NASSAU, Bahamas – Jordan Spieth squatted down in the corner of Albany GC’s driving range and fiddled with a monopod that propped up his phone. The angle was slightly off. Spieth gently tilted his phone camera to the right and reassumed his place on the range, 6-iron in hand. After one swing, he returned to the camera, watching his technique multiple times over. Spieth conferred with longtime caddie Michael Greller, then placed his phone back on the monopod, tweaked the angle ever so slightly once more and readied for his next swing.

Spieth’s life is littered with minutiae these days, at home and on the golf course. There’s the personal minutiae, which subsumes any new parent in the early months. Spieth and his wife Annie welcomed their third child in July. When he’s not absorbed in dad life, he’s meticulously working somewhere, be it Thursday at the Hero World Challenge or at home in Dallas on the minutiae of his swing, his body and his mental approach — every tiny tweak matters. Enough small adjustments will get him back to where he once was, right? … Right? That’s Spieth’s hope.

The Spieth that emerged on the PGA TOUR like a blistering comet 13 years ago, winning the John Deere Classic as a 19-year-old and a pair of majors two years later, has long faded. Time does that. Every teenage phenom eventually becomes the 30-something longing for what they once were.

Spieth, now 32, hasn’t won a major championship in eight-plus years. It’s been more than a decade since he claimed the Masters and U.S. Open back-to-back in what was the best attempt at the calendar Grand Slam since Tiger Woods in 2002. He was transcendent then. The next great hope. The golden child. A generational superstar in the making. Spieth hasn’t been that player for a while. Injuries hampered him. The competition got better. Golf slowly trended toward a power game, which was never Spieth’s magic.

Some comets don’t return, lacking the energy to loop around the solar system, disintegrating somewhere in space. Others, if strong enough, come back around.

Will Spieth?

He begins a pivotal year on the PGA TOUR at the Sony Open in Hawaii with that question in mind. If Spieth is to elevate from a top-50 player (the category he’s mulled in for the last several years) back to a consensus top-10 player, there are more than a few reasons to believe 2026 will be the year he can, and more than a few reasons he needs to.

For starters, the broader circumstances befit it. Spieth has no status beyond 2026 and is not exempt from the full roster of Signature Events for a second straight year. With uncertainty on the horizon as the Future Competitions Committee mulls a transformational shift in the 2027 schedule, it’s incumbent on every player to eliminate any worries that they won’t be a part of the next iteration of the PGA TOUR.

Then, in Spieth’s mind, it’s simply time. There are no more excuses. The 13-time PGA TOUR winner spent the last eight years dealing with a frustrating wrist injury that kept him from swinging the way he used to during his most successful years. Now, finally, he’s fully healthy and coming off an unencumbered offseason.

“I haven't swung it well for the better part of 10 years, which is wild,” Spieth told PGATOUR.COM in December.

Therein lies Spieth’s biggest reason for optimism in the new year. The wrist issues date all the way back to the end of 2017, when Spieth says he hurt it during offseason training. That caused his grip to weaken, his club face to inadvertently open on the backswing, and the ball to flail out right. Compensating for that meant his hands couldn’t get as deep in his backswing, a key component of his natural tendencies. After years of pushing off surgery, Spieth finally underwent a procedure before the 2025 season. The only problem: He had no time to retrain the years of scar tissue and muscle memory when he returned. He jumped straight into the PGA TOUR calendar, debuting at the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am with limited freedom to work on major swing fixes as he fought to keep his head above water.

This offseason marked the first extended period for Spieth to reflect and make changes. Spieth stopped playing competitive golf after missing the BMW Championship. He didn’t make any FedExCup Fall starts, even though he hung tenuously around the Aon Next 10 bubble, which would assure his inclusion in the first two Signature Events. Those were short-term opportunities. Spieth has spent a few years making do with those. This offseason, he had bigger goals in mind.

“You gotta feel like you're moving something 10 inches to move it an inch,” Spieth said. “So then you stand over a shot, and you have a pin tucked by water right, and you have to feel like you're going to swing in the middle of the water, and you're just not going to do that. Because you're going to do it once and it will go in the middle of the water, and you're going to be like, ‘What the heck?’ It has to work slowly sometimes.”

“I'm trying to get my hands in a deeper place at the end of the back swing,” he continued, “which is pretty similar to any good ball striking period of my career and I haven't done that in seven-plus years. It's a decent adjustment, as well as figuring out where the shaft is taken back while my hands go back that way, and then how it comes out. I’m going back in time to just DNA-type stuff that I used to do really well.”

Spieth was displeased with his showing in the Bahamas, his first tournament of any kind since missing the BMW Championship in August and the first chance to see his swing adjustments under real pressure. Spieth tied for last in the 20-man field. Afterward, he questioned whether it was the right choice to come at all.

“In this state, like I was this week, I'm not having much fun with it, and it would have been better served to get more work done at home,” Spieth said. “Unfortunately, hopefully, I can change that.”

That’s why 2026 will be a stress test for the three-time major winner. He’s healthy, had a full offseason to improve and is still in the athletic peak of his career. He’s 32, not 52, and despite the swing issues, ranked 13th in Strokes Gained: Total in 2025. Don’t mistake his lack of true stardom for a lost golfer. Spieth has enough natural talent to keep his PGA TOUR card comfortably. He can look like that free-wheeling, tantalizing 19-year-old in spurts. He just hasn’t captured that form or long enough to make you, or him, believe it’s sustainable. And there’s no reason that improvement shouldn’t follow. With higher expectations comes increased pressure to deliver.

Then there’s the mounting outside noise, which every athlete says they don’t feel but undoubtedly do. Spieth became a target of criticism after accepting sponsor exemptions into five Signature Events in 2025. To him, he was doing what anyone else in his position would do. To others, it appeared as special treatment for a player coasting off a version of himself that was in the past.

“It stinks,” Spieth said. “I was catching strays for no reason from guys who I had pretty good relationships with.

“Everyone's going to ask,” he continued. “I’m not, like, paying (tournaments) to get in. There's a reason that they’re going to pick me to go in. If it's going to be helpful to their tournament, then they're going to want me there, until they don't want me there.”

Spieth won’t apologize for taking them. Candidly, he will have it as a backup plan in 2026. “I’m doing anything anyone else is doing,” he said. But if Spieth gets where he wants to go, and where he believes he is headed, that conversation will dissipate. And it’s a conversation he’s eager to silence.

“I don't want to have to do it,” he said.

Spieth’s early season performance will be critical in setting up a resurgent year. He is playing the Sony Open for just the second time in seven years. He has an incredible track record at the WM Phoenix Open and will sneak into the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am based on his finish in last year’s FedExCup, another one of his favorites.

The runway is there for Spieth to prove there’s an encore act. Talent doesn’t just disappear. The last decade has yielded a series of circumstances that have kept Spieth from accessing it. Those are gone now.

“I shouldn’t have any excuses not to be better,” Spieth said.

It’s time for the comet to return to orbit.