Jason Day has revealed how a chance encounter with Chris Como while Tiger Woods was suffering with the chipping yips helped resurrect his career.
The Australian spent 51 weeks as the World No. 1 between 2015 and 2017 and clinched his first and only Major to date at the 2015 PGA Championship at Whistling Straits.
Lifting the Wanamaker Trophy was his second win of four in six starts as Day established himself as the force to be reckoned with in the men’s game, before running into injury problems and a loss of form that saw him plummet down the rankings.
He has since rebuilt his golf swing to make it less strenuous on his body and is now back among the world’s top 20 having fallen almost outside the top 200, but it could have been very different were it not for the surprise short game issues that plagued Woods.
“When Tiger was going through the chipping yips, Tiger invited me out to kind of go over chipping technique and everything like that,” Day told The Sydney Morning Herald (opens in new tab). “Chris Como had seen a ton of 3D bio-testing of my chipping and they wanted to pick my brain, I guess, about what I thought and all that stuff in regards to the chipping.
“And I remember coming out of that meeting with Tiger and Chris and thinking, ‘There’s something about Chris’. He’s very quiet, listens very intently, but you could tell that he knew a lot about the game and knew it at a deeper level, what the club should be doing.
“There was just something about him that drew me to him, so I just knew when I talked to him about the golf swing that he was very switched on.”
Such were Day’s issues that he became renowned for withdrawing from events, either due to his debilitating back problems or as a result of his vertigo symptoms. After his first win in five years at the AT&T Byron Nelson, the Australian admitted the extent to which the physical impacted the mental, and how close he came to hanging up his clubs for good.
“There were definitely times when I thought, ‘You know what, I’m done playing the game’. Just because of the stress it was putting on me and what it was doing to my health,” he added.
“Mentally, I was not there and I wasn’t confident in myself. I honestly felt like I didn’t have the game and that maybe I was one of those guys that had a really good career and injuries hurt me and through the battling of injuries and trying to get back to the top, maybe I was one of those guys who was going to go out that way.
“But I didn’t want to look…
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