HOW DUSTIN GOT IT DONE

USAToday writer Steve diMeglio investigates how Johnson conquered Augusta in star-spangled manner in these excerpts from his seven-part series on the 2020 champion

DUSTIN JOHNSON made grown men cry. The soft-spoken, gentle giant of the south turned the emerald valley of Augusta National Golf Club into a fighting pit and battered and bruised not only the field of play, but all of his 91 foes last November.

In becoming the first player in Masters history to card multiple rounds of 65 or better in the same tournament – his previous career low had been 67 – the world No.1 tied the 54-hole scoring record of 16 under after three rounds and then went where no man had gone before by reaching 20 under in the final round and finishing there for a five-shot victory, the largest winning margin since Tiger Woods won by 12 in 1997.

Johnson threw haymakers from the beginning of the 84th Masters, made just four bogeys (the fewest of any champion), and hit 60 of 72 greens. When his lead was trimmed to one after two early bogeys in the final round, it spawned fear another Major tragedy was at hand. Instead, he knocked an 8-iron from 185 yards to 6 feet for birdie on the sixth, added another red number on the eighth, then scored again at 13, 14 and 15 to leave his pursuers with nothing to do but weep and wave a white flag.

His master work was so staggering that Cameron Smith lost by five despite becoming the first player in Masters history to shoot all four rounds in the 60s.

“I proved I could get it done on Sunday with the lead at a Major, bro,” said Johnson, who previously had been 0-for-4 with at least a share of the 54-hole lead in a Major. “There were doubts, for sure. I was proud of that round. After the bogeys, it wasn’t like I was frustrated. It didn’t bother me. [I] just had to stay patient and take it to the house.”

THE MOMENT

WHILE others left the grounds to tend to their wounded souls, Johnson headed to the terrace putting green for the abbreviated closing ceremony. There, Woods, the five-time Masters champion, helped Johnson slip on the green jacket.

And then Johnson lost it.

The indestructible force who pulverised Augusta National broke down during an interview and as hard as he tried to hold back the tears and collect himself, the waterworks flowed and his words ceased.

“The tears came from all the joy, knowing all the work that went into it, the team around me,” Johnson said. “Being the Masters champion in that moment, I was just so happy and proud. And having [fiancee] Paulina [Gretzky] there and my two boys and the family were across the street, and it was just a special moment. I was at a loss for words. I just couldn’t say anything there for a while.

“It’s still kind of a little surreal when I see the jacket and know I’m a Masters champion. All the memories come back.”

It was an understandable outburst of emotion. Growing up across the Georgia-South Carolina border on the outskirts of Columbia, about an hour’s drive from Augusta, the Masters was his Holy Grail. He went to Masters practice rounds with his dad before he turned 10, played the course for the first time in 2008, played in his first

Masters in 2009. And long into the nights of his youth, he was making putts to win the green jacket.

“The Masters will always be in my heart, with the history and growing up so close,” Johnson said. “It’s pretty cool when a childhood dream comes true.”

There was more behind the tears than a childhood dream fulfilled. Johnson thought of the heartache he endured in squandering victory in five previous Majors, some with tragic tones attached. And he was just two months removed from the most recent Major disappointment when his one-shot 54-hole advantage in the PGA Championship at TPC Harding Park in San Francisco vanished as Collin Morikawa raced by everyone.

Or the time he rolled down Magnolia Lane in 2017 having won his last three starts but was forced to miss the Masters after he slipped and fell and injured his back in his rental home.

He thought of the six-month sabbatical in 2014 he took from the PGA Tour to deal with “personal challenges” and how he worked to overcome them. Since then, he has won 16 of his 24 PGA Tour titles, including two Majors.

Put all that together and Johnson let his guard down on this rare instance and let the world see what only a few of his closest friends and family had seen.

“I was surprised that he cried and lost it,” said younger brother and caddie, Austin. “I’ve seen him get emotional about other things but not golf. But that tournament means so much to him. It humanised him a bit and everyone else got to see that.”

