{"id":11596,"date":"2015-08-25T13:05:32","date_gmt":"2015-08-25T20:05:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.drjimtaylor.com\/3.0\/?p=6812"},"modified":"2015-08-25T13:05:32","modified_gmt":"2015-08-25T20:05:32","slug":"pga-star-jordan-spieth-didnt-specialize-early","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.drjimtaylor.com\/4.0\/pga-star-jordan-spieth-didnt-specialize-early\/","title":{"rendered":"PGA Star Jordan Spieth Didn&#8217;t Specialize Early"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.drjimtaylor.com\/3.0\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/08\/spieth.jpg\"><img fetchpriority=\"high\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft size-medium wp-image-6813\" src=\"http:\/\/www.drjimtaylor.com\/3.0\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/08\/spieth-300x169.jpg\" alt=\"spieth\" width=\"300\" height=\"169\" \/><\/a>On the heels of my<a href=\"http:\/\/www.drjimtaylor.com\/3.0\/when-should-your-young-athlete-specialize\/\"> recent post<\/a>\u00a0in which I explore the risks and benefits of young athletes specializing early in a sport, a recent article in the New York Times reveals that Jordan Spieth, the PGA&#8217;s #1 ranked golfer (at age \u00a022) was not born and raised to be a professional golfer.<\/p>\n<p class=\"story-body-text story-content\" data-para-count=\"155\" data-total-count=\"3827\">As <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2015\/08\/25\/sports\/golf\/jordan-spieth-reassesses-a-career-path-from-the-top-where-time-is-short.html?_r=0\">the article<\/a> notes, &#8220;[Spieth] cautioned against focusing only on one sport before one\u2019s teenage years. &#8216;Until I was 12 or 13, I played more baseball than I did golf,&#8217; he said.\u00a0Spieth mentioned that he had also played football, basketball and soccer. As a result, he said, &#8216;I learned how to be a teammate, learned how to fall in love with golf as an athlete who plays golf versus being a golfer who tries to be an athlete.'&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>\u00a0So, further evidence that it&#8217;s possible to become a successful professional athlete without early specialization.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>On the heels of my recent post\u00a0in which I explore the risks and benefits of young athletes specializing early in a sport, a recent article in the New York Times reveals that Jordan Spieth, the PGA&#8217;s #1 ranked golfer (at age \u00a022) was not born and raised to be a professional golfer. As the article [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1517],"tags":[1089,1090,1091],"class_list":["post-11596","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sports","tag-golf","tag-jordan-spieth","tag-pga"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.drjimtaylor.com\/4.0\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11596","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.drjimtaylor.com\/4.0\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.drjimtaylor.com\/4.0\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.drjimtaylor.com\/4.0\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.drjimtaylor.com\/4.0\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11596"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.drjimtaylor.com\/4.0\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11596\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.drjimtaylor.com\/4.0\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11596"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.drjimtaylor.com\/4.0\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11596"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.drjimtaylor.com\/4.0\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11596"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}