Category
🥇
SportsTranscript
00:00Profiling your come up a little bit and how you ended up getting to a boarding school.
00:08Can you just talk a little bit about that? Because I think it kind of sets the stage
00:11of why Jason Day is one of the most resilient, hardworking professional golfers that we've
00:17seen in the last couple of decades.
00:19Yeah. So I'll, like my story is like kind of large, but I'll try and condense as much
00:25as I can.
00:26Yeah, no, please.
00:27I grew up in rural Australia, like it was kind of grew up on a farm when I was a kid.
00:34And then my dad found a golf club at a rubbish tip. So we used to go to the rubbish tip or
00:39landfill is what we call it over here and try and find things that we could use around
00:44the house.
00:45Because we weren't well off. We weren't like crazy poor, but we weren't well off. So we'd
00:50go and try and find stuff that we could use around the house. My dad found a golf club
00:55and then he brought it back. And then that's kind of how I started my journey in golf.
01:03And we moved away from where I was in Beaudesert, Queensland, to a place called Rockhampton,
01:09which is eight hours north of where I'm at in Beaudesert, which was quite significant
01:14change. And then my mom and dad were meat workers. And the story kind of gets like it's
01:20like this. So when I started playing junior golf, my dad was very, very abusive on the
01:25golf course. So he if I didn't perform, I like I he beat me. So I remember one thing
01:33when I didn't perform play well at a junior event at my home club, he in the in the in
01:41the car after the round, he like he completely beat me. I was bruised all over all over my
01:46body. And then but what I understood it was that if there was ever a positive out of it
01:56like that, was that it forced me to concentrate at a very young age forced me to focus at
02:02a very young age. And I because I absolutely love golf. Golf was just something that I
02:08just thoroughly enjoyed so much, even if I wasn't if I if I weren't playing with, you
02:12know, with my friends, you know, at eight years old. But my dad was very scary. If I
02:18didn't perform, I knew that I needed to perform. So I needed to go out there and focus. So
02:21I wasn't always like joking around with my my friends. And then my dad passed away when
02:26I was when I was 12 of cancer. And, you know, long story short, you look back in your life
02:35and you go, man, one of those like, why did you know some of these things happen, but
02:38then you don't realize some of these things happen for a reason. And there was a lot of
02:42good that came out of it. So not saying that my father passing was a good thing. It was
02:47just it opened up another door, another avenue for me to be able to go to boarding school.
02:51And I started falling off the rails a little bit. You know, I started drinking at 12, 12
02:57and a half, you know, after my dad passed away, getting in fights at school and just
03:01going down the wrong kind of path. And my sister ran away from from home for four years.
03:06She was 14 years old. So she ran. She was homeless on the streets. You know, had some
03:12other personal issues inside my family that like was was pretty, pretty dark stuff, you
03:17know, that I want to talk about. But, yeah, I mean, that's kind of when my mom took a
03:26chance on me. You know, she she borrowed some money. She sent me away to a boarding school
03:32down back, actually really close to where I was born, Bodeza. It was actually only 20
03:37minutes away, which is funny enough. And this boarding school, that's when I met Colin
03:44Swatton, who used to be my coach slash caddy for a long, long time. And that was the positive
03:53that came out of it was that I got to meet Colin. And he I think he knew early that I
03:59needed structure in my life. You know, there was nothing else to do other than like because
04:06we were in the middle of nowhere in this golf academy. It was like it was literally golf
04:11and nothing else. So he knew that like I needed structure. So he gave me a structure in my
04:17life. And that's kind of I started to play a lot better since then. That's kind of in a
04:23really condensed story. That's how things progressed to the golf academy.