Time Heals

Audemars Piguet ambassador DANNY WILLETT reflects on his journey from Masters champion to the depths of despair and back again.

- Kent Gray

AT THE HEIGHT OF HIS PLUMMET FROM 2016 MASTERS CHAMPION TO SERIAL CUT-MISSER, Danny Willett needed a cocktail of painkillers and anti-inflammatories just to get through the day. There were times when a psychiatrist’s sofa probably should have been prescribed too given the even more excruciating emotional toll the physical symptoms were taking on the golf course. That’s saying something because the back-pain was crippling.

“I was on paras [Paracetamol] and Co-codamol and Bruphen. You know it doesn’t seem much but then you think, oh actually, even just taking four Paracetamol, four Bruphen and a couple of Co-Codamol, it’s quite a lot,” the Englishman says of the pharmaceutical relief he needed.

“It’s something that you shouldn’t be taking all the time because it only preventative. So I couldn’t ever really tell you how much pain I was in but, yeah, the weeks off, I wasn’t able to do a great deal of stuff. Picking the kids up, bending over was painful which was the main things really because that was in my lower back.”