Following surgery on his left wrist last week, Jordan Spieth said on the SiriusXM PGA Tour Radio channel on Wednesday that he expects to be out for the rest of 2024 but should be “plenty fine by the new year.”
In a conversation with Colt Knost and Drew Stoltz, Spieth said his doctor was “pretty excited” to find some things in his wrist that some of the MRIs weren’t showing.
“Anytime a guy who does, you know, 30,000 to 40,000 surgeries is excited about something, you know, that’s reason for me to feel good about it, I guess,” said Spieth. “In due time, it should be better than it was before.”
The wrist issue has officially been a problem for Spieth since the 2022 PGA Championship, but he said on Wednesday that it actually goes back to the end of 2017 or beginning of 2018.
“I didn’t get it fixed maybe then, and I kind of got into some bad habits, and then as I started to swing it better a few years ago it started to kind of act up again,” he said. “And then ultimately I had an incident last May, a little over a year ago when I was with my son in the pool and I was just kind of getting out and something popped and I couldn’t move it. I had to withdraw from the Byron the next week. And it’s kind of been something this year where that kind of dislocation has happened, you know, 20 some odd times since February [of 2024] and it started to happen more and more.
“So it was something that couldn’t fix itself with rest, unfortunately,” he continued. “So that’s why I ended up having to do this. So the answer, I mean, it’s been a while in general, so hopefully this cleans everything up from that original incident.”
Though Spieth played all year and did not make it to the second FedEx Cup Playoff event, the BMW Championship, he said he barely made it that far in the season.
“But there was one day, it was the Friday of John Deere this year, where I actually texted [caddie] Michael [Greller] like, ‘Hey man, it came out last night, it hasn’t gone back in overnight. And I can’t do this. I gotta go get this thing fixed now,'” explained Spieth.
“So that Friday of the John Deere, I was calling it quits actually. It was an afternoon tee time and I actually ended up getting to the range about 15 minutes before my time [because] I finally got it in and just said let’s just see what happens here this week, and then I can reassess after if I play through the Open or whatever. So yeah, late this year it just started to happen more and more.”
Spieth struggled in 2024 with one of the worst iron seasons of his career, although his driving was as good as it has ever been. He lost strokes on approach play and said he nearly called off the season in July and went to get the surgery then.
“Like I said, I really didn’t wanna make any excuses for myself the whole year [because] it wasn’t hurting to hit the shot,” he said. “And then I’d get into competition, and then I’d just bail. It was very strange. And so I guess it was a big enough sample size over a year, you’d think it frustrates you after a week or two, but for me, I just kind of kept thinking, ‘You know, hey, this is just something mechanically I gotta fix.’
“And at least now I have some clarity, right?” he continued. “I’m not blaming everything on it, but there was something there that just made me not me. And so hopefully I come back from this and I just don’t have to think about it. I know that may not be the case the first few months I get back into it. But from what I hear, I talked to a lot of different players who’ve had similar operations and a lot of guys across different sports and they’re like, ‘Look, one day you’ll wake up and, if you’re patient enough, you do the right rehab, you listen to your docs and you take your time, there’ll be one day where you wake up and you’re like, ‘Man, I just totally forgot that there was ever an issue.’ So I look forward to that day.”
Spieth said he expects to be able to start hitting again in November but that playing any events in December “feels like a stretch.”
