The people closest to him – and the man himself – share why Jason Day 2.0 could be the most potent version yet.
[Getty Images: Jason Allen/ISI Photos]
Jason Day’s custom bus has a cold plunge and a sauna. To watch him play lately you’d think he’s using a hot-tub time machine.
Day posted five top-10 results before April, four of which came in a row. While they haven’t quite recalled the run in which he won eight times – including the PGA Championship and the Players Championship – and got to world No.1 in 2015-2016, he is trending. Now he rolls into the PGA Championship at Oak Hill Country Club in upstate New York with some serious form. Could he do what was unthinkable less than a year ago when, in October, he was ranked 175th in the world and missed qualifying for the 2022 Masters for the first time since his Augusta debut?
“To see him claw his way back – I mean, that stretch of golf he played in 2015, 2016 was some of the best golf we’ve seen in the past couple of decades,” said Rory McIlroy. “I think we’ve always known he has the talent; it’s now to the point where it looks like he’s got his health in order, which is great to see. The game of golf is better when he’s playing well.”
It has been five years since Day, who once won seven times in 17 starts, has won on the PGA Tour.
Added Adam Scott, “I played a practice round with him at the Players and the motion is really different, which is hard to do, but I agree he looks really good. I also saw him working there at Sawgrass for five or six days after the Players Championship instead of going back [home] to Ohio. It looks like he’s really sunk his teeth in and is going to see this through. If he gets back to putting at that insane level he was at before, there’s no telling how far he can go.”
Don’t look now, but recent indicators already point to semi-insanity. As Day prepared for Augusta, he ranked 13th in strokes gained: putting and second in scrambling.
“I can see when he’s playing well – it’s a different face, it’s a different walk,” said his wife, Ellie, who is expecting the couple’s fifth child this northern summer.
While Ellie spoke, she was holding their youngest, Oz, in the clubhouse at Austin Country Club in March, when the 32nd-seeded Day was frustrating opponents in his bid to win the recent World Golf Championships–Dell Technologies Match Play for the third time. (He eventually finished T-5, losing in the quarter-finals). Still, the larger point remained: after starting this PGA Tour season ranked 164th in the world, Day was playing like his old self again.
“Yeah, I am excited to be back,” Day said. “The game is looking nice. There’s still some stuff swing-wise that pops in every now and then… it’s just in between patterns. I’ve just got to work out those kinks.”
Lost in the weeds
A decade ago, Scott became the first Australian to win the Masters. It could have been Day. He birdied the 13th, 14th and 15th holes and had a two-shot lead as he stood on the 16th tee. Just as quickly, he bogeyed the next two holes to miss the Scott/Angel Cabrera playoff by two. More than 10 years later, a healthy and revitalised Day will again line up at the PGA Championship as both a past champion, having won his only Major to date at the 2015 PGA at Whistling Straits, and as a current PGA Tour contender. And he has good history at Oak Hill. Months after Day lost that Masters to Scott, both Aussies were in contention at Oak Hill. Day shot a gutsy final-round 67 to finish tied for eighth, seven shots behind the winner, Jason Dufner. Scott tied for fifth. It was a great time for Australian golf.
“I remember that PGA,” Day tells Australian Golf Digest. “I was playing some really good golf. I was trying to win my second PGA Tour event [after claiming his first in 2010]. Oak Hill was a tough golf course and it was one of those Majors where you had to hang in there. It was only just double digits [10-under par] that won it. I think it’ll be even tougher this time, now that the PGA is in May instead of August, so it’ll be colder and nowhere near as humid. There’s been some changes to the course, too.”
You’d never know that in the decade after the 2013 PGA that Day would consider quitting golf.
“It honestly feels kind of like a blur when you think about the past five or six years,” Ellie Day said. “So much happened in that time, it’s hard to even get your head around. It was very hard. Just to see him, obviously, on top of the world, No.1, that was such a crazy stretch, so fun, and then he kind of – I feel like he just slowly dropped off the map.”
Day’s initial concern was back problems – he was often in too much pain to practise – but there was emotional turmoil, too. At the 2017 WGC–Match Play, he withdrew and fought back tears as he revealed that his mother, Dening, had been diagnosed with lung cancer.
It was Dening, a 4-foot-9-inch Filipina, who brought up Day and his two sisters in Beaudesert, a small town inland from the Gold Coast, bringing love to a family that was often roiled by chaos. “My dad was a violent alcoholic,” Jason said in a harrowing 2015 GOLF interview with this author, in which he described living in constant fear of Alvin Day, who worked as a supervisor on the kill floor at a local abattoir. It was Alvin who famously found the kid his first golf club at the tip: a black, Spalding 3-wood. He also used a belt and even closed fists to reprimand his kids.
Day was 12 when Alvin, who quit drinking but remained unpredictable, died of stomach cancer. So when mum Dening received her diagnosis in early 2017, it felt hauntingly familiar. Later that year Ellie suffered a miscarriage that she made public on social media.
Dening underwent an operation that would give her five years, better than the 12 months doctors first gave her, and Jason won twice more in 2018, at the Farmers Insurance Open and Wells Fargo Championship. Those remain his most recent wins. She soon moved in with Jason, Ellie and the kids in Columbus, Ohio, and all was well until last year. During the West Coast Swing, when Jason would finish T-3 at the Farmers Insurance Open, Dening and Ellie were in California processing grim test results.
