Slaying the Tiger Page 5
As the players convened early in the week, a black cloud of death loomed over Dove Mountain, and all indications were that the Accenture Match Play would limp off into an ignominious sunset. From there, the players would make tracks for Florida, trying to forget this odd little footnote in Tour history.
Instead, against all odds, the lame-duck tournament raged against the dying of the light. The week began with no further dropouts, the tournament retained a few shreds of deathbed dignity, and the hated Dove Mountain produced some of the year’s most exciting golf.
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The surprises came fast and furious on Wednesday, beginning with Rickie Fowler, one of the Tour’s poster boys. Fowler was best known, at that moment, for his signature outfit—the orange Puma jumpsuit, complete with flat-brimmed hat. His sponsors and handlers had carefully crafted a modified skate-punk image for him, and the fans ate it up. At every tournament, you’d find a few kids dressed head-to-toe in Fowler orange, and, more worryingly, at least one grown man. In its attempts to market to a younger audience, the PGA Tour found a perfect subject in Fowler, and they promoted him relentlessly.
This rubbed some players the wrong way. At a Saturday press conference a month later at Bay Hill, Matt Every referred to a group of “fakers” on Tour, and added, “Just because you wear stupid clothes doesn’t mean you have style. It means you wear dumb clothes.” Later, he expanded on the thought to me, making it clear that he didn’t blame certain players for taking advantage of good marketing, but that they “may get a little too much attention because of it, and the Tour definitely promotes who they want to promote.”
If the critique was directed at least partly at Fowler, it made sense; he was doing well, especially for a twenty-five-year-old, but not spectacularly well. He’d won once, in a playoff against Rory McIlroy at the Wells Fargo Championship in 2012, but there was no question that his golf celebrity came more from his clothes than his results.
The impression that Fowler was a complacent dilettante, on the other hand—golf’s answer to Anna Kournikova—didn’t hold water. He worked as hard as anyone, and late in 2013, he teamed up with legendary swing coach Butch Harmon in an attempt to jump-start his career. It was slow going—Harmon’s changes weren’t easy to implement—and coming into Tucson, his results lagged behind the effort. Which made it something of a shock when he eagled the 13th hole on Wednesday to go 3-up on Ian Poulter.*2
On paper, a struggling Fowler had no chance against the Ryder Cup legend. Not only had Poulter won the Match Play in 2010, and made the semifinals in 2013, but he was also known as one of the most intimidating golfers in the game. In 2012, he had endured insult after insult from the American fans at the Medinah Ryder Cup to strike a huge blow for Europe on Saturday night when he finished with five straight birdies to keep his team’s deficit from spiraling out of control. On Sunday, he beat Webb Simpson in singles, helping to set the tone for the greatest comeback in Ryder Cup history—a devastating loss for the Americans on their own soil. And he did it all with a vicious energy, expressed in angry roars and bugged eyes and clenched fists. In contrast to the genteel manners of many golfers, Poulter never tries to disguise the very personal conflict at the heart of match play.
He clawed a hole back on no. 14 with a birdie, stalking off as Fowler missed his own birdie putt—Poulter is a devout practitioner of that classic match play gambit—but two pars on 15, a long par 4, kept Fowler 2-up with three holes left. Poulter needed to strike quickly on the par-3 16th, but a solid chip by Fowler forced the Englishman to sink a long birdie putt. Just as he took his putter back, a baby in the stands began to cry. Poulter’s putt sailed well wide, and his face froze into a cold rage. He slammed his putter in his bag and marched to the 17th hole.
“Goddamn fucking asshole,” he hissed. I couldn’t be sure he was talking about the baby, but I also couldn’t rule it out. One hole later, Fowler had a 2&1 win, and Poulter’s face was strung tighter than a violin wire.
Fowler reacted serenely to the win—he had expected his game to come together at some point, he’d been swinging the club well, and so forth. It seemed that he should be doing cartwheels, considering the size of the scalp he’d just taken, but Fowler’s equanimity is legendary—he wasn’t about to break character. And maybe he could sense big things coming; we didn’t understand, as he may have, what sort of tournament, and what sort of year, he was about to have.
