Note: This story appeared in the Jan. 19, 2008 issue of Golfweek.
By REX HOGGARDORLANDO, FLA. – The roars bounce off empty walls and fill the air of Jason Day’s three-bedroom condo. “Fight Night Round 3” rages on Day’s Xbox, and for a moment the Australian prodigy who takes pride in controlling his emotions on the golf course drops his professional sheathing to reveal a raucous juvenile. For a moment, Jason Day the wunderkind looks every bit the 20-year-old.
But the moment quickly passes. Soon the depth of Day’s potential seizes the conversation, and the line between rhetoric and reality becomes difficult to distinguish.
“If Adam Scott and Tiger Woods had a child, he’d swing the club like Jason Day,” said Bud Martin, Day’s manager with SFX Golf.
A few weeks before the Nationwide Tour Championship in California, one longtime official on the secondary circuit was asked who among the 25 graduates would be worth watching at the finale. “Don’t bother (flying to California),” the official mused. “Save your money and write about Day. He’s that good.”
“He is the most talented player to ever come through the Nationwide Tour,” said Jerry Foltz, an on-course reporter for Golf Channel who played on the secondary circuit in 1990-99, and has covered it full time the past eight years.
This year, after finishing fifth in 2007 Nationwide earnings, Day takes his game – and potential – to the PGA Tour.
Day comes by his celebrity honestly. If he was the player to watch in 2007 on the Nationwide Tour, it was because he gave those crowded around the fish bowl plenty to digest, on and off the course.
Ostensibly, Day’s 2007 campaign featured more valleys than peaks. Title runs at the Livermore Valley Wine Country Championship and the LaSalle Bank Open were derailed by inconsistency and immaturity. His breakthrough victory at the Legend Financial Group Classic was punctuated by a clutch 8-footer on the final hole.
In baseball parlance, Day is a five-tool player: power, touch, imagination, focus and marketability.
But as polished as Day seems on the golf course and as engaging and affable as he is when the competitive blinders are removed, there is little about his climb that fits the conventional portfolio of a prodigy.
Dan Brooks, the women’s coach at Duke University who is renowned in college circles for his ability to recognize talent, theorizes that most gifted players are the product of impeccable parenting or forged by youthful tragedy. Day was born of both.
As a boy in Queensland, Day took to the game after his father, Alvin, fished a well-worn 3-wood from a garbage bin and presented it to the curious 3-year-old. Jason quickly took to the game, batting golf balls around the family’s farm. When the Days moved to a rough-around-the-edges neighborhood in Rockhampton, he already was considered a junior phenom.
Whatever potential Day had, however, seemed destined to end up in a metaphorical garbage bin in 1999, when Alvin Day lost his battle with stomach cancer.
“I went off the rails,” said Day, who was 11 at the time. “I’d skip school and get in fights. It was ugly.”
Day’s mother, Denning, mortgaged the family’s house and sent her rebellious son to Kooralbyn International School, a boarding school that cost approximately $18,000 per year, to nurture his golf ambitions and keep him out of trouble. What Day found at Kooralbyn was a future and a friend.
“He was skinny, with long legs and a short little body,” recalled Col Swatton, Kooralbyn’s director of golf.
Now, eight years later, student and teacher can concede that Day also was short on prospects. The gangly 12-year-old had a chip on his shoulder and little use for authoritarian figures.
“(Swatton) was tough and I didn’t have any discipline, and we really didn’t get along,” Day said.
Day’s attitude – and his relationship with Swatton – changed dramatically at age 14 after he read a motivational book about Tiger Woods.
“It had all of (Woods’) results from when he was 14, 15, 16, 17 years old,” Day said. “I just kept thinking, He’s shooting these numbers at his age, my age. Why can’t I?”
The next morning, Swatton found Day on the practice range at 5:30, and the two haven’t stopped working.
Day turned pro shortly after winning the 2006 Australian Amateur Stroke-Play Championship. He secured his status on the Nationwide Tour a few months later by advancing to the final stage of PGA Tour Q-School.
Last July, Day did something Woods, whom he has never met, didn’t do: Win a professional event before age 20. At the Nationwide Tour’s Legend Financial Group Classic in Cleveland, Day posted four rounds in the 60s to become the youngest player, at 19 years, 7 months and 26 days, to win a PGA Tour-sanctioned event.
After numerous brushes with victory, Day watched from the 18th fairway that Sunday in Ohio as Scott Gardiner birdied the last hole to forge a tie at 15 under.
“This is not happening again,” Day told Swatton, who worked as Day’s caddie for most of 2006.
Before Day’s 8-footer for a victory-clinching birdie was halfway to the hole, the young Aussie was fist-pumping.
“There’s only been two times that I’ve been really amazed at how well Jason hits it,” said Swatton, who navigates the fine line between coach, caddie, friend and surrogate father.
“One of the times was when he won the Queensland Amateur. He was only 15 and played a flawless round of golf. The other time was in Cleveland. He was calm all day.”
Yet Day’s explosive swing, swagger and smile often veil the reality of a 20-year-old, video-gameplaying, infinitely fallible young man.
In just his third start on the Nationwide Tour, Day began the final round of the Livermore Valley event four strokes off the lead, only to balloon to an 80.
“I had a bad experience,” Day said. “I broke up with my girlfriend after three years on the final day. She was my first full-on girlfriend. Went out and shot 80. That was pretty bad.”
Where Day deviates from the path of your average twentysomething is during moments of mature clarity that often follow his bouts with adolescence. Two weeks after his Livermore Valley collapse, Day missed the cut at the Henrico County Open. Instead of sulking out of town, he followed Greg Chalmers and Roland Thatcher during the third round.
“I was going through a phase that I didn’t know what I was doing right or wrong, and I wanted to learn if I was doing the right thing,” Day said.
The rest of his summer was a ballstriking blur. Including his victory in Ohio, Day reeled off seven consecutive top-15 finishes, including a runner-up showing at the Cox Classic. He began his PGA Tour rookie season last week with a missed cut (73-70) at the Sony Open.
Yet where golf balls fly only reveals a fraction of the Day arsenal. Perhaps the most compelling reason to lob accolades in the “A frame” Aussie’s direction is how he has handled more adversity than most players twice his age.
In December 2006, Day was involved in a ninecar pileup in Australia and spent the holidays in a neck brace. Less than 12 months later, Day’s future was again cast into doubt by a wrist injury, the product of a right ulnar bone that is 5 millimeters longer than his left and, Day sheepishly admits, a new boxing workout regimen.
Day’s boxing is now limited to the virtual variety on his Xbox. If reality dovetails with the rhetoric in 2008, the roars that now fill Day’s Florida digs could become a PGA Tour mainstay.
Posted: 2/27/2008
print
email
discuss
