He is a few weeks away from turning 28, but Jason Day, who is elbowing Jordan Spieth for the world number one (he reached it in September and lost it a week later to the Texan), has very clear ideas… probably because his life experience has taught him the value of what is truly important. What is now paradise was once hell.
His life, after the death of his father when Jason was only 11 years old, could have been very, very different if his mother had not made a drastic decision at the time. But that is a story that will unfold later. Now let’s take a look at his sporting side, full of happy moments.
Day started this year in eighth position in the world ranking and on September 21, after a spectacular streak of four victories in six appearances, he dethroned Rory McIlroy from the world golf leadership. Jason Day became the third Australian, after Greg Norman several years ago and Adam Scott a few years ago, to be number one in the world.
It has taken him seven years to reach the highest peak of golf since he made his debut on the American Tour, the coveted PGA Tour, in 2008.
In this time he has accumulated more than 40 top 10s and eight official tournament victories, and in the list of earnings in the last four years his worst final position has been sixteenth, last season.
The majors have been resisting him despite having finished half a dozen times in the top five, but finally came his great joy when he won the US PGA Championship last August. He had previously finished second in the 2011 and 2013 US Open and fourth in 2014; second in the 2011 Augusta Masters and third in 2013; and fourth in this year’s British Open. It can’t be said that he didn’t come warning….
He enjoyed his first PGA Tour win in his third season, 2010, when he won the Byron Nelson Championship (earning $1.17 million) in a year that started quite badly, falling in a few cuts, and ended quite well, with five top 10s including a second place at the Deutsche Bank Championship.
In 2011 he scored no victories but ten top 10s including his two second places in the Masters and the US Open. That year he finished ninth on the PGA Tour money list.
The 2012 season was a regular season, with only four top 10s and one victory in an unofficial tournament, the Wendy’s 3-Tour Challenge.
In 2013 he scored seven top 10s, and his best positions were in two of the Majors: second in the US Open and third in the Masters. That year he also won the World Cup for Australia in tandem with Adam Scott, and was proclaimed individual champion of the tournament.
He started the 2014 season with a victory in an unofficial tournament, the ISPs Handa World Cup of Golf, and in February he won this time in an official tournament, the Accenture World Match Play Championship. He had a good performance in the US Open, fourth, was second in The Barclays and fourth in the Tour Championship.
But if things went well, very well, before, this season has been more than excellent. This year he has accumulated earnings of more than nine million dollars, more than half of which he has earned in one month thanks to his victories in the US PGA, the Barclays and the BMW Championship, the first one with 1,800,000 dollars for the champion and 1,450,000 dollars each for the other two.
The 2015 season, which as in the European Tour curiously begins the previous year, began with a great start for Day and is ending in an exceptional way. He was fifth in his first tournament, winner in his second (both were tournaments listed as unofficial) and third in his third appearance. In his fifth tournament, in February, he recorded his first official tournament win of the year, the Farmers Insurance Open, and a week later he was fourth in the AT&T Pebble Beach National Pro-Am. Another fourth place was obtained in April at the Zurich Classic of New Orleans. Against all odds, in May and June he missed the cut in two tournaments in a row, both of them renowned, The Players Championship and The Memorial Tournament. Fortunately, he recovered both emotionally and athletically and in his next tournament, the US Open, he returned to good form and finished ninth. His next event was another major, the British Open, and his skill led him to fourth place. He then won the Canadian Open, was twelfth in the Bridgeston Invitational and then came his victories in the US PGA, the Barclays and the BMW, with a twelfth place in the Deutsche Bank Championship.
HARD CHILDHOOD
But the life of this young champion, born on November 12, 1987 in the small town of Beaudesert, has not always been a bed of roses. Far from it. A great tragedy marked his passage from childhood to adolescence: stomach cancer took his father, Alvin, when Jason was just 11 years old. He had introduced him to the world of golf as a child and now left him an orphan at a very difficult age.
Alvin was strict and set the limits for him, but as soon as Jason passed away he became a troubled teenager who was a friend of fights and binge drinking. He himself has admitted that he became an alcoholic when he was only 12 years old.
His mother, Dening, worked all day to try to support Day and his two sisters. She, a Filipino immigrant, was instrumental in keeping her son from giving up golf.
“I remember watching her mow the lawn with a knife because we couldn’t afford a mower,” Day reminisced on the day she won the US PGA. “I remember we didn’t have a water heater, so we had to use a pot to take a bath.”
In the midst of financial difficulties, his mother made a determined bet on her son’s golfing talent: she took out a second mortgage to finance Jason’s studies at Kooralbyn International School, a boarding school with a golf school seven hours away from his family, friends and former drinking buddies. The school had the distinction of having counted legendary Australian athlete Cathy Freeman and golfer Adam Scott among its pupils.
“It was very easy to stop partying because there was nothing else to do except go to school and golf. There was literally nothing around us,” Day said. “So I was pretty much forced to go to school and golf. And I realized what my mother had done, and that I needed an education.”
A book about Tiger Woods he came across at school, which told of a young Tiger who regularly shot rounds of under 70 before he was 15, motivated Day to haul his golf clubs over a mile to the driving range at dawn to hit balls. And there he met another of the other great people in his life, academy coach Colin Swatton, who became his mentor and ‘foster father’ and with whom he continues to this day.
“I practiced 32 hours a week,” Jason reminisced. “All I did was go to school and play golf. I didn’t do any social life.”
He improved rapidly and in a few years moved to the United States to join the Nationwide Tour, where in 2007 he became the youngest – 19 years and 7 months – to win on the PGA Tour, where he made his debut the following year.
And last August 21st the virtuous circle was completed with his victory in the US PGA. The image of Day crying in the arms of his caddy and then with his family (he got married in 2009, is the father of one child and is expecting another) could not have been more touching.
“Knowing how hard it was to accomplish what I accomplished today, or what I’ve done in the past, thinking about my mother, my sisters, when I was a kid, a 12-year-old kid… I thought I had no future, either in golf or in general… It’s just an unbelievable feeling.”
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