It has undoubtedly been Dustin Johnson’s year. The American player put the finishing touch to an extraordinary season at Augusta National, in which donning the green jacket of the Masters for the first time was his best gift. With four top 10s in the last five editions, including a second place last year, DJ -as he is also known by the initials of his first and last name- managed to make his dream come true in this postponed Masters (November instead of April).
And he won his second major in a big way (the first was the 2016 US Open), with an exhibition of talent that resulted in the lowest total score (-20) in the history of the old Masters, whose inaugural edition was played in 1934. Johnson pulled five strokes ahead of his closest pursuers, Australian Cameron Smith and Korean Sungjae Im, in a tournament in which Jon Rahm, second in the world ranking, finished seventh, with -10.
DJ, with a record of 23 victories and more than a hundred top 10s on the PGA Tour, has consolidated his position at the top of the world ranking and closes the year with a clear lead of 2.6 points over the player from Biscay.
The turbulent 2020 has been more than profitable sportingly speaking for DJ, as he has reaped a dozen top 10s, including three wins (Masters, Travelers Championship and The Nordest Trust), four second places and a third.
In Dustin Johnson’s life, now peaceful, there were also turbulent episodes that included the theft of a gun, drug use and excessive alcohol consumption. At 36 years of age, this big boy from Columbia, South Carolina, can boast of his enviable position at the top of the world ranking and the FedExCup of the American Tour.
Married to model Paulina Gretzky -daughter of arguably the greatest ice hockey player of all time- and father of two children, DJ is now a very happy man.
Johnson is, along with Arnold Palmer, Jack Nicklaus and Tiger Woods among others, one of the players to have won at least once on the PGA Tour in each of his first ten seasons.
But life hasn’t always been so rosy for DJ. His life has not been exactly placid and he has starred in some episodes that, if he could, he would have erased from his past.
The first and most lurid occurred when he was still a teenager and almost cost him jail time. With a group of friends they broke into a house and stole, among other things, a pistol. That gun was used days later in a murder, and the big problem was that the gun and the bullets it carried had Johnson’s fingerprints on them. The issue is that Dustin had bought the ammunition apparently forced by the older brother of a friend of his and without knowing that later that gun would be used by that person to commit a murder. The later to become famous golfer was pardoned for the home invasion robbery and the murderer was sentenced to life in prison. “I never really had a relationship with those people,” Johnson told Golf.com in a 2011 interview. “I was in the wrong place at the wrong time. I looked in the mirror afterwards and realized that person wasn’t really me and wasn’t who I wanted to be. I wanted to go to college and I wanted to play golf. It was an easy decision to get back on the right track. I didn’t want to throw away all the good things.”
And he was on the right track… until his dark side came out again. Although the leaders of the PGA Tour tried to hide it with politically correct language, that is, hypocritical, saying that his removal from competition for six months in 2014 was “a leave of absence to solve personal problems”, the truth is that what happened is that Johnson had tested positive for the third time in an anti-doping control, and nothing less than for cocaine (the previous ones, in 2009 and 2012, had been one for the same drug and another for marijuana). Johnson never acknowledged the reason for his suspension, denied being a cocaine user and said that his retirement from competition had been related to alcohol abuse to deal with stress: “My way of getting it off my chest was to drink or go on a bender,” he claimed, and acknowledged having put himself in the hands of experts to learn how to handle pressure and risky situations.
In case the player lacked any sauce on his complicated existential plate, a Fox reporter wrote that it was no big secret that Johnson had had sexual affairs with the wives of two PGA Tour players, one of whom divorced after the thorny affair came to light.
Given the disturbing outlook, when he began dating his current partner, her father, Wayne Gretzky, warned him that he would have to behave differently if he wanted to continue the relationship. And so far Johnson seems to be complying.
Tumultuous personal life aside, the current best golfer in the world according to the ranking is living a dream sporting period.
It seems that his responsibility as a father (his first son was born in January 2015 and the second one in 2018) put the life of this great golfer back on track -and we will see if definitively-.
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