Slaying the Tiger Page 6
Day had spent a painful childhood dreaming of the big money, and the hardest part of his life was about to end. The sponsors with the fat checks had seen plenty. Day, just eighteen years old, turned pro and signed a deal with TaylorMade and Adidas. From the moment he put his name to that first contract, he would never be poor again.
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“I thought winning was going to come easy,” Day told me, “because I’m like, ‘Oh, everything’s so natural.’ ”
Maybe that was the product of his short memory. Nothing had come easy before, but the success of the last two years must have seemed simple. Everything was progressing in a straight line. Day got sponsor exemptions into seven tournaments on the PGA Tour—his first chance to play with the big boys—and he and his team were optimistic (or naive) enough to hope he could earn his Tour card for 2007 with a series of spectacular results.
It wasn’t a disaster—Day made five of seven cuts, and earned almost $200,000—but it wasn’t nearly good enough.
Day knew how close he’d come, and that gave him hope through the disappointment. In 2007, he started his Nationwide Tour career in Australia, finishing thirty-first at the Jacob’s Creek Open. He followed that up the next weekend with a tie for sixth in New Zealand. The money from those two finishes wasn’t huge, but it was enough to return to America in April.
That spring, he learned his first lesson in media relations that year, when he told an Australian paper that his goal was to eventually wrench the number 1 spot in the world from Tiger’s grasp.
“I’m sure I can take him down,” he said, and the fallout was huge. The context he gave later in the quote didn’t matter—he gained a reputation for brashness, and for putting the cart ahead of the horse.
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Two years earlier, visiting Twinsburg, Ohio, as an amateur, Day walked into Mavis Winkle’s Irish Pub with Col Swatton, who was meeting a friend for a drink. That was the first time Day laid eyes on a server named Ellie Harvey. She was nineteen, two years older, a girl from Ohio farm country who attended Paul Mitchell Beauty School by day. Day’s behavior that day was proof that he wasn’t actually brash—he was too shy to approach her, but he returned to Mavis Winkle’s every afternoon with Swatton in tow. After they left town, Day used Swatton again to get her phone number. He began texting her in 2006, and though Ellie mostly blew him off, he wasn’t deterred.
Now he was back in America as a professional. Within a week of his return, the Nationwide Tour brought him to the Legend Financial Group Classic in Highland Heights, just twenty miles north of Twinsburg. He and Ellie “ran into each other” again that week at Mavis Winkle’s, and Day convinced her that he owed her a dinner. She knew nothing about golf, but she ended up watching him play that weekend, and it turned out to be a case of perfect timing—with a score of -16, Day won his first professional event, taking home a cool $94,500 and becoming the youngest player to win an event on any of the PGA’s three major tours.
The next week, they had their first date at an Applebee’s in Columbus. His career, and his romantic life, were off and running. He finished fifth on that Nationwide Tour that year to earn his PGA Tour card for 2008, and he and Ellie married a year later. Col Swatton was his best man.
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At that point, the central question of Day’s life changed from “how do you become great?” to “how do you stay great?”
Players find it difficult to describe the difference between simple excellence and actually winning tournaments. They recognize that at the highest level, the separation is mostly mental, but putting the concept into words is much more difficult. Most players grasp for the answer without success, but Day, eloquent as ever, gave the best explanation I’ve heard.
“You get to a point where it’s that fight or flight,” he told me. “Everyone has it—that point where you’re like, ‘Oh, I’m out of my comfort zone. I want to pull back a little bit.’ And that’s where you start making bogeys, and once you make a couple bogeys, then you’re like, ‘Ahhh, okay, now I’m back between fifth and tenth, back in my normal range.’ ”
It’s unusual for a player to admit that there’s comfort in losing, but you see it all the time, especially in majors—that tug that brings a front-runner back to the pack when he finds himself isolated at the top. First place can be terrifying, and in the critical moment, some players feel a pressing, subconscious need to escape the stress. The heartbreak comes later.
