Jason Day’s long road back

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’s 11 top-25 finishes in 13 starts this season 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 2015-16. But he’s trending. Now he rolls into the Masters Tournament after a one-year absence that ended a streak of 11 consecutive appearances at Augusta National. While golf comebacks are common, at Augusta National they can take on an almost mythical quality – Jack in ’86; Crenshaw in ’95; Tiger in 2019.

Is Jason Day next?

“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 instead of going back 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 prepped for Augusta last week, he was 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 summer.

She was holding their youngest, Oz, in the clubhouse at Austin Country Club, where 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 T5.)

In his match against Collin Morikawa, Day, 35, tied the first hole with a birdie and struggled at the second but made a 32-foot par putt to tie. He looked to be in trouble at the ninth but made a 58-foot birdie putt to tie it, too, and eventually won, 4 and 3.

It was vintage Day, the lethal putter who won the Match Play in 2014 and ’16. He turned back Matt Kuchar to set up a quarterfinal match against Scottie Scheffler, the people’s choice in Austin. Day quieted the crowd with three birdies in the first five holes, then hit a soaring, 280-yard 3-wood to 6 feet at the par-5 sixth hole before rolling in the putt to go 3-up through six.

It all went pear-shaped from there; Day began feeling unwell – “Allergies,” he said – and missed a birdie putt from just over 7 feet at the 10th. He bogeyed the 14th. Although he made three late birdies, Scheffler covered them as the new No. 1 beat the old one, 2 and 1.

Still, the larger point remained: After starting this season 164th in the world, Day was playing like his old self again. He’d been away from the cool kids’ table for so long that while he was taking on Scheffler – the story in golf for the last 14 months – Ellie and Meredith Scheffler, wife of Scottie, were meeting for the first time.

“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, like the wedge shot on 14 that – it’s just in between patterns. I’ve just got to kind of 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.

Ten years later, a healthy and revitalized Day will again motor down Magnolia Lane as a contender. You’d never know that in the intervening decade he considered quitting golf.

“It honestly feels kind of like a blur when you think about the last five or six years,” wife Ellie said. “So much happened in that time period 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 kind of slowly dropped off the map.”

Day’s initial bugaboo was back problems – he was often in too much pain to practice – but there was emotional turmoil, too. At the 2017 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 rural town in Queensland, 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 slaughterhouse. It was Alvin who famously found the kid his first golf club at the dump, 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 mom Dening got her diagnosis in early 2017, it felt hauntingly familiar. Later that year Ellie suffered a Thanksgiving Day miscarriage that she made public on social media.

Dening got 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 on TOUR. 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 T3 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 of last year, and Day posted the news on Instagram and withdrew from the Arnold Palmer Invitational presented by Mastercard 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 thing 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

Around two years ago, Day began working with Dallas instructor Chris Como, who specializes 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 longtime trainer Kevin Duffy to protect his back, Day finished 114th in the FedExCup 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 Australia’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, analyzed 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 2015-16.

“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.”

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 will stay on the bus during Masters week. Day was iffy to crack the top 50 in the world (he’s now 33rd) and get his invitation, and no one wanted to jinx it by renting a house. Ellie’s parents, brother, and sister-in-law are also scheduled to attend the tournament.

The Masters asks everything of a player; Day has had to find answers just to be there.

“It’s been an interesting journey over the last 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.”

This would be a good week for that to happen.