Willett beats injury to battle back from ‘pitch black’ days
Masters champion had considered retirement Yorkshireman hits 69 with remodelled swing
Hope has been in short supply for Danny Willett since he won the Masters in 2016.
In the wake of his greatest triumph, the spiky Yorkshireman with the famously outspoken brother tried to fulfil the schedule expected of a major winner, only to crumple as a debilitating back injury became so acute that he required painkillers just to get out of bed.
As he plummeted from ninth to 462nd in the world in a matter of months, Willett was playing so badly that he seriously thought about retiring.
Unable to sleep and with his game on a downward spiral, he could not see light at the end of the tunnel.
“Pitch black,” said Willett when asked how dark those days were. “No, it wasn’t good for a while, but that’s kind of the situation we were in, and we’re fighting, swinging it a little bit on and off, and the body being really uncooperative.
“Unfortunately in this game, trying to travel and play 26 weeks around the world, travelling countless amount of air miles, isn’t good for the body.”
In desperation, Willett decided that his swing needed a complete overhaul so that he could play without pain. If he was unable to complete that transformation then he knew it was game over.
Turning to Sean Foley, Justin Rose’s swing coach, he completely changed his swing with the aim of playing pain-free for the first time since the Masters.
The two started working together at last year’s USPGA Championship and, at first, Willett was excruciatingly poor. A missed cut in the French Open was his ninth in 12 events, but he sensed he was finally on an upward curve and at the beginning of this month finished sixth in the Irish Open before registering a creditable 19th-place finish in the Scottish Open at Gullane last week.
Yesterday’s opening 69 at Carnoustie was his first sub-par round in a major since the high water mark of his career at Augusta, and could have been even better. After starting with a bogey he registered birdies on four, five, six, 10 and 13 to move to four under par before bogeys on 17 and 18 saw him finish on two under.
“That was good and we had a lot of 12-, 15-footers as well that just slid by,” said Willett, who was the leading British player alongside Matthew Southgate. “Could have been a really, really nice knock, but at the end of the day it wasn’t.
“It’s definitely nice to be stood here after shooting a relatively stress-free 69. You look at the number as a whole and not how we finish or how we start. It’s a number in the 60s and we’ve had a few the past couple of months which has been really nice.
“I’m pretty hopeful we’ll never be in as dark a place as we were, but this is a strange old game. You get ebbs and flows and hit a low point, but I’ve really enjoyed golf the last six, seven weeks.
“Even getting the clubs out and going to play at home without having to do two hours of warm-up and go see the physio felt pretty good. That kind of leads you to work a little bit harder, even if it’s just an extra half an hour putting and an extra half an hour hitting balls. It’s a lot better place to be.”