WHEN Jason Day’s father scavenged a golf club from a tip it turned out to be worth nearly $40 million.
Alvin, a meat worker, was scouring the Beaudesert, Queensland, dump for things to sell, when he came across a rusted three-wood and took it home to his three-year-old son.
Alvin grabbed a tennis ball, put it on the ground, and told young Jason to hit it.
He did, and flushed it. Alvin retrieved the tennis ball and told his son to swing again.
For a second time Jason hit it sweetly, and Alvin declared on the spot his son would be a champion. Bold fatherly predictions aren’t rare, but very quickly it appeared that Jason Day’s talent was.
He continued to swing that club every chance he got. When he was six he was playing “for real” at the local public course with his dad, six holes at a time, using a second-hand set of clubs handed “over the fence” from a neighbour he remembered only as “Tinker”.
Alvin’s find had set his son on course for golfing immortality, but an epic turning point in the family’s life would nearly derail the dream.
Alvin died from stomach cancer when Jason was just 12.
Left to raise three kids on her own, Dening Day was working long hours and the kids needed to be responsible way beyond their years. But it didn’t work that way.
One of his sisters ran away, and Jason, lost without the strong discipline and guidance of Alvin, got “caught up with the wrong crowd”.
He was finding trouble, real trouble, fighting at school and in the street, and drinking.
Really drinking.
If a 12-year-old can be an alcoholic, Day was.
“I was very wild. I didn’t care and got into trouble a lot, did all the bad stuff. Going to parties, staying out late. There was a lot of drinking,’’ Day said.
But he was still playing golf, and his mother identified that the game could be his salvation.
She took out a second mortgage on the family house, enlisted the help of some other relatives, and shipped Jason off to be a boarder at the Kooralbyn International School, south of Brisbane.
It was a school with a strong sporting focus, with a golf course and academy attached. Golfer Adam Scott had been there, so too Olympian Cathy Freeman. Not a bad production line.
But beyond that, Kooralbyn had two significant elements that would change the immediate course of Day’s life.
First, it was in rather remote surroundings, with the distractions that had been causing Day trouble practically out of reach.
“It was very easy to stop partying because there was nothing else to do except go to school and golf,” Days said.
“ There was literally nothing around us. So I was pretty much forced to go to school and golf. And I realised what my mum had done, and that I needed an education.”
But maybe more important than the relative isolation of the school, Colin Swatton was Kooralbyn’s golf coach.
The pair had a fight at their very first meeting as teacher and pupil.
Day told him to f--- off as they argued about what the teenager should have been practising. Jason wanted to use his irons, Col wanted him to work on his short game.
But the youngster returned later the same day and apologised.
And since that day the pair have developed a partnership that Day conceded has been the most critical element in him scaling the heights he has.
Swatton is Day’s caddie, coach, mentor and father figure, the Alvin replacement.
“Col took a 12-year-old kid who didn’t have a lot, and turned him into the best player in the world,” Day said.
“When I first met Col I was a kid that didn’t like to listen, but needed that guidance. I needed that person to tell me I was making a mess of myself.
“All of the sacrifices that my mum and my sisters had made would be a waste of time, and I didn’t want to let them down or disappoint them.
“Col would have to scold me every now and then but that was just a part of him being the disciplinarian in my life at the time. I understood that. And as soon as he would say something, I would listen.
“I remember him telling me to do a swing drill every day, and a month or two months went by and he didn’t realise I was still doing the drill. He only wanted me to do it for a couple of weeks. Whatever he told me, I just kept doing until I was changed for the better.
“He has been an amazing supporter ever since I met him, since we had that first fight, and coming back to apologise to him.
“The things he does is how you get the edge, doing that extra little bit so you have that extra bit of information that could make you play better.
“Colin should be in the Hall of Fame.”
The admiration is mirrored by Swatton, Day’s greatest advocate without doubt.
When his pupil battled through the effects of vertigo in the final two rounds of this year’s US Open, as Day collapsed on multiple occasions during the third round, but still managed to stay on top of he leaderboard, Swatton declared “they’ll make a movie about that round”.
Subsequent tests pinpointed an ear infection as the cause of those dramatic greenside falls at Chambers Bay in June, and his vertigo has since abated.
But not so Swatton’s admiration for his boss.
Yes, Day’s success has helped Swatton himself collect more than $1 million this year.
But the hours and hours he spends helping Day be the best he can be, which go beyond the duties of just a bag carrier, are not done for cash reward.
The pair are professionally and emotionally entwined. On reaching world No.1 one status this week, Swatton declared Day could be Australia’s best ever, supplanting the iconic Greg Norman, who was ranked No.1 for 331 weeks.
“I want to see him solidify the No. 1 position,” Swatton said this week.
“I want to see him continue to grow and I want to see him do what I believe he can and that is dominate.
