The Courier & Advertiser (Angus and Dundee)
Walker: ‘I knew my name was on trophy’
It was a feeling like no other. Chasing his first major title while being hunted down by the best player in the world, Jimmy Walker felt like he couldn’t miss. He was just playing too well.
“It’s hard to be scared about anything when you know you’re so on it,” Walker says.
“The confidence I was walking around with the whole time was uplifting. I had a sense of freedom. I just didn’t think I was going to make a bogey. I’ve won golf tournaments by nine shots but I’ve never had that feeling. It was so comforting.”
The blanket of invincibility Walker wore that week in the 2016 PGA Championship at Baltusrol, New Jersey, back in 2016 would sell for millions.
The Texas native played the final 28 holes without a blemish on his card to oust world No 1 Jason Day and lift the Wanamaker Trophy.
Walker’s coolness won through on a weekend where Mother Nature was determined to wreak havoc.
Nearly four inches of rain had battered Baltusrol’s Lower Course ahead of Saturday’s third round.
Play was wiped out 15 minutes before Walker was due to tee off.
Then, on a marathon 36hole finale on Sunday, organisers allowed for preferred lies on the deluged fairways for the very first time in a mad dash for a finish.
“I had this really strange calm,” Walker says. “The greens were soft. I was chipping very well and putting very well.”
A Sunday morning 68 left him just ahead of Day,
Brooks Koepka and Henrik Stenson.
“After that third round, I went to my bus, laid down on the couch and took a nap for a bit,” he says. “I knew that I was hitting it well enough that they would have to hit a good score to beat me.”
Three moments defined the final round.
After reaching the turn at level par, Walker holed out from the greenside bunker on 10. “You don’t want to have nine pars in a row and finish with a bogey,” he recalls. “I was just on the upslope and I had plenty of green to work with.
“Was I trying to make it? No. I was trying to get it close as possible. When that went in I thought: ‘I will get this done today.’”
He held on to a two-shot lead until the par-five 17th. “My caddie said if we birdie this hole, we win the golf tournament.
“I said: ‘Let’s do it.’ I smoked the drive, killer lay-up and we watched Jason Day not birdie. I flipped a wedge in there, made the putt and had a three-shot lead.”
That nerveless eightfooter should have made it a formality. But on the 18th tee, Walker watched Day crush a two-iron from 254 yards to within eagle distance. The defending champion marched up to the green and made it.
Suddenly the lead was one and needing a par or better, Walker had carved his fairway wood into the heavy rough. “I hit it in the worst possible spot,” he admits. “It got a lot harder than it needed to be.” Pressure?
“I wasn’t nervous,” he insists, reliving his threefooter for glory. “I hadn’t missed one and I knew I wasn’t going to miss.”
Just three years before that seismic moment, Walker was a journeyman pro battling to keep his tour card. Six wins later, the keen astrophotographer was shooting for the stars.
Walker had been pushed to his absolute limits but had managed to achieve a lifelong dream.
“Jason was parked right next to me,” he says. “We talked after the round and then I texted him that night and said: ‘Hey man, great finish, you doing that helped me learn so much more about myself. You made me dig deeper and find something else.’ He took it the right way.”
Just months later, Walker’s inspirational story took a cruel twist. At the World Cup of Golf in Australia in November 2016, he thought he had come down with a nasty bug. It wasn’t until he arrived at the Masters the following April that he received his diagnosis.
“I was a wreck,” he says. “At Augusta I found out I had Lyme disease and that’s what was kicking my ass.
“It really beat me up pretty good. It did a fullblown attack on me. It hit every part of my body.”
The bacterial illness is transmitted to humans through the bites of infected ticks and, without treatment, it can spread to joints, the heart and the nervous system.
Walker isn’t sure where he picked it up, but speculates it may have been on a hunting trip that autumn. The effects were devastating.
“I basically had the flu for two years,” he says. “I had no energy. Your phone battery is sitting on 3% the whole time. That’s how it felt. It was hard to practise. It was tough to get off the couch.
“Even once I physically started to feel better it still fried my brain. It hit every part of my brain and I still deal with brain fog and forgetfulness.”
It was one thing for Walker to accept that he was a spent force in professional golf, but the impact on his family life was the most taxing.
He was balancing the rigours of tour life with a debilitating disease while raising his two sons, Mcclain and Beckett, with his wife Erin.
At one stage, Walker was so exhausted he was falling asleep reading bedtime stories to his children. “It was a tough time in my life,” he says.
“My kids were young and they wanted to play. All I could do was get up and go to work. I felt like such a deadbeat dad and deadbeat husband. My wife ended up contracting it, we both dealt with it.
“Looking back, you wish it never happened, but you just move forward and hopefully I can write a new chapter.”
Walker eventually walked away from golf in 2022, seemingly for good. His game was in tatters and, at the age of 43, he decided he was done after shooting 78-70 in his hometown event, the Valero Texas Open.
He then received an unexpected lifeline.
The defection of a number of PGA Tour players to LIV Golf moved him into the top 50 in the career exemption list, giving him full playing rights for 2023.
He grasped his chance but burned his one-time exemption by finishing 124th in the regular season Fedex Cup standings, which traditionally would have been enough to retain his card.
Walker resents the PGA Tour for moving the goalposts after introducing a new autumn schedule that meant only the top 70 automatically retained their cards.
Walker may have lost his card, but he does have his swagger back. Illness is no longer dictating his life. “I call them ‘Lyme days’ but it’s very rare I have one any more,” he explains.
“I’m healthy, I feel good, I look good.
“I’ll have my opportunities, they’re few and far between now but I’ll be ready for them.” So, can he win again? “I know I can, for sure. It could just take three shots for me to realise: ‘Wow, I can do it.’”
•