What’s it worth? That is the basis of what became known as “Goldman’s dilemma”, when 198 sportspeople from the 1980s were asked if they would take a magic drug that guaranteed global success if they knew it would kill them within five years. More than half said they would.
For Danny Willett the stakes were not so dramatic, but he knows the value of his Masters win in 2016. “I’ll take winning one major and having a f***ing 2½-year slump,” he says.
Willett’s win was one of Augusta’s more colourful days, involving a brilliant final bogey-free round of 67 and the implosion of hitherto unflappable wunderkind Jordan Spieth. It was the last time an Englishman won, the only time in 30 years stretching back to Nick Faldo, but was followed by a downward spiral accelerated by a spinal edema.
During his fall, Willett, 38, would take monthly trips from Sheffield to the same Harley Street chiropractor who once got Justin Rose out of a wheelchair as well as treating Martina Navratilova and the guitarist from Bachman-Turner Overdrive. His own rhythm section went horribly awry as he slumped from the world’s top ten to beyond the top 600, relying on painkillers to get him through the worst.
It has not been unremitting gloom, though, and he won the DP World Tour Championship in 2018, a victory he says was more defining than the Masters because of what had preceded it, and then added the 2019 BMW PGA Championship and 2021 Alfred Dunhill Links titles.
The flip side was shoulder surgery in 2023 and January’s torn hamstring, but he has plundered his resilience again to head to Augusta, where this time he will be going it alone without a coach.
The Yorkshireman says he has not watched clips of his Masters for two years, but not because it hurts. “I watch it and I have a smile on my face, but I don’t need to,” he says. “I can close my eyes and tell you every shot I hit. It’s more a case of why would I watch it?”
Willett seized on Spieth’s collapse to win the tournament — the American then presented the Green Jacket to his rivalJIM WATSON/AFP/Getty Images
He knows we are going to have to rewind, though, to when Spieth was the star of golf — the reigning champion, not far from a calendar grand slam the previous year, “Captain bloody America” in Willett’s pithy assessment.
And Spieth, only 22, led by five on the back nine. He came to the picture postcard 12th, Golden Bell, and put two balls in the water and another in the back bunker. As Spieth helped Willett into his green jacket at the victory ceremony, few would have expected this pairing to claim only one more major — Spieth’s rollercoaster 2017 Open — over the next decade.
“I tapped in on the 15th and saw that big, white leaderboard change and thought, ‘Bloody hell!’ ” Willett remembers. “Then I hit a lovely eight-iron into 16. We’d gone from chasing all day to leading. It was an incredibly bizarre 25 minutes of golf.
“On a Thursday, on the first tee, I have the nerves of, ‘I hope I have a good week,’ and there’s loads of stuff going through your mind, but on a Sunday down the stretch, my nerves change. It’s not, ‘Don’t mess this up’, it’s, ‘We’ve got a chance to do something really good here’. They’re the good butterflies. Sure, your hands are shaking, but it’s a very different scenario.”
Just why is the 12th such a deceptively dangerous 155 yards? “It’s a horrible little hole that is only a wedge or a nine-iron, but people don’t realise that, for us guys, hitting a seven-iron into the middle of a green when it’s windy is easier than trying to control the ball flight on a wedge because of the spin rate. The wind down there can make it carnage.”
Willett is going without a coach as he looks to put the issues of recent years behind himJordan Bank/Getty Images
There are little things casual watchers have long forgotten about Willett’s zenith. One came on the last hole where, just before his final two-foot putt, he removed his jumper to reveal a green polo. It seemed an odd time to change. “I was playing well with my jumper on, but it was boiling hot and I was sweating my knackers off,” he explains. “Once I got close, I felt safe. If I’d have been under the magnolias I’d have kept it on.
“I still had to wait for Spieth [three groups behind] to finish and he was class. It couldn’t have been easy having to be part of the ceremony. It’s a strange, old tradition and a bit cruel after what had happened, but it’s not like we won by one. We won by three and I think people forget that.
“I don’t know if it shook him, but nobody had prepared me for what happened afterwards, the scrutiny and constant eyes, getting asked to play around the world, spreading yourself too thin, and the body couldn’t keep up.”
The next 24 hours raced by. There was a party with Sir Alex Ferguson at his manager’s hired house, where unbridled joy was doused in unlimited alcohol.
Willett celebrated his win with Ferguson, among others
“You win and there’s like three hours of media and then we were having a good old party. The next morning the adrenaline was still pumping and I couldn’t sit still. Everyone in the house was asleep and I just thought, ‘Bollocks.’ I went for a jog and had my music on, and was running on cloud nine.
“Then we flew to New York and when we finally got home there were journalists around the house when all we wanted to do was get inside the house because little man had just been born. It was overwhelming. There was no time to be normal.”
In a fortnight he had become a father to Zach, who had been due on Masters Sunday but arrived early, and a major winner. By the time he went back a year later his back hurt and his form had gone. He felt like an impostor at his own champions dinner, made an eight on the 1st hole, and heard the whispering galleries say he was a lucky winner, as if that was possible over 283 shots.
Willett was not prepared for the level of scrutiny that followed him after his winAndrew Redington/Getty Images
“You know, when Tiger won [in 2019] nobody mentioned that five out of the last eight people hit it in the water on the 12th,” he says breezily. “I only needed one!”
Why do some top-class players never win a major? Why did it take Rory McIlroy 11 years to add a fifth? Willett is well placed to assess the head-wrecking traits of his game. “I was playing with Westy [Lee Westwood] that day, and brilliant as he is he never quite got over the line, and there’s been many more. For me, it was quite early on in my major-playing career and there was no scar tissue.
“Afterwards you know what the feeling is like and you’re trying to replicate it time and time again, and when you can’t the frustration grows.”
He warms to this theme. “I mean, Jesus Christ, this is a terrible sport for your win percentage. Obviously what Scottie [Scheffler] is doing is incredible, and there’s Tiger, but you look down to Brooksy boy [Koepka]. He is a five-times major champion and, if LIV’s not scuppered it for him, he’s going to be in the Hall of Fame, but I saw a stat that he has won 4.5 per cent of his tournaments. In any other sport that would be mind boggling.”
Willett deserves great credit for soldiering on through all his setbacks and now, from a decade’s distance, he seems happy to bask in the sepia afterglow. He has kept the newspaper cuttings from The Augusta Chronicle and does not want to mothball memories, telling me Peter Alliss sent him his dictation from the final round, while Arnold Palmer, Jack Nicklaus and Gary Player sent hand-written letters.
After flipping coaches for three years, he says he has had enough lessons from top gurus to try it on his own for a while. “I’ll play pretty well, and out of nowhere I’ll have a little double cross that will kill you. I can ask a coach, but it’s more about me standing over a ball, water on the left and out of bounds on the right, and trusting what I believe in.”
As one of a strong English challenge, with three players in the world’s top seven, his ambition remains the same as before his green and gold day: “I want to win golf tournaments.” He knows he can be far better than the world No393, but suffice it to say, many higher-ranked players, past and present, would swap places in an instant.