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 the age of 32, the Columbia, South Carolina, native can boast of his enviable position at the top of the world ranking and the American Tour.
He has earned almost four million dollars this year (one million less than what his house with its own pier in Palm Beach, Florida is worth). Florida), last season he pocketed more than nine in prize money alone and is expecting his second child with his partner, model Paulina Gretzky, daughter of what is considered the greatest ice hockey player of all time. You could say that Dustin Johnson is a thoroughly happy man. With his two wins this season (at least until early March, when he won the World Championships series tournament in Mexico), his two third-place finishes and a sixth, his rise to the top of the world and PGA Tour rankings, it looks like this season is going to have an undisputed star. In fact, with his 11.72 points, he is 1.4 points ahead of Jason Day at the top of the world podium.
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 has not always smiled so much on DJ, as he is also known by the initials of his first and last name. 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 stage. After his debut in the Olympus of the winners of a major last year (the US Open at Oakmont), the cannonball Johnson (for his powerful punch, with an average drive of 316.2 yards and the longest of the season: 428 yards! at the SBS Tournament of Champions), is having a magnificent season.
Of the seven tournaments he had played up to March, he had won three, finished third in two others and sixth in another. Last season he had three PGA Tour victories and twelve other top-10 finishes, including one second and two third places. He totaled earnings of 9.3 million dollars, and also participated in the Ryder Cup team that defeated the European team.
His most serious rivals this season are Justin Thomas and Hideki Matsuyama, who at the beginning of March were ahead of him in the PGA Tour’s FedExCup ranking, before Johnson won the World Championships Match Play, and are seventh and fourth respectively in the world ranking. Thoma has three wins and two other top-10 finishes this season, while Matsuyama has two victories and two second-place finishes.
It seems that his responsibility as a father (his first son was born in January 2015 and now his partner is pregnant with his second) has put this great golfer’s life back on track -and we’ll see if definitively-.
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