Winning the Masters sent me into a spiral ‘MY BROTHER STOKED A FIRE BUT I WILL ALWAYS STAND BY HIM’
But one year on, Danny Willett says family values have helped in his struggle to regain form
DANNY WILLETT is sitting at a table on the patio at Bar 91, outside the clubhouse at the PGA National resort. It is warm and a storm is coming. The Masters champion is picking at a rather frugal chicken Caesar salad. Music is playing. It is New Song, an old one from Howard Jones. ‘Don’t crack up,’ he sings, ‘bend your brain, see both sides, throw off your mental chains.’
Willett is talking fast. Mainly about winning the Masters and what it did for him. The good things and the bad and the pressure it has brought. The pressure to replicate what he did during that burnished week in Augusta last April, the pressure to play a role, the pressure on his time. Pulling on the Green Jacket liberated him by making him a major winner but it imprisoned him, too.
Willett does not spare himself when he talks about it. He is not a great one for pauses. When he speaks, he speaks earnestly and intently. He does not ramble. He does not go off at tangents. Tangents are a waste of time. On the practice putting green, a few yards away, golf balls rattle into tin cups. Willett’s answers hurry from A to B without borrow.
Don’t take that to mean that Willett is at all rude, by the way. Far from it. He is honest and to the point. He does not balk at questions. He does not duck subjects. He does not hide from introspection. He grew up the son of a vicar, Steve Willett, in the south Sheffield parish of Hackenthorpe. That brought some teasing, he says. It also brought a sense of perspective not common in golf.
‘It played a big part in me growing up,’ says Willett, 29. ‘My mum was a teacher, my dad was a vicar. Because that was my dad’s job, he had to deal with people on a daily basis who had issues in certain areas. He dealt with people every day that despised getting up and going to work but they had to do it to put food on the table and pay a mortgage.
‘A big part of his job was counselling people. He had a church of over a hundred people at Hackenthorpe so every single day within the parish, he’d be doing that. Our door was open 24 hours a day, seven days a week for anyone. Anyone. So there were either people in the house, or in the church if they wanted a serious chat. For him to be able to handle people who had actual serious problems as opposed to me who might not be very happy that I was being picked on at school a little bit or that sports day didn’t go as you wanted it to or, later in life, that I didn’t play great today, was important.
‘To be able to put perspective on everything was big in how we do things. In some ways, it was difficult that Dad was a vicar when you were a kid because you got picked on a little bit but nothing terrible. Little bits and bobs but nothing you can’t handle and shrug off.
‘I haven’t been to church a lot since he retired but I really used to enjoy going in to watch him preach. Maybe that was partly because I’d been able to talk to him beforehand about what the sermon was about. If you didn’t want to tell him that you were struggling with anything, you could maybe relate the sermon to your own situation and then take it from there.
‘My dad has really helped me at times. He has put perspective on everything that you are doing. Just to feel lucky for the situation that you are in, to be able to play the game that you love as your job.’
There have been times in the last 11 months when the game has tested Willett’s love. There have been times when it has infuriated and dispirited him. He doesn’t seem to hear the music playing as he sits outside Bar 91 but he does talk about the mental chains. He has been trying to loosen them ever since his stunning victory at Augusta last April when he won by three shots from Lee Westwood and Jordan Spieth. It was his first major win and he has been trying to live up to it since. It has not been easy. He has had good results. He finished third at the BMW PGA Championship at Wentworth last May and second at the Italian Open in Milan in September. He led going into the final round at the Maybank Championship in Malaysia last month before finishing fifth. Still, it has been a battle, pockmarked by missed cuts and low finishes and the long slog of searching for a return to form. Some have mocked him for his struggles. That is the way these days, particularly on social media. Willett is a straight talker, so he doesn’t always tell people what they want to hear. He might tell them that they’re wrong. That doesn’t always go down well.
‘I’m very happy being who I am,’ says Willett. ‘I think that’s showed a lot of the time with the way some people love you, some people hate you. As long as I’ve got my family who love me for what I do and who I am, then other people can make their own minds up.’