Colt Knost, the 2007 US Amateur champion who played amateur golf with Johnson and roomed with him on the road the first year they turned pro, was moved by Johnson’s victory and post-round interview.

“I started crying when I saw him cry,” Knost said. “He’s got the biggest heart in the world and he’ll do anything for anyone that’s in his circle and those tears show you how much that tournament means to him and how much working his butt off to be the best means to him.”

The Masters masterpiece also came a month after Johnson spent 11 days in quarantine in a Las Vegas hotel after testing positive for the coronavirus. Johnson, as is his nature, dealt with it and moved on without missing a beat.

The Masters capped a 13-tournament, post COVID-19 tour de force to end 2020 in which he won four times, including the Tour Championship that earned him the FedEx Cup, and an 11-stroke romp in the Northern Trust where he shot 60 in the second round and finished at 30 under. He also finished runner-up three times.

The victory solidified his perch atop the world rankings; he has now spent more time as the world No.1 than anyone not named Tiger

Woods and Greg Norman.

“The way he was playing at the end of 2020 I think is the closest thing to what Tiger Woods was,” said elite swing coach Butch Harmon, who has worked with Johnson since 2009 and was with Woods from 1993 to 2004. “The only difference is Tiger was on for 20 years. When DJ’s on, and he’s firing on all cylinders, and everyone else is on, DJ wins.

“He is the closest thing to Tiger Woods I have ever seen.”

THE MENTALITY

AS Johnson sauntered up the hill towards the 18th green on Masters Sunday, he turned to Austin, and asked him where he stood on the leaderboard.

“What do you mean where do you stand?”

Austin then told his brother that he was five shots clear and just minutes away from polishing off a remarkable, record-setting romp to win the green jacket.

“I told him I could win the Masters from where he was,” Austin said. “And he did the same thing at Oakmont on the final hole on Sunday when he won the [2016] US Open. That’s DJ.”

“I call it DJ Island. He just has this ability to check out and go to his own little island. It’s him there and no one else.”

His fleeting memory allows him to move on like no other golfer, no matter how tragic the result. And there have been many soul crushers, starting with the 2010 US Open at Pebble Beach, where he blew a threeshot, 54-hole lead with a final-round 82. Two months later in the 2010 PGA Championship at Whistling Straits, he grounded his club in a bunker he did not think was a bunker on the 72nd hole. The resulting two-shot penalty cost him a spot in a playoff.

In 2011, he was in contention deep into the final round of The Open at Royal St George’s before he hit a 2-iron out of bounds. In the 2015 US Open at Chambers Bay, he three-putted from 12 feet on the 72nd hole and finished one shot behind Jordan Spieth.

Losses like that leave scars. But not for DJ. The losses hurt him, but

The tears came from all the joy. Being the Masters champion, I was just so happy and proud

they don’t remain haunting – and certainly not lasting – memories.

“I always jokingly use the phrase he was dipped in Teflon at birth,” said David Winkle, Johnson’s longtime agent. “At Chambers Bay, we get in a car to go up to the makeshift clubhouse area and it was about a minute and we get up and he gets out of the car and goes immediately to a place where kids are yelling for autographs and he signs all their stuff.

“We get in the car to leave. And it’s kind of quiet. And Dustin pulls the car over and says, ‘Guys, lighten up. It’s just golf.’ And I thought, good lord. Here we are trying to lift him up and he lifted us up. This guy is unbelievable.

“And I’ll never forget the 2011 British Open. I think he’s devastated. But he walks out of scoring and high-fives me and goes, ‘Best finish in a Major, Winky’.”

But that’s the way Johnson has always been.

“Even as a kid or a junior golfer, I’ve always had the ability to get over things right away, especially with golf,” Johnson said. “I don’t know where exactly it comes from, but obviously it’s good for a golfer because there are so many things that happen, and weird things that happen, especially to me.

