Former No. 1 Day healthy, eager to get back to top
Jason Day is climbing the mountain again.
The Aussie was the king of the hill after he marched to victory in the 2016 Players Championship as he brought the daunting Stadium Course at TPC Sawgrass to its knees with an overpowering 2iron, a killer short game and a lethal putter in winning wire-towire by four shots.
The win was his 10th on the PGA Tour, his third in six starts and seventh in 10 months. He was the undisputed world No. 1.
“I honestly felt there was no one better than me in the game and that it didn’t matter who it was, I was going to beat them,” Day said. He hasn’t won since. While he finished runner-up to Jimmy Walker in the PGA Championship, a bad back tempered the fire in his game and shelved him during the FedExCup Playoffs. The pressure of retaining his lofty perch atop the world rankings and the demands inherent in holding such a position finally got to him, and he has fallen to No. 3. He became a father for a second time during his great stretch of play. And the health of his ailing mother, who had surgery to remove a cancerous tumor from her lung this year and is recovering nicely, shook him.
But just as his mother is back at work in Australia, Day is back at work trying to get back to No. 1, knowing it will be an arduous climb. He doesn’t want to remain at base camp looking up at Mount Everest. He doesn’t want to settle.
“There are guys out here that are comfortable to stay in that place, whatever the base camp they’re at,” Day said Tuesday ahead of The Players Championship beginning Thursday. “It’s a good living out here, I must admit. We play for a lot of money. I could kind of just cruise it in and make a good living and enjoy having a little bit of fame and fortune that goes along with it.
“But at the end of my career, I will be severely angry at myself if I did not give it a 100%. I think it’s kind of in my blood.”
Day says he’s back in love with the daily grind of trying to be the best player in the world, whether he’s in the gym or on the golf course. He’s healthy again. And he’s better equipped to handle the extracurricular activities of being atop the rankings.
“I didn’t realize that once you got to No. 1 in the world, the amount of demand from the media, fans, sponsors and pretty much everything else that entails being at a golf tournament and off course as well,” Day said. “I’ve got to make it as less stressful as possible. Make sure that when hopefully one day I get back that I take that stress and that load of stress off my shoulders, so I can just go out there and focus on golf. Because I’m a person that I can’t do 4 million things at once, and that’s what it feels like when you’re at the top. It just feels like you’re getting pulled in each different direction and you’ve got no time to breathe.”
Day has caught his breath and has a good bounce back in his step. He’s feeling good ahead of his title defense, and he’s feeling good about his game.
“There’s no better feeling than being the best,” he said. “For a moment there after I lost my No. 1 world ranking, I kind of lost the desire to kind of be there, and I think it was just because I was mentally burnt out from everything that had gone on. Earlier this year with some distractions, finally I can kind of take a breath and sit back and go, ‘OK, I need to kind of start my trip back to up the mountain again.’ ”