AN HONEST DAY’S WORK
Golfer candid about family
The best thing about Jason Day — no, wait, it’s a long list and tough to pick just one — but among the greatest things about the world’s No. 1 golfer is that sometimes he speaks before he has thoroughly considered the consequences.
Tuesday, in typically rambling fashion, he veered off course while answering a question about his son Dash’s starring role in a Taylor Made golf commercial tied to Father’s Day, always the final day of the U.S. Open.
“He went down to a studio in Columbus and he had headphones on and (Day’s wife) Ellie was helping him out with his lines,” said the 28-year-old Aussie. “I mean, he’s only three. People forget he’s three, he’s a humongous toddler. And you should see (baby daughter) Lucy, she’s even bigger. She’s a fatty. Ellie … I think she has protein shakes in those things.”
(“Those things!?” Ellie will say when he gets home. “You’re discussing my breasts in public? Go sleep on the couch.”) “But anyway, I’m off point now, I can’t remember what I was going to say,” Day resumed. “Yeah, but Ellie was going through the lines with him, and they started talking to him from Atlanta and he got a little shy, but it ended up turning out great. When I first saw the commercial, especially at the end when he says, ‘I love you, daddy,’ I just started crying.”
And that, too, is on the list of great things about Jason Day. He lets you look into his heart.
He’ll talk about his rough childhood in Australia, or the time he almost quit golf just before playing in his first Masters because he didn’t like the game any more, or the stomach-churning bouts of vertigo at last year’s U.S. Open, when it looked as though he would have to withdraw after collapsing on-course on Friday, and ended up shooting 68 on Saturday to get into the final Sunday pairing with Dustin Johnson. Oh, and about D.J. … “It’s always easy from the cheap seats,” he said, starting out in defence of the star-crossed bomber who famously threeputted from 12 feet to go from winning outright to at least getting into a playoff to losing outright to Jordan Spieth at Chambers Bay in Washington.
“I putted out first, trying to give him the opportunity, if he holed that putt — because it was very holeable — to fist-pump or do whatever he wanted to if he won the U.S. Open. And then he hit the putt past and he went in there pretty quick, lined up pretty quick and unfortunately missed it,” Day said.
“He’s a good putter. I honestly thought he’s going to hole this putt and the crowd’s going to go nuts and this is going to be me looking from the outside going ‘that should have been me.’ It didn’t work out that way for Dustin, but I honestly felt he should have won.”
There was a good deal of talk about stress and failure and confidence, and inevitably the topic turned to Spieth’s shocking meltdown on the 12th hole at Augusta in April while apparently on his way to his second straight Masters win.
“It just goes to show that the best players in the world … we’ve got so used to seeing Tiger do it so easy and so effortlessly that we forget sometimes how hard it is to win a golf tournament,” Day said. “Dustin, he’ll definitely get one. You’ve got to learn from it, try to get better for the next time.”
Day, despite nursing a cold, comes into this week a solid favourite to win, not based on his No. 1 ranking but on his form chart. In five previous U.S. Opens, he’s finished in the top 10 four times, including two seconds.
Also, he finally got over the majors hump at last year’s PGA Championship, where he stared down Spieth, and already has won three times this season, including Bay Hill and The Players.
“I think the biggest thing to me was to understand I could win multiple times in a year, not just once,” Day said Tuesday. He began to feel it would happen at the Open Championship last year, and knew it when he won the RBC Canadian Open the following week.
“From there it was like I’m going to win and I’m going to win every week,” Day said.
At Oakmont, where the complaints about the length of the rough and the green speeds are legion, Day thinks he’s perfect for the course, as long as he keeps his head and doesn’t try to hit the driver all day. Sadly, the typical U.S. Open setup of heavy rough, combined with Oakmont’s punitive bunkers, 210 of them, will take the driver out of many players’ hands.
“I probably need to hit 3 wood out here a couple of times. More so I’m going to hit irons off the tees, I think,” Day said. “Driver, I think I can only hit it four times maybe, four or five. I mean, I can hit it anywhere I want but that wouldn’t be the greatest game plan in the world.”
And the Day game plan is a finely tuned machine.
“Some guys prepare differently, and some guys want it more than others, but right now my priority, as long as my family is happy and healthy, is to win as much as I can,” he said.
“Sooner or later, my priority will change, but right now, I’m driven to win tournaments because the 10 that I’ve won is not enough. I need more.”
Sounds like someone we used to know, if only half as well.