COGNIZANT CLASSIC

March 2, 2025

Jordan Spieth

PGA National Champion Course

Quick Quotes

Q. You've wanted to get some starts under your belt and kind of back playing into form. How did this week go in that progression that you're going through?

JORDAN SPIETH: Yeah, it was a lot like Phoenix. I'm shocked at -- I get that the overseed was there and the wind was down, but it's still a stressful golf course, and this was some of the best golf I've seen played relative to what I would have thought would have happened on a golf course in quite a while.

If you had told me 14-under at the beginning of the week, I would have shook your hand and gone home. It may be even top 10. It's crazy good golf out there.

I feel like I'm trending in the right direction. I feel like I played better than I did in Phoenix. Phoenix is a better fit for me, I think, maybe. I just throw out Torrey Pines because I did what I always do there. It's really not a great judge on where I'm at.

I really do feel like I'm playing good golf at about 60 percent of the control tee to green that I'm capable of doing and still able to come to a very challenging golf course and hit nice shots and shoot under-par rounds. I'm one swing away on Friday from having a chance to win, and that was a 9-iron, which is just a 1-in-100 kind of chunk.

I feel really good. THE PLAYERS, I've got to be more patient than I have in other years, and then Tampa will be good. I'm bummed not to be there next week. It's been a great, great place for me, and I really wish I was getting that start, but I needed to play better injured golf last year, I guess.

Q. You've had some ups and downs with the wrist in these couple starts you've had. How did hold up this week?

JORDAN SPIETH: Yeah, it's been pretty good this week. It's been pretty much the same every morning when I wake up. It's just minorly maybe getting a little bit better as it's getting warmer, but it's very slowly -- by the time I start hitting, everything is okay, and I'm not thinking about it much at all on the golf course, which is really the goal.

I just hope that I start to wake up and it starts to feel a little more normal. It's strange. It doesn't feel unstable like last year; it's just simply beating it up. It's just the scar tissue and some of the inflammation.

Q. A few years ago when you dropped to 91st or 92nd in the world, what are the parallels from your climb back up again maybe to now, besides the injury?

JORDAN SPIETH: I think it's way different. I'm in a way better head space now. I feel like I'm more capable of handling dips better than back then. If I didn't putt well in 2019, I wouldn't have made a cut. I figured something out with my putting, and it was my best putting year I've ever had. But I couldn't hit it on planet earth and I was in the last group on Saturday of the PGA, and I knew that I had no chance. So it was a very different situation.

Right now I'm on the right track back. I'm progressing, and I know that I'm on the right track. I'm not searching for answers. That's a big difference.

That just means it'll come. But the problem is I've been so far off for so many years that if that's 10,000 reps, it might take 20,000 to be where I want to be. But I'm already 15,000 in. So hopefully it just continues to get better. No limitations on the wrist. Being able to hold the club in the right place going back is a big deal, too.

I feel like I'm in a -- I have way more knowledge about what I do well and why I did it well and how to get back to doing that than I did back then. I feel like I can do stuff like this every week, and back then it was like a crapshoot.