Defending Masters champion struggling to find winning game
Danny Willett knew winning the 2016 Masters was a big deal when he did it. He maybe didn’t know how big a deal until he got home to Sheffield, England.
“When we arrived home, it was manic, really,” Willett said as he prepared to defend the green jacket beginning Thursday at Augusta National Golf Club. “You don’t realize what you’ve achieved until you kind of see the reactions.”
And the reactions ranged the gamut, from some of his closest friends who had gone to bed when he seemed to be hopelessly behind Jordan Spieth in last year’s final round to the less flattering response he received as a sudden superstar.
“It is tricky,” Willett said. “Social media is one of the things these days that allows people to write and say whatever they want. People don’t know what you’re doing in your day‑to‑day lives or how hard you’re working or what’s going on and people think they can then say these things that, obviously, they are not the most positive at times. If you read that kind of stuff, it isn’t nice.”
In retrospect, Willett wishes he had sought advice on how to handle it all. Not one of golf’s shining lights before the win, he went from the background to the spotlight at a pace he wasn’t prepared to handle.
“We kept trying to go about our own business and kept trying to work hard and trying to play golf, but unfortunately, you know, it is difficult,” he said. “We were being pulled here, there and everywhere and trying to do other things.”
Those other things included celebrating the victory pretty hard, Willett acknowledges.
“Every time you see friends, see family, you haven’t seen them since you won; you stay up and you chat and this, and that and the other, and it’s just one of them things,” said Willett, who also had his first child along with wife Nic just before the 2016 Masters. “It kind of just built up and built up and just took its toll a little bit.”
The wear showed on his game. After winning the Masters, Willett missed the cut at The Players Championship, finished 37th at the U.S. Open, 53rd at the British Open and 79th at the PGA Championship, and he had as many missed cuts as top 10 finishes on the European Tour.
“It’s been a very difficult year for Danny Willett, trying to live up to the expectation of Masters champion,” former PGA player and current Golf Channel analyst Colin Montgomerie said. “Every time he goes out, he’s known as the Masters Champion. It’s been a very difficult year to try to emulate that and try to live up to that added expectation.”
This season, Willett has finished 69th and 75th and missed the cut in three PGA Tour events and placed 54th and missed the cut in two European Tour events. The only positive on the 2017 resume is a fifth-place finish at the Maybank Championship in Kuala Lumpur in February.
“Honestly, I think he’ll be quite thrilled to get this Masters out of the way and then concentrate on the rest of his career without being the current Masters champion,” Montgomerie said.
Willett arrived in Augusta on Saturday and played the back nine at what he described as a leisurely pace.
“Just mozied around really,” he said. “I could have just walked around, but I figured we had the clubs.”
He is sharing a locker in the champions’ locker room with 1991 Masters champ and fellow Brit Ian Woosnam, and on Sunday, he handed out the trophies for the girls 10-and-11-year-old Drive, Chip and Putt winners under the iconic oak tree outside the Augusta National clubhouse.
That happened just yards away from where he first slipped on his green jacket last year after shooting a bogey-free 67 as Spieth melted down on No. 12 on Sunday. That round seems farther away the way he’s playing these days, though.
This story was originally published April 5, 2017 at 7:00 PM with the headline "Defending Masters champion struggling to find winning game."