“What you have to do when you’re in the fight or flight moment,” Day said, “and you’re out of your comfort zone and you have a chance to win—you have to be like, ‘Screw it, gotta punch through it, let’s go and do it.’ And when you do, it’s the most rewarding because you actually got past that barrier. And once you get to that uncomfortable stage a lot, you know exactly what you need to do, then it becomes easier to win.”
Day got his big win at the Byron Nelson Classic in 2010, and entered the top ten of the world rankings after finishing at both the 2011 Masters and U.S. Open. The most acutely he’s ever felt the pressure, though, came at the 2013 Masters.
Day and Adam Scott are inevitably lumped together as Australians at the very top of the game, but in some ways, they’re opposites. Where Day, with a thin goatee framing his wide, friendly face, looks eminently approachable, Scott is so good-looking that he seems remote, even intimidating. Where Day is gregarious and a good storyteller, Scott is shy and intensely private. Where Day came to the sport from the most unlikely background, Scott is the son of well-off golf enthusiasts, and enjoyed a more traditional path to the top.
Despite the differences, they share a trajectory that goes beyond their Kooralbyn roots. In 2012, Scott led the British Open by four shots with four holes to play before a nightmare stretch of bogeys allowed Ernie Els to steal the Claret Jug by a single stroke. The collapse invited comparisons to Greg Norman, and though Scott did his best to hide his pain, it was no secret that the loss left him devastated. Was he just another Australian with immense skill who couldn’t handle the pressure of a major championship?
Then came Augusta, 2013. Late into Sunday’s final round, it looked like the younger Aussie would beat Scott to the punch. Day had shot up the world rankings, but his nagging problem had blossomed into a curse—in three years of excellent golf since his win at the Byron Nelson, he had never won a tournament. On its own, the stat was a little staggering; how could someone that good, who performed so consistently, never win? It became a talking point whenever Day’s name was mentioned: great player, humble guy, couldn’t close.
Ever honest, Day admitted that he had been a little distracted in 2012 by the birth of his son, Dash, and that it was tough to watch a player like Rory McIlroy receive all the “next big thing” accolades when Day felt that he was just as good. As his focus wavered, his team had to stage another intervention. “Work harder,” they told him.
He did, and he rushed back up the world rankings in early 2013. It all led to Sunday at Augusta, where Day made birdies on 13, 14, and 15, and led the tournament with just three holes left. It wasn’t quite the runaway lead Scott had enjoyed at the British, but the parallels were clear. He had a chance not just to win, but to win the biggest damn tournament of them all. It would put every question to rest, and it would do so emphatically.
The reason Day can explain the stress of winning, though, is because he’s faced it so often on the biggest stage. It met him head-to-head that Sunday, and Day couldn’t push through. Bogeys on 16 and 17 dropped him back to -7—away from that terrifying, lonely place atop the leaderboard—and when Adam Scott and Angel Cabrera each birdied no. 18, he was relegated to third.
He admitted in the post-round interview that the pressure got to him, and in 2014, he elaborated. “When I walked up to the sixteenth tee, my whole body froze,” he said. “It seized up like never before.”
Even in defeat, Day hoped an Australian would win. He got his wish minutes later when Scott sank a fifteen-foot birdie putt to win his country’s first Masters.<
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—
It hasn’t been easy for Day to move beyond the money. Ellie teases him for being a cheapskate, but he can’t help it—sometimes, he told me, he’ll visit his online bank account simply to gaze at the numbers, still shocked by what life has given him. And still wondering, deep down, if it will all be taken away.
As the millions piled up and Day’s game continued to improve, he forced himself to ask a new question—“How do I become so great that I win tournaments?”
Day is a fierce match play competitor, and he had marked the Accenture as his best chance of the season to break the winning drought. He was suited to one-on-one golf, and he had already earned a reputation as a master at the head game. He’s known for making his opponents putt everything out (some consider it rude not to concede the short “gimme” putts), and he doesn’t care who it pisses off. Russell Henley was one of his victims in 2013—Day could sense his anger when he forced him to hole a series of short ones—though it nearly backfired when the Georgia native birdied the 18th to force extra holes before losing in 19. He did the same to Paul Casey in 2011, making him sink an eighteen-inch putt the likes of which Casey probably hadn’t missed in two decades.