Elsewhere on the first day, Victor Dubuisson made quick work of Kevin Streelman, winning 5&4 on the 14th hole, and an Australian golfer named Jason Day played a bogey-free round to beat Thorbjorn Olesen 2-up.
* * *
“Somebody once said about certain golfers that they’re afraid to win. When they have their good weeks, and a chance to get into the top five, a chance to win, there’s something in their head that says, ‘I’m not supposed to do this. I’m not good enough for this. I don’t deserve this.’ ”
—DOUG FERGUSON, Associated Press
If you think of golf as a haven for the spoiled and rich, Jason Day is the hardscrabble kid who crashed the gates.
The twenty-six-year-old Day came into the Match Play Championship ranked number 11 in the world—by any measure, one of the best young golfers in the game. Among players in their twenties, you could argue that he was second in merit only to Rory McIlroy. He had the sport by the short hairs, and he was becoming an icon in his home country. There was only one blot on his résumé, but it was glaring—he’d won just a single event on Tour.
That’s an abnormally low total for a player who spent more than three years ranked inside the world’s top forty, and almost a year inside the top ten. Day is young, and his legacy is decades from rounding into final form, but for a golfer of such proven skill to have held a trophy just once…it hinted at deeper issues. Compare him, for instance, to McIlroy, a year younger but with more than a dozen titles to his name. Or Dustin Johnson, who had his own troubles with closing a tournament, but still had four wins before his twenty-seventh birthday. Or, climbing down from those dizzying heights, take Patrick Reed, or Harris English, or Keegan Bradley, all of whom had multiple wins early in their careers despite résumés and career earnings that paled in comparison to Day’s. As the young Aussie would be the first to admit, part of it is growth. Part is learning how to win.
During one interview at the Accenture, Day listened as the topic inevitably arose. Why couldn’t he finish the job?
“I think I finally realized,” Day began, before hesitating as he looked out from the podium. “I think at the start of my career—”
He paused to collect himself.
“I’m going to be honest here,” he finally said. “I came from a very poor family. So it wasn’t winning that was on my mind when I first came out on the PGA Tour. It was money.
“I wanted to play for money, because I’d never had it before.”
—
Day was born in Beaudesert, a town nestled in the southeast corner of Queensland, about sixty miles south of Brisbane and forty miles west of Australia’s Pacific coast. Beaudesert has grown in the past three decades, but in 1987 it held about three thousand people. The name means “beautiful desert,” a euphemism that disguises a mean landscape—one that terrorized early settlers who attempted to cultivate cotton or raise sheep, making them vulnerable to droughts and devastating floods from the nearby Logan and Albert Rivers.
Alvin Day, a native Australian, and his wife, Dening, who was born in the Philippines, met through letters, and never even saw each other in person before Alvin made the trip for the wedding. Back in Australia, they had two daughters and a son named Jason. Alvin worked on the kill floor of a meatworks, and Dening worked in the office, and together they struggled against the poverty that was forever encroaching.
Jason remembers his first house as an “old, broken-down home” on Dunsinane Street. The Days never had money to buy new toys, so the whole clan, including Jason’s sisters Yanna and Kim, would sometimes visit the town dump (“the rub
bish kip,” as Day calls it) to forage. On one trip, Alvin found an old three-wood somebody else had trashed. He had been a decent tennis player in his day, but a toy was a toy, and so he brought it home to his son. Jason was three then, and he took to the club immediately, using it to smash whatever object was handy. The first thing he hit was a tennis ball, and the family legend has it that Alvin declared, on the spot, that his son would be a champion some day.
Day’s obsessive nature was evident early, when he would toddle around in his backyard, fixated on the club. He lacked the strength to hit the balls over the fence, so he’d simply whack them from one end of the lot to the other, retrieve them, and start over again.
