The 2016 Masters is a tournament Jordan Spieth can’t seem to forget.
Leading by five shots heading into the back nine in the final round on Sunday, many bookies would have suspended betting on the eventual champion.
However, bogeys on the 10th and 11th eroded the lead, and a quadruple bogey on the 12th saw two of the Texan’s shots land in the water.
Finishing second to Sheffield’s Danny Willett by three strokes, one of the most jaw-dropping finishes to an Augusta week had played out before our eyes.
This was Jordan Spieth though – he’d won the Masters the year before, and the US Open, and was ranked number one in the world – surely he could shake it off?
It seems not.
Speaking ahead of the Fort Worth Invitational, the 24-year-old said:
Even though it was still a tremendous week and still was a really good year in 2016, that kind of haunted me and all the questioning and everything. I let it tear me down a little bit. I kind of lost a little bit of my own freedom, thoughts on who I am as a person and as a golfer,
I loathed going to the golf course for a while.
The three-time major winner revealed his strategy for dealing with the tough moments:
I’ve just tried to really be selfish in the way that I think and focus on being as happy as I possibly can playing the game I love; not getting caught up in noise, good or bad. Because what I hear from the outside, the highs are too high from the outside and the lows are too low from the outside from my real experience of them. So trying to stay pretty neutral and just look at the big picture things and try and wake up every single day loving what I do.
Playing in his home state, Spieth rebounded from his Masters disintegration with victory at the Fort Worth Invitational in 2016.