“I knew he was going to hole it,” Day said afterward. “But it’s not about that hole, it’s about the future holes coming on. So if I can make him a little angry, if I can, you know, get him out of his game plan and force him to make silly decisions out there, you know, that’s obviously part of the mind games that you play.”
In 2014, his winless streak spilled into its fourth year, accruing the worst kind of psychological momentum, and he knew he had to make a move in Arizona. On Thursday, he almost took an early dive when he fell 3-down to Billy Horschel—a Florida native and one of the few American golfers who shares a modest economic background—and faced an uphill battle just to survive the round of 32. With a chance to go 4-up on the 10th green, Horschel three-putted, and Day capitalized on the mistake by winning 11 and 12 to shave the deficit to a single hole. The match raged on to the 22nd hole, when a final birdie by Day sent him through to the round of 16.
Fowler, the face of the Tour’s youth movement, defied the odds to slay a second titan in Jimmy Walker, and the most anticipated match of the second round, between Harris English and Rory McIlroy, lived up to its billing as the Northern Irishman fell late.
While English basked in the glow of victory, Rory dealt with life as an icon. As he walked off toward the waiting SUVs, a group of preteen girls waited outside the ropes. They screamed his name as he passed by, like they were auditioning to play extras in a film about the Beatles. He flipped them a ball without looking over, and the girl who caught it began crying hysterically. Her family laughed at her, and she laughed at herself, too. But she couldn’t stop crying.
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On Friday, in the Sweet 16, neither Victor Dubuisson nor Bubba Watson played especially well. Dubuisson took a two-hole lead early, held on to the edge throughout the front nine, and increased his lead to 3-up with just four holes to play. Of the six holes he won on the day, five of them came on pars as Bubba bogeyed his way around the course. The Northern Trust champion finally woke up on 15, and fought back to 1-down with a hole to play. He could do no better than par, though, and the inscrutable Dubuisson was on to the Elite Eight.
Jordan Spieth, just twenty years old, was a machine without pause, dispatching Matt Kuchar 2-up. Jason Day beat one South African, George Coetzee, for the honor of facing another, Louis Oosthuizen. As for Rickie Fowler, his week wasn’t getting any easier. After Poulter and Walker, he drew Sergio Garcia, another of Europe’s Ryder Cup studs. Undeterred, Fowler caught fire on the back nine for a 1-up victory.
Graeme McDowell had come back from the dead in each of the first two rounds, but on Friday, facing his old Ryder Cup rival Hunter Mahan, he looked to be in fatal trouble. Down two with two to play, Mahan had him on the ropes. Cosmic justice was in the air—the Accenture didn’t mean as much as the critical Ryder Cup match Mahan had lost to McDowell after a flubbed chip in 2010, which led to the American breaking down in tears at the press conference—but considering their history, the match surely meant more to him. Maybe it was the memory that made him tighten up no. 17, or maybe it was just a bad shot, but he bogeyed, keeping McDowell in the match. On 18, Mahan put his approach forty feet away and got in safely for a par. The onus was on McDowell, who had stuck his iron into the green, and needed a birdie from five feet to send the match to extra holes. He hit it, pumped his fist once, and strode off to the first tee.
From there, the match progressed like a nightmare for Mahan, and three holes later, McDowell put him out of his misery with a 14-footer for birdie. Mahan did his best to take it in stride as McDowell dropped his putter and brought his hands to his face in a combination of fatigue and disbelief. Hunter’s eyes were dead. He had lost to his chief tormentor again, and after shedding his sunglasses and Ping hat to shake hands, he re-donned the disguise and walked to the black SUV waiting to take him away. Through the tinted windows, as the vehicle pulled away, you could see him staring out, obscured in his pain.
