Jason Day's PGA triumph leaves Jordan Spieth in awe

SHEBOYGAN, Wis. – He did not have to pull out his driver.

Jason Day had a three-shot lead with eight holes left, he was 18-under par, he could play safe and win his first major.

He pulled his driver.

"I had hope," Jordan Spieth said, thinking that maybe the guy next to him on the 11th tee box would make a mistake doing this, and set in motion a stumble that could give him a sniff of a chance to win the PGA Championship.

Then Day swung, and in Spieth's words, "hope was lost."

The drive seared through the lakeside air and bounced to a stop. The final pairing of the day walked down the fairway and Spieth saw the distance on his opponent's drive.

"Holy [expletive]!" he said.

It had gone 382 yards.

Day turned to Spieth, smiled, and flexed his bicep.

What was so incredible about Jason Day's record-setting 20-under par performance here Sunday was the way he boat-raced the (now) No. 1 player in the world. Every single time it looked like Spieth had a glimpse of a path back, Day dropped a barrelful of bricks in his way. The pressure of never having won a major, of the final Sunday of the PGA Championship, of Spieth waiting for him to fail – it bounced off Day like raindrops off a golf umbrella.

Day kept pulling driver, again and again, and kept obliterating the ball. Spieth called it "a stripe show."

Maybe the most indelible moment – the deal-closing moment – came on the 16th, which is a par 5 that's reachable in two shots if a player has the distance and the gumption. Spieth put his tee shot in the fairway and got to his ball. "Driver off the deck!" someone wailed. The favorite had to go for it; he was three back and needed something big. He pulled out a fairway wood, and pulled it into the bunker.

Day took out a 4-iron and fired it onto the green. Birdie. Checkmate. Spieth had come into the final round thinking 3-under would earn a playoff and 4-under would win it. He shot 4-under … and lost by three shots.

In the scorer's cabin, Spieth turned to Day and said, "There is nothing I could have done."

There was nothing that the world's best player could have done.

And all this authored by a man who was so devastated by the death of his father when he was a child that he was getting in fights and getting drunk at age 12.

The story of Jason Day isn't just a comeback from near-misses at majors; it's the story of a fight against grief and anxiety that most of us can't imagine. The emotions that poured out of him here Sunday, even before he made his final putt on 18, came from a well of loss and restored life. There was a very real chance Day could have spiraled out of control after his dad died from stomach cancer in 1999, and his mom and sisters did everything they could to help him. So did his caddie, Colin Swatton, who met Jason during those hellish days and accompanied him all the way to this moment of triumph. Day's life could have gone in any direction without them.

"Who knows where I'd be," Day told reporters, getting teary-eyed again. "I can't tell you."

The family was so poor, Day explained, that his mother had to cut the grass with a knife. She didn't have a water heater so she had to use a kettle. There was a second mortgage, a long drive to a good school in Queensland, all before Day had any sense that he would amount to anything other than a juvenile delinquent.

Even after he cultivated his gift, there was that cauldron of emotion that just doesn't go well with the mental calm of golf. Controlling a long iron in the wind is nothing compared to controlling negative thoughts. He went through "multiple mental coaches" and still there were crushing losses, like being in the lead on the back nine at Augusta in 2013, and leaving a putt short at St. Andrews last month that could have gotten him into the playoff that Zach Johnson eventually won. All that went into Sunday being "the hardest round of golf I've had to play."

As he stood at the 18th tee, a tournament he was winning by three strokes was anything but won in his mind. "Don't double bogey," he heard in his head. "Don't go left." He blistered it down the right side, to safety. "Don't be short," he heard before hitting his approach. "Don't go in the water." All the voices around him were cheering, screaming, and the voice inside was still somewhat of a threat.

"But that's the moment," he said, "where you have to pull yourself back and say, ‘No, I'm not going to have that.' I'm going to stamp my foot on that thought and move forward and try to grind this out and really work on the process of getting the shot right."

He got the 18th hole right, he got the final round right, he got the tournament right. He got everything right after almost getting everything wrong. And after all the mental coaches and the frustration and self-doubt, he had learned something quite powerful.

"The biggest thing that prepares you for something like this is," Day said, "is just the sheer experience of failure. Looking at failure not as a negative but as a positive. Knowing that you can learn from anything, even if it's bad or good. And that really gets you mentally tough."

Everyone now wants to know what comes next. Is this the beginning of a sustained major rivalry between Day and new No. 1 Spieth? Are we in for a triumvirate of talent, with Rory McIlroy in his prime and the three of them having won five of the last six majors? Now that Day has done this, what will he do next?

For Day, though, this is as much about the past as his future. Sunday was not only the moment when he slammed the door on the world's No. 1 and carved his name into one of golf's most famous trophies. Sunday was the moment when he bravely pulled a driver and swatted his demons away.