Jordan Spieth is aiming to make the most of his nearby surroundings as he plots a pathway to Genesis Scottish Open success.
American Spieth, who is ranked 10th in the world, is among the impressive field for this week’s tournament at The Renaissance Club.
After finishing tied 10th in last year’s event, Spieth insists he was eager to return to Scotland.
Having played nine holes at the tournament course during the day, the 29-year-old revealed he went on to complete a full round at nearby North Berwick with family and friends during his downtime on Tuesday evening.
Spieth said: “I felt like it was really good prep for The Open Championship. I also really enjoyed this tournament last year.
“I thought we had the wind blowing significantly last year all four days including a tough final round where I had a chance to win.
“Certainly something about the golf course caught my eye so I’m just trying to pick up where I left off here.
“I really enjoy coming to Scotland. Scottish links, or this country, it’s one of my favourite places in the world to play golf.
“You can’t even count on two hands how many phenomenal golf courses there are.
“There’s four or five in a five-mile radius here in this part of the country, so I went out last night and played North Berwick just trying to have a lot of fun while we’re in the middle of working.
“I’ve never played 27 holes on a Tuesday of a tournament week. But I knew this morning would be nine holes in the morning and plenty of time to rest.”
American looking to revive season
Spieth is 30th in the FedEx Cup rankings, and missed the cut at last month’s US Open which was his most recent outing.
The Texan hopes to benefit from hitting the reset button in recent weeks, adding: “I went through a good stretch of the season and then I kind of paused and said there’s a couple things I want to work on. I think I would have won a few different events had I had this shot.
“There was a six-week period where I was doing some trial and error on some feels to develop a couple shots that I wish I had and had some mixed results, missed cuts or top fives or anywhere in between.
“I felt like that was a good time to do that and I felt comfortable with the fact that I wouldn’t necessarily have great results every week.
“Going into this last three-week stretch, I wanted to rest some and then build up what was probably the best of the feels and fine-tune it as best as I could.
“You can just do more at home in a week than you can in a tournament week.
“I didn’t play a lot of golf, which I normally do, so in the past couple days, I’ve tried to do a lot of that.
“There have been some playing conditions shots that I’ve got to knock a little bit of the rust off, but all in all I’m excited about the plan that the last 10 weeks has been, and I’ve got a really exciting stretch of golf coming up.”
