Up and Down: Victories and Struggles in the Course of Life

Editor’s note: 12-time PGA TOUR winner Bubba Watson’s new book, Up and Down, is the inspiring story of an imperfect man striving to become the best person he can be – wherever the course may take him. To order the book, click here.

Chapter 1: Rock Bottom

I can see it in the mirror. Everyone can see it. I am standing on a scale a lot these days: watching the pounds fall off as I become rail thin. I’m too weak to hit many of the shots that led me to two green jackets in three years. It’s the spring of 2017 and I’m on my bathroom scale in our home in Pensacola. My feet tremble as 162 comes across the digital screen.

162.

The number doesn’t flash at me; it screams.
In a fog, I move from the bathroom into the bedroom. I fall to my knees and cry out to the Lord. “I don’t know what you want me to do,” I say. “I don’t know what to do. Help me, Help me.”

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I was at a breaking point. I had been losing weight for nearly a year. A decade ago, I had been pushing 210 pounds. I had slimmed down twenty pounds by giving up everything that tasted good — cheeseburgers, chocolate cake, and sodas. At 190 pounds, I had the energy and power to compete at the top of the game. When I saw 162 on the scale, I thought I was dying. There was something going on in my body that no one could find. Three or four doctors had looked at me with blood tests and heart monitors. “Bubba, there is nothing wrong with you,” they told me. “It looks like you eat fish every day.”

But I’m a fearful guy. The Bible teaches us to not fear death, but I was worried that this was the end of my life. I thought back to 2010 when I watched my father, Gerry, go through throat cancer and wither away from 190 pounds to 92 pounds in less than a year. I remembered bathing him three days before he passed away. You never dream of bathing a grown man, especially your father. So here I was losing weight and wondering if I had throat cancer or some other terminal disease and getting ready to die and leave my family.

On the golf course and off it, my mind tended to go quickly from one extreme to another. I could have a five-under round going and then have a single bad break with my ball settling into a divot and feel like everything was falling apart. The difference was that on the golf course I could make a birdie that would turn my mood from bad to good, but when it came to my weight there was no way for a quick rebound that could help settle my mind. When I started losing weight my first instinct was that I was dying. And the more anxiety I had around thoughts of death, the more fearful I became and the less I was capable of coping with the stress.

One of my biggest downfalls is that my mind races, but my mind also is such a beautiful thing that’s helped me tremendously as I’ve worked to become a great golfer. It’s my mind that in 2012 conceived hooking a modern golf ball 40 yards with a 52-degree wedge out of the woods to 10 feet at Augusta National to win my first Masters in a playoff. But my mind is also tremendously stubborn and now its stubborn will was threatening everything that I had worked for. Something had to give. That’s when I fell on my knees and begged God for help.

I didn’t grow up in the church. I didn’t learn as a child how to say prayers before I went to bed or before meals. When I was nineteen years old, I went to a church service for the first time with a neighbor, but it wasn’t until I met my wife Angie at the University of Georgia that I began seriously to commit myself to Christ. Shortly after we were married in 2004, Angie and I were baptized together the day after Christmas. I can’t say I knew I was going to have that moment when I saw 162 on my bathroom scale. Perhaps it’s like in golf when you finally see an instructor to correct flaws after years of frustrating play. I don’t know much about that, having preferred to figure things out on my own for most of my career, but I understood that my mind, and my fears, were problems I couldn’t solve without God.

Very few people in the world of golf knew the ordeal that I was facing with my weight, and how I had let the pressure to succeed in the game while trying to be a good husband, father, and friend drive me to the lowest place in my life. Teddy Scott, who as my caddie was around me more than anyone, didn’t know that I was worried about my weight. He could see that I was losing weight, but like most others he didn’t see it as a huge problem. In some ways, having so many people telling me that I looked good when I felt like crap seemed to make me feel worse. Not that anyone meant harm. After all, no one really knew what was going on because I was hiding it from all but a few people.

Mostly what Teddy and others did notice during this period was how I lost my confidence as a golfer. I was a master of deflecting my pain, cracking jokes during matches and cutting rap songs with other golfers, which I’ll tell you about later. I projected an image of good health. I didn’t know how to ask for help. I wasn’t taught to ask for help. On the golf course, I started eating energy- boosting protein balls made of organic oats, ground flaxseed, peanut butter, and chocolate protein powder. But I kept losing too much weight. I had excruciating pain in my stomach when I felt pressure or anxiety. Golf was killing me. I was letting my position on the money list, world rankings, and Ryder Cup and Presidents Cup standings eat at my soul. And as I changed my diet to try to handle the pains caused by the stress, I began to lose more weight and energy because I simply was not eating enough to provide my body with the nutrition it needed.

Ultimately, I accepted that it was my mind and not my body that was causing the stress, anxiety, pain, and weight loss. I wouldn’t go so far as to say I was depressed. I never thought about it that way. It was just an out-of-control mind, racing with fear and anxiety. I contemplated retirement. I told myself that if I retired from golf, I could live my life beautifully and not have these stresses.

“I need to be here for you and the kids,” I told Angie. “I will quit golf if it is causing me all this stress and making me slowly wither away to death.”

“But you love golf,” she said. “Why would you do this? It’s a mind thing. It’s not a three-putt on the golf course that’s causing this. If you quit golf your mind is going to go to something else.”

I was letting the whole world dictate how I felt because I wanted to please everyone. I don’t like seeing negatives about me and couldn’t let them go. I had grown up my whole life being negative and talking negative. The negativity had to do with my fear of disappointing people. To change that outlook, I was told to see a psychologist or mental coach, but I said no. I thought I could do it myself.

