’d been avoiding since a wrist injury first upended his game in 2018.
It was time to go under the knife.
“Yeah I’m going to get operated on ASAP,” he said Sunday, revealing his plans to seek surgery to repair a nagging injury in his lead wrist for the first time. “We’ll go through the process from there.”
Spieth was light on specifics of the procedure he’ll be undergoing, saying doctors will have to “recreate the tendon” in his left wrist “so it doesn’t dislocate,” and that the timeline for his return to golf is roughly three to four months, or roughly in time for the beginning of the 2025 PGA Tour season.
Still, the decision marks the most significant development in Spieth’s physical health since the wrist injury first surfaced in 2018. That season was, perhaps not coincidentally, when his slide from the top of the Official World Golf Ranking began.
As Spieth told reporters a few weeks ago, the injury began as a chipped bone in his wrist that caused inflammation and pain. He tried to treat the injury without surgery at first, but the injury morphed over time. During a flare-up last spring, doctors diagnosed him with nerve damage in his lead wrist and arm. Spieth says he will go long stretches without feeling pain, which is why he tried to play through the injury for years. But pressure on the wrist of any kind — he said one flare-up came after lifting a toaster — can send him back into agony.
“Anything that impacted the ground was not a good situation for me this year,” he said Sunday.
Given the golf swing requires repeated ground impacts, Spieth knew the wrist was hampering his golfing ability, but he was reluctant to open up about it in public. He assumed, perhaps rightly, that any discussion about the injury would be seen as excusing his performance. Still, there’s ample reason to believe his situation was more causation than correlation.
“It happened last May, was the first instance,” Spieth said of the wrist flare-up. “I think I have three top-10s since that.”
Spieth knows a single injury can’t explain seven years of bad play. If fixing his game was as simple as missing four months of action, he probably should have (and would have) undergone surgery in ’18. Some injuries arrive suddenly, like a tidal wave, but this one came deliberately, like a river carving through a valley.
“[It’s] a come-and-go thing,” Spieth told the AP’s Doug Ferguson. “I could oddly enough twist in the wrong way getting off the ground, and I couldn’t play tomorrow. But I could play the next day. The ulnar side of the wrist is hard to heal.”
The result of it all arrived on Sunday afternoon at TPC Southwind. Spieth’s 2024 season is over. Another year of his playing prime is gone. Now, a surgery and several lonely months of rehab stand between him and a return.
“It’s incredibly frustrating,” he said afterward. “Probably the most frustrating year I ever had.”
The hope is that today’s frustration will be worth tomorrow’s payoff, that the golfer of yesteryear will return in full, but there’s no guarantee.
The end was painful for Jordan Spieth on Sunday, but at least it was quick. What comes next won’t be.