This went on until he was six years old, and finally met the minimum age requirements at the Beaudesert Golf Club. He started out playing six holes at a time, and sometimes his dad would drive him to local youth tournaments on Saturdays. At that point, he was using a mixed bag of clubs that included a 1.5 wood and anything he or Alvin could find on the cheap. Before long, recognizing his son’s skill, Alvin went to a pawnshop to raise some cash. He bought Jason a set of second-hand Aussie PowerBilt 2000 clubs, and if his son wasn’t addicted yet, that sealed the matter.
Shortly after Jason began playing at a real course, Alvin found a new job at a meatworks in the city of Rockhampton, just off Queensland’s Capricorn coast, and relocated the family seven hours north. The move didn’t improve their financial lot—that year, Jason and his two sisters bought their school clothes at the St. Vincent de Paul Society, where they stuffed five-dollar bags with all the clothes they could fit. His new classmates teased him about his shabby wardrobe, called him a “refugee” and, because he was the only student with Asian blood in the school, asked him if he had just come off the boat.
But the move did change his access to golf. In Rockhampton, eight-year-old Jason would race home from school every day at three p.m. and wait for his next-door neighbor, a high schooler. Together, they’d set off for Capricorn Country Club, a course that has now expanded to fifteen holes and was even shorter then. The words “country club” inspire thoughts of well-manicured lawns and exclusive social milieus in America, but at the Capricorn, the name was quite simply a nod to the fact that it was plunked down in the middle of the bush. A club, sort of, and very much in the country.
It cost the Days only one hundred dollars to buy Jason a yearlong membership, which included unlimited golf. As long as you had enough balls and the daylight didn’t run out, nobody would bother you. When the balls became scarce, Day would head for the lake on the first hole and dive in, fishing them from the floor. Golfers played through, hitting over their heads, and when Day came up for air, he sometimes found half a dozen leeches attached to his back. But he’d also have enough balls to continue.
Junior golfers in Australia are measured by grades, from d-grade to a-grade, and Day began working his way up the ladder rapidly. Before long, he was b-grade, which allowed him to play eighteen holes. The families at Capricorn would hire a bus and send their kids out at four a.m. for the long drive to each weekend’s junior event, and Jason began to win. He gained a reputation, and his addiction grew.
—
It got harder before it got easier. When Day was eleven years old, his father began experiencing chronic stomach pains. Doctors dismissed it at first, but the pain persisted. Less than a month after he first had it checked, Alvin was diagnosed with stomach cancer. He died four months later.
By his own reckoning, Day went off the rails. He was only twelve, but he began drinking, staying out late, and getting in fights at school. His father had been the one to facilitate his golf game, from that first 3-wood to the pawnshop to the day he built Jason a putting green at the family home in Rockhampton, but his role had gone deeper than that.
“My dad was the strict one in the family,” Day said. “My mom was always the one that, after we got the belt, she would hug us and tell us it was okay. My dad…I remember saying “shut up” one time, and he belted the crap out of me. But that’s just how it was. I mean, he kept me in line. And as soon as he passed away, you know, we all got out of line.”
Because Day is friendly, and far more open than your average golfer, I felt okay asking him what he remembered when he thought about this father.
“I can’t remember him,” he said. “I can’t remember. It’s just like I’ve blocked most of my childhood. I can’t really think of anything….You have little windows, and then you’ve got these little memories in each window, but it’s pictures. Just pictures of my memories.”
Had he blocked it out on purpose, or was this just a matter of memory fading with time? It wasn’t a new question for him; his wife, Ellie, has suggested that he visit a psychologist to see if anything might open up. But it’s not something he thinks about until he’s asked, and in truth his relationship with his father is more complex than he sometimes lets on. He admitted to Sports Illustrated’s Alan Shipnuck that Alvin was an alcoholic and, depending on the interview, Day either credits his dad for giving him the focus he needed to pursue a professional career, or implies that he felt a pressure that could almost be crushing.