He is loyal, too. Willett is the third of four sons and when one of his elder brothers, Pete, wrote an article for a golf website that caused a furore before last year’s Ryder Cup because it was fiercely critical of American fans, there was a lot of pressure for Willett to disown him. He wouldn’t do it.
‘It’s your brother,’ he says. ‘The piece that he wrote stoked a fire that didn’t need to be stoked but you are always going to stand by your family. Unless they’ve killed someone. It’s your brother. He wrote an article that didn’t get taken very well at all but there’s no reason why that would cause me and my brother not to speak or for us to hate one another. Bloody hell.
‘We are all close. I’ve got three brothers. We are a very close family. Golf’s golf and family’s family. There are a lot stronger bonds within your family than there are doing your job. It affected that week at the Ryder Cup but there is no reason why that should then affect anything else.’
Willett still refers to that Ryder Cup at Hazeltine under Darren Clarke’s captaincy as ‘everything that happened in September’. He played three matches and didn’t even win half a point. ‘How was your first Ryder Cup’, someone asked him afterwards. ‘S***,’ he said. It took plenty out of him and though he was mentally exhausted, he kept playing because he was in the hunt for the Race to Dubai. He lost out to Henrik Stenson.
But Willett is not a man who is going to wait around for life. Or
mope. His game is not where he wants it to be — he missed the cut at the Honda Classic last month, finished low down the field at the WGC Mexico a few weeks ago and withdrew from the Arnold Palmer Invitational at Bay Hill on the eve of the tournament because of a bout of sickness — but as his defence of the Masters approaches, he knows that all eyes will be on him once again.
‘When you are Masters champion, you know people expect you to do this and that,’ he says. ‘I have won it and I know winning it should relieve a bit of pressure, but you put more pressure on yourself because you know what you can do.
‘I don’t think winning the Masters has changed me too much as a person. You get that little bit of fire in your belly because you know what you can achieve and you know you beat the best guys. But I think that hindered me for a little bit afterwards, too.
‘When things don’t go your way every day, you get so frustrated because you know what you have done in the past and that frustration led to decisions, poor golf and a little bit of a downward spiral.
‘You know that, under pressure, you can hit some great shots on Sunday and hole some tricky putts. Then you get to an event and you don’t do it and you think, “Well, how’s that happened?” And that’s the thing it’s taken a while to get sorted in my own mind. Those are the variables within your game and if you are not going to accept that can happen, then don’t play.
‘What drives you is trying to be the best you can be. I have now had a little taste of what it’s like to be at the pinnacle of your game. That Masters Sunday was incredible. Regardless of what happened after it, no one can take away the feelings I had on that Sunday.
‘You can’t buy those experiences. You can only work hard. We are fortunate that we are good at what we do and so we will get opportunities to be in that situation more and more and that’s what drives you. It’s that feeling of being nervous and knowing that a mistake will cost you the golf tournament. It’s what brings the best out of you.’
Other changes have swept over Willett’s life in the last year. A week before the Masters, his wife Nicole gave birth to their first child, Zachariah. ‘The little man’, as Willett calls him, travels to some tournaments with his parents. For others, he stays at home with the family support network that is so important to the Masters champion.
Willett still lives in south Yorkshire. He has not contemplated a full-time move to Florida, like so many of his contemporaries. Nor is he tempted by the idea of a Surrey pile close to Wentworth or Ascot. He is wedded to his roots. ‘I’ve got loads of great acquaintances and friends on tour,’ he says, ‘but Yorkshire is where my family are. We have always said we would be near our family.’
He keeps coming back to that. Back to the fact that his mum and dad both did jobs that gave something back to the community. They both did things that inspired Willett and kept him grounded.
‘One of my brothers is a teacher, one’s a fireman,’ says Willett. ‘My mum was a teacher, my dad was a vicar. I admire my dad. My mum raised four good lads. It must have been hard. They weren’t on the biggest wage packet in the world and they raised four kids who went on to be pretty successful in their own right and he has been a great husband and stuff.
‘So, for me, what more could you ask for in terms of a role model? I don’t think I would choose many people who could beat that. So now every morning I get up and I do the right thing. I am happy enough with where I am. I have got a beautiful family. I’m working hard. If you can do that, it’s a bit easier to take anything that’s thrown at you.’