“I think he can be another Greg Norman or even another Tiger Woods, in the sense
he can dominate his competitors, I think he is that good a golfer.”
It was the culmination of a plan the pair hatched years earlier when, at just 18, Day declared he wanted to be No.1.
“We had a plan, we said we were trying to get to No. 1 in the world by the time I was 22,” Day said.
“We had a whole plan, this is what you need to do, this is how much you need to practice, how everything needs to happen and at 22 you’ll be No.1.”
Day wasn’t delusional despite being so young and even though he was “five years late” in achieving his No.1 goal.
He had torn his way through the amateur ranks, winning the Australian boys’ title when he was 17, and the Callaway World Junior Championship the same year, 2006.
The year before, he lost in a playoff at the Queensland PGA Championship, after which seasoned professional Peter Senior declared he
was good enough to turn professional “right now”.
He didn’t, waiting until he was 18 after which he headed to the US full of confidence, a swag of top-line sponsors on board, and high hopes of immediate success.
It was 2007 and while Day didn’t qualify for the PGA Tour, he was allowed to compete on the secondary Nationwide Tour, and he set it alight.
Day won his first tournament as a professional, the Legend Financial Group Classic, and he thought he was awesome. Too awesome.
“It’s easy to get a big head,” he recalled of those early days.
“I do remember slacking off. Everyone said, ‘This is the next guy to take on Tiger Woods.’ I had a good year ... 10 top 10s and a win ... when you are that young and full of confidence you don’t say the best things, and you don’t work hard.
“I think I was playing eight hours of video games every day. I did everything I possibly could not to play well.”
Day’s first win gained him promotion to the main US Tour, where the big bucks were on offer.
But he didn’t have the immediate success the “next Tiger” should have.
Day didn’t break through for his first PGA Tour win until 2010, the Byron Nelson Championship. It was his 65th event on tour.
Standing on the green to give a big congratulatory kiss was his new wife, and the second key in the ascension.
Love at first sight does exist. It happened to Day.
In 2005, a shy 17-year-old Day walked in to an Irish Pub in Twinsburg, Ohio, with Swatton, who was helping set up an academy in the area and spotted Ellie, a waitress.
He didn’t actually talk to her, but was smitten, got her details, and started sending her text messages.
She didn’t immediately get caught up in the exchanges, but in 2007 the pair met face to face again. Day asked her out, and so took Ellie, and Swatton, to dinner at Applebees and to a horror movie afterwards.
They married in 2009, have son, Dash, another on the way and are as tight a family unit as exists in the cutthroat world of US sport where big deals and big bucks can create the sort of temptations that even the strongest — like Woods — fail to ignore.
Ellie Day has become a Twitter favourite for her husband’s fans, sending out shot by shot updates and loads of love for Jason to her 18,000 followers.
“Small-town Ohio girl. Happens to love a guy who is good at golf,” reads her Twitter profile.
She has watched Day’s rise from competitor to champion. And despite racking up $38 million in career earnings he’s still the “simple man” she met.
The pair set up their base in Ohio, where cold, snowy winters don’t bode well for golf.
For much of the gruelling week-to-week golf season in the US the family travels in a motor home, parking it adjacent to the driving range at courses including Augusta, where Day has finished second (2011) and third (2013).
Day could be $16 million richer tomorrow morning should he win the US PGA Tour’s season-ending FedEx Cup in Atlanta.
But he won’t be rushing out to spend it, Floyd Mayweather style, on a fleet of flash cars or a diamond encrusted putter.
“I might buy a few more V-necks from Target,” the 27-year-old said this week.
“I don’t really spend money. I have some nice stuff, I might buy some new clothes.
“I have clothes that are five years old that I still wear. I am a simple man.”
And there’s other more important things to worry about. A Masters win remains high on Day’s agenda, as does the Open Championship, and the US Open. He wants the career grand slam. But he also wants to win other tournaments, lots of them, all of them in fact.
“Now I am at No. 1 I’m happy, I am proud of the achievement. But it is not the end,” he said.
“This is the start of a new chapter. And now I have to strive to stay there. The only way to do that is keep winning.
“And the way to keep winning is keep on putting in the hard work. Greg Norman spent over six years of his life at No. 1, Tiger more than double that and I’m here for one week.
“There is a long road ahead to even be considered near those guys.”
Day has travelled a mighty long road already, from the public course at Beaudesert with Tinker’s old clubs, his dad walking alongside him, to the fairways of the world, Swatton carrying his bag, Ellie and Dash cheering him on.
“I always had a vision of me standing on top of the earth, and to know right now there is no one on this planet that’s better than me, that’s pretty cool,” Day said.
“That’s what I was thinking when I was a little kid. But to be able to do that, I can’t really process it, it’s surreal. I still feel like I did yesterday or the day before that.
“I am still a regular guy who is really good at hitting a golf ball.”