—
Eight players returned on Saturday, all of them fighting for a chance at the semifinals. It began poorly for Jordan Spieth, and it ended that way, too. After missing a par putt on the 16th hole, he took off his hat and conceded the match to Ernie Els. As he walked off the green, Spieth turned to look back at Els, who was taking his par putt just for practice. It lipped out, and Spieth turned away, disgusted.
“I knew he was going to fucking miss,” he said.
A Sirius radio reporter asked if he had time for a quick interview, but Spieth disappeared into the SUV.
“I was a little mental midget out there,” he told the media later. “Actually kind of embarrassing, looking back. I was dropping clubs and kind of just whining to Michael [Greller, his caddie], and you just can’t do that.”
It’s difficult to dig beneath Spieth’s surface sometimes, considering his immense skill at presenting himself as a mature adult, but the two keys to figuring him out as a golfer were both on display in the quarterfinal loss to Els—his impressive maturity, and a self-defeating petulance when things got tough. In 2014, the twenty-one-year-old’s season would be defined by these dueling impulses.
For Day, it was never much of a battle in the first quarterfinal match, as Louis Oosthuizen fell 3-down early, giving Day an easy win and a trip to the semifinals for the third straight year.
Rickie Fowler took a day off from his bright colors, and came into his match against Jim Furyk wearing all black. Since Monday, he had spent his afternoons hiking up the hills behind his hotel. He went alone the first day, climbing twenty minutes to the top and enjoying the view, and on Tuesday he brought his sister and mother. His communion with nature was paying off, and he took an early 3-up lead over Furyk. The veteran fought back and survived to the 18th hole, but his approach came up short and rolled down into the desert valley. His whole body hinged forward at the waist as he realized what he’d just cost himself. Fowler hit safely onto the upper tier, and needing a great shot, Furyk tried to be too perfect. He came up short yet again. As the ball rolled back to him, a fan yelled out, “Always easier the second time, Jim!” Fowler two-putted for an easy win.
McDowell actually took a lead before the 18th hole for the first time all week in his match against Dubuisson, but the Frenchman fought back, and a seesaw battle ensued. On the 9th, Dubuisson pitched out from the rough left of the pin, and landed his ball perfectly on the fringe to dampen the speed. It was a brilliant shot before it ever went into the hole, and if anyone was paying attention, they might have begun to suspect what he had in store for Sunday. He pumped his fist like a man who had never done it before—like someone nervously shaking a pair of dice—and came into the 18th with a 1-up advantage.
Against McDowell, after the three matches he had just won, a late lead seemed almost like a curse, and when Dubuisson missed the green on his approach, it looke
d like the Northern Irishman might slither away again. But a fan encouraged Dubuisson with a very American exhortation—“Come on, Pepe!”—and his short-game magic saved him. A brilliant chip up stopped a foot from the green for a conceded par, and he had done what nobody else could do—he closed the uncloseable McDowell.
If Dubuisson felt any joy, he disguised it well in the press room, where he was distant, detached, and nearly sullen. This would soon come to seem normal, but for an American media that was largely meeting Victor for the first time, the mystery deepened.
And then there were four.
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On Sunday morning, the Saguaro cacti on the foothills of the Tortolitas looked like solemn crosses marking the graves of an ancient race. Fowler brought some color to the scene, ditching his funereal black outfit for a pair of checkered orange-and-white pants and a hat with a screeching orange puma diving across the front. Day took the fight to him early in their semifinal match, going 3-up after eight, and again after 11, but nobody had been able to tighten the noose on Fowler yet. True to form, he won 12 and 13 to dig back.
But that was the point when his fight ran out. A bogey at 15 gave Day a 2-up advantage with three to play, and on the par-3 16th, Fowler needed a straightforward three-footer for par to extend the match. It was the kind of pressure putt he had been sinking with ease all week, but this time it lipped out on the left, and his run was over.
In the other semifinal, the early sense in the media room was that Dubuisson had finally come to the end of his Cinderella week. Like the cartoon coyote whose feet still churn even after he’s run off the cliff, the French phenom was no longer on solid ground. When he went 3-down to Els at the start of his match, it looked like he would finally plummet.