In golf, the players who peak earliest often fall hardest. But why? Some athletes never fully recover once it happens, whether the cause is age, a lost swing, or nerve that just stops holding up under pressure.

Three names make that point better than any list of statistics could: Jordan Spieth, Rickie Fowler, and Michelle Wie West all reached rarefied heights early, then watched it slip away.

Jordan Spieth

The last time three-time major winner Jordan Spieth posed with a trophy was back in April 2022. Since then, the 33-year-old has continued to live through a drought. It wasn’t always this way: in 2013, he became the youngest PGA Tour winner in 82 years at the John Deere Classic. With such a start, he was heading for the stars, and all that was left was his breakaway moment.

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He backed it up in 2015, winning the Masters and the U.S. Open and climbing to No. 1 in the world. It didn’t last. A collapse at the 2016 Masters, then another rough final round at Augusta in 2017, started a stretch that would drag on for years.

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His biggest problem was arguably his driving. After ranking 15th in strokes gained off the tee in 2015, he fell to 50th in the 2017-18 season and 176th in the 2018-19 season. A two-way miss made it difficult for him to trust his swing and put additional pressure on the rest of his game. In the years that followed, he managed to recover, but not to the level he may have wanted.

He ranked 35th in 2021, 39th in 2022, 58th/59th in 2023, 15th in 2024, and 33rd in 2025. Meanwhile, his scrambling, approach play, and putting also declined. After ranking among the Tour’s best putters from 2014 through 2016, Spieth eventually fell outside the top 100. The combination prevented him from reproducing the extraordinary form that produced three major championships.

He snapped a four-year winless drought at the 2021 Texas Open and followed it with another win at the RBC Heritage the next spring. A wrist injury derailed him not long after, and this year he didn’t crack the top 10 in any of the four majors.

Rickie Fowler

Rickie Fowler had all the ingredients needed to be a great player. But today, it feels like a story of what could have been. After a standout amateur career, he turned professional in 2009, won PGA Tour Rookie of the Year in 2010, and even claimed his first Tour victory at the 2012 Wells Fargo Championship. 

2014 was the year that made people believe in him. He finished inside the top five at all four majors that season, with runner-up finishes at the U.S. Open and the Open Championship, and he added a runner-up at the 2018 Masters later on. In between, he won The PLAYERS Championship and the Deutsche Bank Championship in 2015, then picked up the Honda Classic in 2017 and the Waste Management Phoenix Open in 2019.

His last win came at the Rocket Mortgage Classic, July 2, 2023. Before that stretched a years-long drought that at times had him outside the top 100 in the FedExCup. He put together eight top-10s that season along with the win, but he hasn’t been back in the winner’s circle since.

Yet despite flashes of a comeback since then, the sustained dominance many expected from him has never arrived. Still, 2026 has been his steadiest stretch in years, with a runner-up finish at the Truist Championship and several more top-10s along the way. The win, though, still hasn’t come.

Injury has played its part too, and in that sense his story isn’t so different from Wie West’s. A right oblique injury knocked him out of the 2018 FedExCup Playoffs. Then in 2025, a left shoulder problem he’d been dealing with since high school flared up and wouldn’t let go, and he later named it as the real reason behind that season’s struggles. By his own account, he played through SLAP tears, bursitis, and inflammation, leaning on pain medication just to get through tournaments.

Michelle Wie West

Michelle Wie West was once destined for greatness. By her mid-teens, she had won the U.S. Women’s Amateur Public Links and nearly made the cut at the 2004 Sony Open against men. Later, in 2006, she recorded six top-five finishes in eight starts, including three major championships. Living up to that early success, however, proved difficult.

Wie West suffered a series of injuries, beginning with a wrist problem in 2007. Although she tried to compete through the pain, her results suffered. She recovered for a while after joining the LPGA Tour, winning the Lorena Ochoa Invitational in 2009 and the Canadian Women’s Open in 2010. In 2014, she won the U.S. Women’s Open and finished fourth on the money list.

Her wrist problems were followed by trouble in her back, hip, and ankle. She retired in 2023, choosing to focus on her young family over the tour. When she returned in 2026 after three years away, she missed the cut in both starts.

These weren’t ordinary slumps. Spieth’s putting and driving broke down together. Fowler never really collapsed, he just plateaued for years. Wie West’s body gave out before her talent did. In each case the skill that made them stars was still in there somewhere, just without the structure to bring it out on command. Spieth’s numbers hint the tools are coming back. Whether Fowler’s 2023 was a turning point or a blip is what his 2026 season will answer. Wie West’s answer already came. A fast start, in the end, says nothing about how a career finishes.