“At the end of the day, it’s still a game. I love the game. But there is zero I can do to change something that’s already happened. I just keep trying to push forward.”

THE INTELLIGENCE

THE brilliance of Dustin Johnson is his uncluttered mind. While many fellow pros can go on and on about course management and others can talk endlessly about the complex principles of the golf swing,

Johnson’s simplistic approach to life and putting the golf ball in the hole does just fine.

He is not about to sit down with Bryson DeChambeau, and converse about the relationship between mass and velocity or do a deep dive on air density and local slope adjustment. And he does not have much to say about the psychology of handling the game’s mind-numbing disturbances.

But because of his unwavering and carefree demeanour, a few infamous gaffes over the years on the golf course and his distant appearance during press conferences – where he often responds to long-winded questions with brief frankness – many tend to question his intelligence.

Thus, despite his success, his mind is rarely credited as a strength.

“People don’t think he’s the smartest guy in the room and I think it’s because he’s got the southern drawl and he kind of talks slow, but that’s just how he talks and if it makes him sound maybe not the smartest, then so be it,” said Knost. “He might not be book smart but he’s smart. And he’s like Rain Man when it comes to his golf IQ. I’ll bet you he can go through and tell you every shot he hit last year on the PGA Tour.

“He knows what’s going on, he knows how to manage his game now as good as anybody, he knows what he’s looking for in his equipment and he knows a lot about the golf swing even though he doesn’t let on that he does. Sounds pretty smart to me.”

THE SWING

GIVEN his enormous physical gifts, Johnson could shun the weight room and practice ground and likely still make do against the best pro golfers in the world. But when it comes to his occupation, he learned work is not a four-letter word.

“Dustin is freakishly athletic,” said Winkle. “I think it was a little bit of a curse early in his career that he was so athletic that he probably gets three or four hours of benefit out of an hour’s work of time.

“He became an extremely hard worker about four or five years ago and took his focus and his dedication to a new level. That’s when he made the leap from being a top-10 player in the world to being the best player in the world.”

Johnson discovered there are a lot more fruits that come with the labour and despite reaching the summit of golf, he is not about to put his feet up.

“Having the success I’ve had, the feeling I get when I win, especially a Major, all those things make my family proud and drive me to continue to work hard and continue to try and be the best I can,” Johnson said. “And I like being the best.”

Getting there included two pivotal discoveries.

The first took a few years to come to fruition. When Johnson started working with Harmon in 2009, the coach quickly preached that Johnson should master the fade. Up until then, Johnson relied on a draw that much of the time he couldn’t control.

“We would work on it every practice session but he wouldn’t put it in play in a tournament. He just didn’t have the confidence,” said Harmon. “And then one day he called me and he said, ‘Hey, Butchy, I was just playing today and I decided I was going to hit fades off every tee and man I drove it good. I think I’m going to play that way.’ And I just laughed and said, ‘Yep, that’s a good idea.’”

That was in 2015 when Johnson was testing equipment.

“It wasn’t like I couldn’t hit a cut,” Johnson said. “But if I had to cut one around a tree or something like that, it took me a while to trust it. Then when I was testing equipment, I hit a couple of cuts on the range and it felt really good. So the next three days I played and hit nothing but cuts.”

A few months later, another foundational moment occurred. At the 2016 Northern Trust Open at Riviera Country Club north of Los Angeles hooked up with reps from TrackMan, a launch monitor that provides precise analytics concerning what a golf ball does after being hit.

At the time, Johnson was a middling wedge player. More harshly, it was a weakness.

“He was leaving so many shots out there,” Winkle said. “He spent hours that day and then turned to me and said, ‘Wink, order me one of these’.”

Johnson would spend hours working on half-, three-quarter and full shots with his wedges. Now he is one of the best wedge players in the game.

“I knew I had to really work on my wedge game,” Johnson said. “Now I’m never surprised with whatever number I have to the green. I probably practice like 80 percent of my time on wedges.

“It took me a long time but as you get older, you figure out some things.”