A year before my weight sunk to 162 pounds, my life had begun spiraling in the wrong direction. My main priorities in 2016 had been to make the Ryder Cup and Rio Olympic teams. Rio was particularly a huge deal considering it was the first time golf had been staged at the Olympics since 1904. I was consumed by the thought of failing one of the drug tests administered by the PGA Tour and International Olympics Committee. Even though I had never taken illegal drugs or been drunk or taken much more than Advil, I was worried that I would get a false positive on a drug test and they would take my career away from me. This may seem irrational but that’s how I felt.

I would qualify for Rio, where I finished in a tie for eighth. Teddy didn’t make the trip for personal reasons, but he texted me Bible verses and his viewpoints on the course set-up. Randall Wells, my business partner and childhood friend, stepped in to caddie. The whole experience of being an Olympian is very different from being just a golfer. I got to meet Greg Louganis, the four-time Olympic gold medalist diver, and athletes from several different sports. It definitely brought some perspective to my life as a professional golfer. Most of the Olympic athletes had trained for years to peak during these two weeks. Many of them only got one shot at the biggest event of their life, since the Olympics are only held every four years. As a golfer, I consider the Masters to be my biggest event, and I get to play it every year.

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After failing to secure an automatic qualifying spot on the 2016 Ryder Cup Team, I was left needing a captain’s pick to get a spot on the team. When Ryan Moore ended up getting the last captain’s pick, it hit me pretty hard. Ryan deserved to be picked over me for the last spot on the Ryder Cup team, because he had finished in the top ten in all four playoff events. Yet I was still hurt and embarrassed after being left off the team. In most years, being ranked ninth in the team standings and seventh in the world ranking would have pretty much assured me a spot on the team. When I got the news from captain Davis Love III, I asked him to let me join him as a vice-captain, which he accepted. Still, negative thoughts dominated my head. Do people hate me? Do they not think I’m good enough to play on a team? Do people not want to partner with me? Why do I have to be a vice-captain?

The effects of that stressful period carried over into 2017 as I continued to lose weight. During the offseason I switched to a Volvik colored golf ball after playing a Titleist for most of my career. With a pink ball, I was going to grow the game in a different way. When I was growing up, I used a two-toned PING ball, so the idea of playing a colored ball certainly felt nostalgic. Because Volvik wasn’t a widely played brand on the PGA Tour, a lot of people questioned my decision to change balls after having so much success with the Titleist Pro V1x. No one seemed to care how much research or testing I had done before making the switch. The feeling that everyone was second guessing the change did impact me mentally. Having finished the prior year poorly, the extra mental stress made it even harder for me to rebound in 2017. I let my mind take me out of where I wanted to be. Every time I hit a bad shot, I started to believe that I wasn’t good enough, and perhaps would never be good enough again.

“It’s your mind,” my caddie, Teddy Scott, told me. “You’re not having fun with golf. You’re letting all this other stuff in your life dictate how you feel. You need to relax.”

That year I missed the cut at three of the four majors and was knocked out of the FedEx Cup playoffs after two events. At the 2017 Masters I thought I played great, but I missed the cut there for the first time in nine appearances. Teddy and I compared all the data from 2017 to previous years and found that my loss of power was changing the way I played Augusta National. I simply wasn’t swinging the club with as much power or speed as I had in the past, before I started losing weight. I started drinking high- calorie smoothies a couple of times a day to gain weight.

In my conversations with the Lord, I admitted to Him that I didn’t know if it was dumb to change equipment in the middle of my physical and mental struggles. While my concern had not yet peaked, I already knew I was losing too much weight. I knew something was wrong but couldn’t really accept it at the time. I required medication for air travel because every time I got on an airplane, I thought I was going to have a heart attack. Everybody from my doctor to my wife to my caddie was telling me that I just needed to change my mindset.

Why was I so fearful if I trusted what I read in the Bible? I had a beautiful wife who loved me unconditionally. We had two beautiful kids and we were giving them the best life we could possibly give them. I had achieved my golf dream of winning the Masters not once, but twice. So what was I truly fearing and why was I letting this negativity get to me? I was trying to fight through this. I didn’t want to sit at home. I was going to fight through it on the golf course. I got stronger and deeper into the word of God. I began a new prayer: “Lord, if you’re going to take me, I want you to take me. But I want to live every day being the best husband and the best dad that I can be. I love the game of golf and I believe that you gave me the talent to play it. So just let me enjoy the moments that I have left here on this earth.”

I don’t remember the scripture that came up on my Bible app when I was down on my knees in the bathroom, but I know it was positive and it helped me grow closer in my relationship with God. The Bible is my book of positivity that I have to go to daily or my mind is going to run the opposite direction to a very dark place.

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I cry easily. I cry during church. At my wedding I battled tears so long the small crowd in attendance began to wonder if I was going to get through my vows. I cried in 2005 when I finished twenty-first on the Nationwide Tour (now called the Korn Ferry Tour), the last spot to earn a PGA Tour card. I cried in 2010 at the Travelers Championship in Hartford when I won for the first time on tour. In 2014, I cried after winning my second Masters in three years when I saw my two-year-old son, Caleb, approaching me as I walked off the eighteenth green. But I doubt if I have ever had a cry more beneficial to my life than the one I had when I was on my knees, steps from my bathroom, with what I believed was my future hinging on the numbers on the scale.

These tears, and my faith, ultimately saved my life.

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Taken from Up and Down: Victories and Struggles in the Course of Life by Bubba Watson with Don Yaeger. Copyright 2021 by Gerry L. Watson. Used by permission of Nelson Publishing, an imprint of Thomas Nelson.