“She was holding Oz – they were buddies – and she almost fell out of my bus, down the stairs,” Ellie said. “We were like, This is bad. It was a huge decline. It was rough. So, we ended up sending her home. I couldn’t even tell Jason what was going on. I had phone calls with all these doctors. Basically, we got really bad news, the cancer had spread everywhere. It just got really bad really fast. She was like, ‘Do not come home. You stay out there with him.’
“I never knew what the right thing was to do,” Ellie continued. “She was in Columbus, and we had people looking after her that whole time. She was in our pool house. I couldn’t tell him until after Pebble. I could see that he was on the trajectory last year to kind of do what he’s doing this year, but I knew when that news came through it would completely derail him.”
Dening died at 65 in March last year, and Day posted the news on Instagram and withdrew from the Arnold Palmer Invitational to fly back to Ohio. He wasn’t home long. After hosting a small celebration of her life, he went back to playing and missed cuts at the Players Championship, Valspar Championship, and Valero Texas Open.
“She died on a Wednesday,” Ellie said. “On Saturday, we had a [gathering] at our house for friends and family who knew her. He left Sunday or Monday to go play the Players. He just didn’t know what else to do. I’m like, Maybe it’ll be good to get out of Ohio.”
As his results continued to underwhelm, Day sometimes asked his wife why he was still playing.
“At one point I was like, ‘You just need to take a beat, give yourself until the end of the year,’” she said. “‘If you still want to quit golf, whatever. I think it’s stupid.’ I’m like, ‘What would you do? You would lose your dang mind. You can’t stay at home for two weeks.’ You know? The thing is, at the end of the day he knew that. He knew he didn’t want to actually quit.”
In addition to changing coaches and clubs, Day also switched caddies, briefly trying out Steve Williams. Ellie joked with him that the only thing he hadn’t changed was his wife.
Finding daylight
About two years ago, Day began working with Texan instructor Chris Como, who specialises in biomechanics and reminds clients that all body parts must work together in the kinetic chain. That message resonated with Day.
“With Jason, we’ve gone through two phases,” Como said. “The first part was getting his body to move in a way where his back wouldn’t hurt, and that was the majority of the focus for the first year or so. The logic was that even if there was a short-term cost in terms of ball-striking, he had to be pain-free, and if he was, he’s so good that he was going to be able to figure something out.”
While working with Como and long-time trainer Kevin Duffy to protect his back, Day finished 114th in the FedEx Cup in 2021 and 124th last season. He kept at it. His work ethic, after all, was how he’d found his way out of the darkness once before, as a boarding student at Queensland’s Kooralbyn International Golf Academy, where he met Col Swatton, the head of instruction and benevolent father he never had (and his caddie in his most fertile years).
As an adult, Day maintained his annual ritual of a winter training camp in Palm Springs – seven weeks at a time, everyone on the bus. He rehearsed his swing at odd hours, analysed videotape, and found a body specialist in Arizona with whom he has regular Zoom sessions.
“He has zero quit in him,” Como said.
Added trainer Duffy, “He had to learn to move his body in a less injurious way, but that wouldn’t connect with where he was feeling the clubface for a while.”
Finally, at the end of last year, they reached a turning point, Como said. Day was consistently moving without pain and getting a hang of the new swing that would keep him injury-free.
“From there,” Como said, “we shifted the focus to being a little shallower with the club and the arms in transition and the way he releases the club and squares up the face at the bottom – release pattern-type stuff. Once we went down the path of the body stuff, the ball-striking started getting better and better. He still moves in and out of it; I wouldn’t say it’s fully ingrained. But he’s found something with the putting again, and it’s the Jason Day we all remember.”
With one big difference: Day believes that he was far less self-aware in 2015-2016.
“When I got to No.1 in the world back in ’15,” he said, “I enjoyed the journey getting there, but when I got there, I didn’t know how I got there, which is interesting to say because I had a team of people around me that would just take care of everything.
“They just kept the horse running, and I was just like, OK, I’m going to run in a straight line,” he continued. “I think this time around I’m just doing it slightly different. At least I’ll kind of have essentially an understanding of how things are and where they’re going and where I want to be.”
At 35, could Day have another big run in him?
“Absolutely,” Como said. “He loves the game. He’s so into golf and competing. He’s got a lot of wisdom under his belt from the adversity he’s dealt with, and he’s still very young, right? He’s been on tour a long time, so it can feel like he’s older than he is. I feel like he has a lot left.”
Jason, Ellie and the kids stayed on the bus during Masters week. Day was iffy to crack the top 50 in the world and get his invitation (he would come in ranked 35th), and no one wanted to jinx it by renting a house. Ellie’s parents, brother and sister-in-law also attended the tournament. The Masters asks everything of a player; Day had to find answers just to be there.
“It’s been an interesting journey over the past two to three years,” he said. “I’ll probably think the same way going all the way through to the end of my career. It’s more about the journey and enjoying that process, and then the wins hopefully get in the way.”
The PGA Championship at Oak Hill would be a good week for that to happen.
