By Kent Gray
DP World Tour Championship defender Danny Willett has credited coach Sean Foley with helping get his game back to a place he believes could be even better than when he won the Masters in 2016.

A year on from the victory at Jumeirah Golf Estates that finally ended a rollercoaster 30-month ride from Masters champion to serial cut-misser, Willett has given his body and swing a full bill of health.

RELATED: How Danny Willett escaped golf’s doldrums

He says Foley’s inquisitive, data-led coaching and bubbly personality, coupled with a back relatively free of pain, has him in a positive space entering the Race to Dubai decider. 

“You know, I think anyone who has ever met him knows that he’s a charismatic guy,” Willett said of Foley, Tiger Wood’s one-time swing mentor who is at the DPWTC this week.

“The time when we first got together, I was in a pretty low place, and you kind of needed that. Me and Mike are really close. Pete [Cowan] was like a father figure in how he kind of put his arm around you and we’d go over some things, and I’m still really close with them guys.

“But Foles just brings a different energy to the table in how he does things with his work and backs it up — with whatever we do, he backs it up with a lot of science and facts, and we use TrakMan data to get to the bottom of some things.

“Yeah, he’s an incredibly intelligent guy, and I like the fact that he’s always wanting to change and wanting to get better and wanting to do things to increase his knowledge of what he’s teaching. I’m the same in what I’m trying to do. I’m trying to increase and gain knowledge in what I do so that I feel like I can choose which ones I want to kind of use.”

Pressed on whether he believed his game was back to where it was before he edged Lee Westwood and Jordan Spieth by three strokes for the green jacket three years ago, Willett was quietly bullish.

“In terms of playing-wise, I think I could potentially be better than what I was then. Very different ball flight. Very different golf game and very different outlook on probably what is a good or a bad day or how things go.

“So I think as a whole, the potential is there to be better. Whether that means you’re going to win anything else, no. But [given] what we’re doing, the potential is definitely better.”

Willett kicked on from win in Dubai last November to capture his seven European Tour title at the BMW Championship at Wentworth this summer and enters this week’s season-decider in 18th place in the Race to Dubai standings. While he’s in good shape physically, the partnership with Foley and other areas of his game remain a work in progress. On Tuesday, putting coach John Graham accompanied Willett during the Pro-Am.

Willett with putting coach John Graham during practice prior to the DP World Tour Championship. (Photo by Andrew Redington/Getty Images)

“Yeah, body-wise is good, pretty good, anyway. We’re not in the physio bed anymore. We’re back in the gym training, working out, doing whatever we want basically. Apart from a bad night’s sleep or whatever it is, or you travel badly, just the normal things that I’m sure everyone kind of goes through on a day-to-day basis, we’re pretty solid.

“The swing moves are always a continuous thing. We’re always getting work on that and we’re always trying to get better and change things.

“I think we’ll be working forever. I don’t think there’s an end goal, really, with the swing. We’ll keep trying to get better. I’ll keep changing things, if I feel like it will help me with what I’m doing. You might have felt something two years ago that was good and then because it kind of got bedded in, you lost that feeling and you’ve got to change it to get the same thing, but a different way.

“It’s how the game goes. It’s a strange old game. We’ll keep working for the next 30 years.”