Jordan Spieth’s pre-shot movement is a popular topic in pro group text

Harold Varner III is opinionated, and on Saturday he expressed his opinion.

Here is HV3 on his newborn son, Harold IV: “I am going to play with my child. He goes to bed around 8:30 p.m. It’s incredible. He’s like an old man. Come into the world sleeping all the time, come out of the world sleeping all the time.

Here is HV3 on Patrick Cantlay: “The most impressive thing about Patrick is that when you ask him a question in the media, it’s so thoughtful. I’m just like, yeah, you know, I’m good, man, I’m trying to get home, let me answer this question, whatever. But he speaks so well. Obviously he’s a smart kid, but you know, being able to express himself, especially when he doesn’t agree with someone, I know what I say when I don’t agree with someone: it’s just two words.

Here is HV3 on Tiger Woods’ back last week at the Masters: “You know what’s weird, man. And I know he’s getting old, but he’s not that old. So you hear people and they say, I’m not doing it when we see it again. I’m like, is he 100 years old or 46 years old? So it was weird for me. I don’t care if he has one foot or two feet. This guy, he’s so good.

Varner had joined the CBS show on RBC Wealth third round, where he shot a score-under 63 to enter Sunday’s final round with a one-shot lead, and the announcers Colt Knost And Amanda Renner prepare it for shots. And perhaps its hottest?

Here is HV3 on Jordan Spieth’s pre-shot routine as they watched him before a stroke:

“What do you think of this little rehearsal over there?” Knost asked Varner.

“Uhhhh.”

There was laughter, then Varner continued.

“I mean, I thought he was about to hit him actually. We had some really good things in the group text about this rehearsal, but, uh, none that I’d rather comment on here. But if you hit shots like that, I would repeat it.

“Who is in this group chat? » » asked Renner.

“Um, no, no way,” Varner said. “None that I would want to say on the air.”

If you haven’t seen Spieth’s move, it looks like this: he takes the club back, stops slightly halfway through the backswing, slowly brings the club back farther, then slides his hands forward and brings it back the club at the address. This helps him get his swing into position.

Of course, there are other ways to frame it. No, Varner’s group text isn’t the only one that makes sense of all this.

“Well basically he feels like he tends to have the club get stuck behind him and he gets in underneath,” analyst Gary Koch said two weeks ago, during Golf Channel’s broadcast of the Texas Open. “So he’s trying to get the club to point to the left at the top of his swing and then get the club in front of him where he can swing the club to the left and produce that little fade.”

“It’s difficult to explain this decision other than to say that it allowed him to come out of a slump, to become about half the player he was,” Golf Channel analyst Brandel Chamblee recently wrote: on Twitter. “If you want to thwart or hinder a genius athlete, you just have to make him think about his action.”

On Saturday, Varner finally left the show. On Sunday, he played for his PGA Tour title.

“I always think about group text messages,” analyst Nick Faldo said on the show. “It wasn’t really like that in my time.”

Nick Piastowski

Publisher of Golf.com

Nick Piastowski is the editor-in-chief of Golf.com and Golf Magazine. In his role, he is responsible for editing, writing and developing stories in the golf space. And when he’s not writing about ways to hit the golf ball farther and straighter, the Milwaukee native is probably playing the game, hitting the ball left, right and short, and drinking a cold beer to clear his score. You can contact him on any of these topics – his stories, his game or his beers – at [email protected].