New BMW PGA Championship winner Danny Willett reflects on his journey from Masters champion to the depths of despair and back again
By Kent Gray
At the height of his plummet from 2016 masters champion to serial cut-misser, Danny Willett needed a cocktail of painkillers and anti-inflammatories just to get through the day. There were times when a psychiatrist’s sofa probably should have been prescribed to given the even more excruciating emotional toll the physical symptoms were taking on the golf course. That’s saying something because the back-pain was crippling.
“I was on paras [Paracetamol] and Co-codamol and Bruphen. You know it doesn’t seem much but then you think, oh actually, even just taking four Paracetamol, four Bruphen and a couple of Co-Codamol, it’s quite a lot,” the Englishman says of the pharmaceutical relief he needed.
“It’s something that you shouldn’t be taking all the time because it’s only preventative. So I couldn’t ever really tell you how much pain I was in but, yeah, the weeks off, I wasn’t able to do a great deal of stuff. Picking the kids up, bending over was painful which was the main things really because that was in my lower back.”
Willett’s sobering revelation came a day after he’d emerged from his personal horror show by clinching the 10th DP World Tour Championship last November; less than a year later the 31-year-old has changed the public’s perception of him – again – with a convincing win in the European Tour’s flagship BMW PGA Championship on Sunday.
Luke Walker/Getty Images
Willett salutes the Wentworth galleries on his march to victory at the BMW PGA Championship.
Rewind to November, and the two-stroke victory over Patrick Reed and Matt Wallace at Jumeirah Golf Estates came a full 953 days of lows after that Augusta National high and enabled Willett to crystallise his journey back from the depths of sudden despair. After finishing second in the 2016 Race to Dubai standings for the second successive year off the back of his major breakthrough, Willett tumbled to 96th in 2017 with just two top 10s. His shocking decline was even more pronounced on the PGA Tour where he finished 224th in the FedEx Cup standings with four missed cuts and two injury-enforced withdrawals – including at the U.S. Open after an embarrassing opening round of 81 at Erin Hills – in 11 largely forgettable starts. Indeed, there wasn’t much to write home about stateside last season either; four missed cuts and another “WD” as he amassed a miserly $84,000 while struggling with a shoulder complaint that was a direct result of trying to compensate for his back.
“The back end of 2016 beginning of 2017 I was injured pretty bad but I was playing a lot of golf because I’d agreed to play a lot of golf. When I won the Masters you sign up to play wherever in the world and go travelling and play the golf tournaments that I’d already agreed.
“But the body wasn’t in a position, the mind wasn’t in position, the game definitely wasn’t in a position to kind of be travelling that much and playing that much. And I probably stretched myself a little bit too far and started to not enjoy it. Ultimately you kind of spiral down quickly and yeah, we got to a pretty low point where golf wasn’t really fun and we were in a lot of pain.
“It’s a very lonely sport, isn’t it. It takes a long time to play, you’re out there for four or five hours speaking to yourself most of the time. So yeah, it’s been a bumpy old road for the last couple of years.”
You often have altercations with the people that are closest to you. She [wife nicole] sees you at your worst… completely stripped back.
The turning point came at the Maybank Championship in February last year where Willett missed the cut but played pain-free for the first time. Willett credits a complete swing overhaul overseen by Sean Foley, Tiger Wood’s former coach, for that blessed moment in Kuala Lumpur when he finally went “clean” after five years of pill popping.
“As soon as I was sat down with Foles, I was open to do anything. We were gonna completely unravel everything that had happened and we started again. And I put full faith and full trust in the work that I was gonna do with him and I haven’t really wavered off that since we started. I think that in itself takes a lot of courage, to give up everything that you were doing and say right, we’ll start again and go from there.”
Something had to give after Willett’s seemingly inexplicably slide down the world rankings from a career-high ninth after his major breakthrough in 2016, to the relative wilderness of 332nd spot. Now back inside the top 50, Willett admitted it had been tough playing in front of folk who didn’t fully understand the extent of his back injury.
“That’s where the mental side comes into play… if you’re injured and you can’t make the moves then there’s nothing you can do. It’s a tough place to be in because you’re working hard, but the harder you work the more physio you need ‘cause you’re not making the correct moves. Do you not work so that you’re not in pain? But then you’re not gonna get better. So that’s why I needed such a drastic change and that’s why it’s taken as long as it as.”
Through it all Willett has drawn strength from his family, particularly wife Nicole, mother to his two sons Zachariah, 3, and 14-month-old Noah.
“She takes the brunt of most things whether it be good or bad. It’s always the same thing isn’t it, you often have altercations with the people that are closest to you. She sees me more than anybody else in the world, she sees you at your best, she sees you at your worst, she sees you completely stripped back when no one’s there and there’s no cameras on you, you’re just being you.
Willett poses with his Green Jacket the morning after the 2016 Masters at Augusta (Getty Images)
“She’s been awesome. To have the family that I’ve got at home is one of the main things I think that helps get through these stages because when I look back now and think about bad days when I was playing poorly and injured, they were pretty poor days. But you look now and …as long as you’re healthy, the kids are always gonna be smiling and it kind of puts things into perspective.”
Whether Willett kicks on from his fifth European Tour win at JGE is a moot point. That he’s made it back at all, given the pain he’s endured in the past two or so years, is a remarkable achievement in itself. It’s not quite Tiger-fused back redemption, but there were similar dark days from which Willett admits he never thought he’d recover.
Still, it didn’t stop the inevitable question about this year’s major championships. Can you win another one of the bigs?
“I have no idea,” was Willett’s refreshingly honest answer. “We’re fortunate that we’re in all the majors for the next few years, so you can plan around them. Yeah, if things keep going the way they are, I’m going to look forward to getting back to Augusta in April actually with a golf game that can get around the golf course.”
This feature first appeared in the April 2109 edition of Golf Digest Middle East.
