ORLANDO – Viktor Hovland isn’t the only one digging into a bag of tricks to work on his swing on the range at PGA Tour events. Jordan Spieth has his own DIY training aid that attracted eyeballs after the third round of the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am.
Hovland has made waves with his pool floaties. Spieth said hold my beer and is using a jerry-rigged shaft and driving rod that looks as if it could do some bodily harm or at least draw blood if he isn’t careful.
NBC/Golf Channel commentators Notah Begay III and Arron Oberholser watched Spieth go through the drill post-round a few weeks ago. Oberholser noted that his wife, who played on the LPGA Tour, used to use a similar contraption back in the day, but he was never a fan of it.
“I was always afraid I was going to hit the stick and hurt myself,” Oberholser said.
On Tuesday, Spieth didn’t set up his training aid, but he did stop long enough to explain the purpose of it to Golfweek.
“I’m just trying to get my hands to settle deep,” he said at Bay Hill ahead of the Arnold Palmer Invitational, where he is in the field on a sponsor’s exemption. “It’s just a bad habit of my hands getting up, the club gets all out of whack, so my hands stay settled and on plane.”
Added Oberholser: “When he gets more arm depth, he can hit the shots he wants to hit. Where he has problems is that as he gets hip high, he ends up lifting instead of turning and isn’t able to get the hand depth that he wants.”
Spieth said that his longtime coach Cameron McCormack rigged it together a shaft and driving rod together and added a bit of foam so that if Spieth hits it, it doesn’t strike his wrist.
“It’s getting closer,” said Spieth, who has three top-30 finishes in his first four starts this year, “and better.”
“When he put it in the slot, man, it was just a tight little fall to the left, like 2 yards,” Oberholser said. “It was really pretty.”
Carl Lohren, longtime teaching pro and author of “One Move to Better Golf,” considers Spieth to be the most talented player in the game with an incredible set of hands around the green. He said of the drill: “It’s not goofy. It came out of Hogan’s book (Five Lessons: The Modern Fundamentals of Golf) and when he explains the plane of the swing, it’s coming on top of that ball up over his right shoulder and he’s just taking it back parallel with his hands,” he said. “It is better than what I’ve seen Spieth do because most of the things I’ve seen him work on are terrible. It’s more correct than anything I’ve seen him do. When he starts the hips and shoulders together, his hands want to go inside. But he forces them to stay out and comply with that correct plan. It’s not a bad drill, but he’s doing the right thing in the wrong way. A right thing done in a wrong way doesn’t equal right.”
