Rock bottom usually came on a long-haul flight with the sort of double entendre Danny Willet would care to forget. For months, even years, the 2016 Masters champion would spend thousands of pounds on plane tickets, physios, MRI scans and medication, still not knowing whether his back would hold up by the time he landed. The pain would veer between shoots and aches; his mood from anger to despair as he plummeted from golf’s pinnacle down to as low as No 462 in the world rankings. “It’s a pretty vicious cycle,” he says, ahead of his return to Augusta this week. “I wouldn’t quite say it got to the stage where I wanted to give up, but it was just the complete non-enjoyment of playing the game. The difficult thing is not knowing. The pain and lack of enjoyment become so intertwined that you don’t know which is which.”
It feels like a short lifetime since Willett became the second Englishman to win the Masters, seizing on Jordan Spieth’s sodden self-implosion around Amen Corner. He was still somewhat of an unknown quantity in the US, despite plenty of success on the European Tour, and was propelled into the world’s top 10 while also being unfairly derided as a fluke. The criticism failed to prick beneath his thick skin, but Willett admits the storm of newfound attention became overwhelming. “Things went a little crazy,” he says. “The challenges didn’t quite sit right, I didn’t know how to overcome them.”