—
After Alvin’s death, the family unit began to break down. One of his sisters ran away from home for three years, and Day’s drinking got worse. Young as he was, he became an alcoholic. He brawled in school, and became sullen. His mother knew he had potential as a golfer, and she made a desperate choice. By taking a second mortgage on her home and enlisting help from one of Jason’s uncles, she sent her son to Kooralbyn International, an independent boarding school known for producing top-tier athletes like track star and gold medalist Cathy Freeman, and the golfer to whom Day would always be compared, Adam Scott.*3
Day remembers the loneliness of the trip south, when he was dumped without ceremony and left to fend for himself. His new school was in the middle of nowhere—some of the students had been sent by parents who wanted to get rid of them, and others were promising athletes hoping to turn professional. The culture, and the lack of surrounding temptations, made it easy for him to stop drinking and focus.
But the change wasn’t immediate. On one of his first days, a Kooralbyn golf coach approached Day while he was on the range. He suggested that Day should work on his short game, and Day said he’d rather play the par-3 course. The coach insisted, but since his father’s death, Day didn’t listen to anyone. His stubbornness, and his issues with authority, quickly turned the exchange into a shouting argument. He and the coach raised their voices until they were swearing at each other, and Day stormed off to the par-3 course—he was going to do what he wanted, authority be damned.
One thing you quickly learn when speaking with Day, though, is that his life is defined by moments of personal reckoning. This was the most important of them all.
“I just thought, man, that wasn’t a good thing to do,” he said. “I mean, my family’s trying to sacrifice so much to get me to come here. I should just kind of listen to him and see what he has to say. And from there, I went back and apologized.”
The coach’s name was Colin Swatton, and he was impressed by Day’s atonement. After that day, he became a sorely needed father figure for Day. They stuck together through Kooralbyn, and when Day was ready to head for America, Col was by his side as coach and caddie. He’s still on the bag today, and he probably will be for a very long time.
—
The Kooralbyn International School closed in 2002, and he and his class moved forty miles north to Hills International College in Jimboomba. Day, now fourteen, borrowed a book about Tiger Woods from his roommate. In the back pages, he read Woods’s detailed results from age thirteen onward. What he saw was alarming—where Woods was shooting 68s and 66s, Day was stuck at 74 and 72.
“I kept saying to myself, why is he shooting those scores? Why is he so much better than me?”
He realized what Swatton had been trying to impart from the beginning—he needed to work on his short game. He also nee
ded to work harder in general, and to channel the inherent obsessive nature that would let him focus on golf and golf alone. Day knew he had it in him somewhere. It had been present from age three, when he wouldn’t let go of his rotting 3-wood, and it was the secret urge that drove almost every golfer who has ever made it big. Where others would get bored, or distracted, the future pro can spend hours on the range and the putting green, alone if necessary.
The realization change Day’s life. He would wake up every morning at five—there’s no daylight savings in Queensland, so the sun would be waiting for him—and practice until eight thirty. After sneaking in a half-hour breakfast, he’d be in school from nine until one, take a thirty-minute lunch, and go at it again until six p.m. Then dinner, then homework, and then it was out to the night range, where he’d hit under the lights until fatigue overcame him.
Each day, and each week, he’d use the book to track his progress against Tiger Woods. Other players at Hills would try to keep up with his extreme schedule, but it was rare for any of them to last more than a week before the allure of sleep trumped their own lesser obsessions.
—
Day’s breakout came in 2004, at age sixteen, when all facets of his game seemed to cohere at once. When it clicked, it clicked fast. He won the Queensland Junior tournament, the touring Junior, the South Australian Junior, the Australian Junior, the New Zealand u-19s. Then it was home to the Queensland Amateur, where he competed against players of all ages and became the youngest winner in 104 years.
The results were enough to get him to America, and Torrey Pines, for the World Junior. There, he faced a group of the best fifteen- to seventeen-year-olds around the world on an incredibly difficult course. Only three players managed to shoot under par. At -7, Day bested them all. A year later, he finished as top amateur at the Australian Masters and the Australian Open, tournaments won by Robert Allenby. The last amateur event he ever played was the Australian Masters of the Amateurs in January 2006. He won with a gross score of 281.