Jordan Spieth will surely wish that he had taken advice from Sir Nick Faldo way back in 2015.
Spieth made a huge splash on the professional golf scene when he won the John Deere classic when he was just 19 in 2013.
He then went on to win three major championships from 2015 to 2017 and by the time he was 28 in April 2022, he had 13 PGA Tour victories to his name.
However, Jordan Spieth has not recorded a win since then.
He has been working incredibly hard on his game, but to no avail.
Spieth’s poor form seems to be getting him down now, and it’s fair to argue that he will never be the same player he once was.
Had the 33-year-old listened to Nick Faldo 11 years ago, we may well be watching a completely different Jordan Spieth right now.
The warning Nick Faldo gave Jordan Spieth in 2015 now looks poignant
Back in 2015, Faldo was speaking about Spieth after he had won the first two major championships of the year.
And the six-time major champion sent a warning to the man from Dallas, Texas.
“He doesn’t need to (change),“ Faldo told Reuters back in 2015.
“I’ve been there, when you’re playing well you’re always looking for more but all you really want to do is just maintain things.
“If you’re playing good enough to compete against everyone … and your game is good enough to beat the best in the world … I wouldn’t go and look to over tinker with it,” said Faldo, shaking his head.
“That’s what many have done before, (thinking) ‘I’ve got this good, I want to keep going’, but maintaining it is a tough enough game.
“There’s a knife edge between playing so well that it makes you feel so darn good that you feel 100 percent confident … to then, very simply, hitting a few bad shots — that whacks your confidence.“
Sadly, Spieth is one of the biggest tinkerers in the game. He is constantly working on a different feel or a different movement in his swing, and if anything, he is only getting worse as a result.
Nick Faldo rebuilt his swing after winning The Open in 1987
After Faldo’s triumph at Muirfield in 1987, Faldo realized that his swing was not solid enough to hold up under pressure.
So he embarked on a complete rebuild with David Leadbetter and went on to win five more majors before he retired from playing competitively.
“Crumbs, it’s 30 years ago that I went through that, decided to change my swing. I was European number one at the time,“ Faldo said.
“The fortunate thing now is that you don’t have to go through that process,” he explained. “I did it the old fashioned way, tip your balls out and beat them.
“Now you have what I call the appliance of science. You have machines to tell your swing path, club-face angle, ball flights after one shot — that’s fantastic.
“I wish I would have had that rather than hit a million balls and then go, ‘Oh, I wonder how this feels?,“ added Faldo.
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