Atlanta, United States: How will Jordan Spieth improve upon one of the greatest seasons in golf? A clue could be found on the seventh hole last Sunday at East Lake Golf Club.

Walking off the tee box after making back-to-back bogeys to fall into a share of the lead at the Tour Championship, an out-of-sorts Spieth received a pep talk from his caddie, Michael Greller. “No more talking about anything that just happened,” Spieth said Greller told him.

Spieth’s facility at putting the past behind him — and Greller’s ease in steering him back on the right thought path on those rare occasions when he doesn’t — are reasons for optimism that Spieth, 22, can build on a season in which he won two majors and five tournaments overall, ascended to No. 1, captured the FedExCup title and locked up Player of the Year honours.

“Jordan’s always been good about blocking out the past and being able to not look into the rearview mirror too much, whether it’s positive or negative,” said Greller, who offered two examples.

Four days after equalling the tournament record of 18-under to win the Masters, Spieth teed it up at the RBC Heritage in Hilton Head Island, South Carolina. It would not be one of his 10 top-three finishes, but it was not because of any lack of effort or caring by Spieth, who tied for 11th.

“After Augusta, it’s very tempting to just cruise and get content,” Greller said. “But he wanted to go win at Hilton Head. He just didn’t have the gas.”

After winning the US Open in June, Spieth could have pocketed a sizeable appearance fee to play in the Scottish Open and approached the tournament as a glorified warm-up for the British Open. Instead, he travelled to the John Deere Classic in Silvis, Illinois, with the stated intention of winning. He fulfilled the goal, but not before chastising Greller after a first-round 71 for not pushing him hard enough.

“He said, ‘You need to yell at me’,” Greller recalled. “He’ll tell me in so many words that I’ve got to grab him by the head and get his head right.”

He added: “It’s weird. It’s like your boss telling you to yell at him.”

After playing the four majors in a cumulative 54-under par and ascending to No. 1 with his second-place finish at the PGA Championship, Spieth could have treated the FedExCup playoffs as four victory laps. Instead, he approached the Tour Championship as the year’s fifth major, and prepared for it the way he did the Masters at the start of the year.

“He had one of the best years in the history of the game,” Greller said. “And to feel like it somehow would have been a letdown if he didn’t win it, you want to put a bow on it at the very end. You want to finish with an exclamation point, so you feel that pressure.”

Henrik Stenson, who was paired with Spieth for the final two rounds at East Lake, praised Spieth’s putting but also singled out his mental focus, describing both as “the best in the world.”

Mental focus is not magical thinking. In Spieth’s case, his mind is where preparation, analysis and design intersect. The mental side of the game, he said, is about “taking situations from the previous weeks, dissecting them, figuring out what went right, what went wrong; when I went on good stretches, when I didn’t bounce back from a bogey or when I made a couple birdies and then made a couple bogeys right after; trying to understand what mistakes I made in my game decision-wise.”

Spieth’s mental acuity had to be sharp because his ball-striking at East Lake was not. To say he had his B-minus game from tee to green would be grading on a curve.

“I didn’t feel comfortable striking the ball whatsoever today or this week,” Spieth said on Sunday. “I didn’t have a go-to shot. My swing was just try and align correctly, load a little bit and try to shorten your swing so that it will come off going around where you want it to go. It was amazing that we competed with the way I felt over the ball.”

On Sunday, as they walked from the 17th green to the 18th tee, Greller said to Spieth, “You did this with your head this week.”

Spieth said: “He knew I wasn’t comfortable over the ball.”

So Spieth has his ball-striking to work on to keep complacency at bay during the stolen weeks that pass for golf’s offseason. Which is nice — unless you happen to be one of the players pursuing him.

Asked what he could do for an encore in 2015-16, Spieth said: “Hopefully improve. Get better.”

— New York Times News Service