Masters champion Willett ‘wasn’t especially good’

It was a career that began on a council-run golf course in Sheffield, where those who remember playing with Danny Willett — the first Englishman to win the US Masters for 20 years — said he “wasn’t especially good”. Crammed onto a pylon-dotted hillside by a council estate in the south-east of the city, the Birley Wood course is just a couple of tram stops away from the church where his dad Steve was a vicar. It feels a world away from Augusta’s exclusive fairways; and yet it was here those who knew Willett as a younger player say he forged his competitive spirit. Jonathan Pyle, now Birley Wood’s head professional, used to play against Willett and reckons the tough course in Sheffield served his old foe well in Georgia. “I know it sounds daft, but there was a chip shot he did on the 17th hole and I was thinking: ‘he’ll have learned that here.’ If you can’t chip and putt you’ll struggle at Birley Wood because the greens are so small. It’s funny to think that a Masters champion started here: a tiny little golf course in Sheffield. It just goes to show that golf isn’t just for privileged people.” Pyle, like many of Willett’s early opponents, said he wouldn’t necessarily have picked him out for success. “He wasn’t like a young Tiger Woods or Rory McIlroy or anything. He was good, but he wasn’t that good. I mostly remember his swagger - he was a nice lad but he was cocky and always on the line of being a bit too cocky. I remember playing against him at the British Open qualifiers and hearing him yapping and yapping, bouncing around on the putting green, going on about how he was going to win and thinking: ‘you really think so?’ Then of course he did win.” Willett’s parents recently retired to Anglesey, where the new Masters champion has often talked of learning to play on family holidays “in a field full of sheep”. Talking to BBC Breakfast on Monday morning, father Steve admitted his middle son was better than him by the time he left primary school: “When he was 12 he was out-driving me by 70 yards. But it wasn’t just his play; he understood things. He just knew about golf and I stopped playing with him after a while because it was embarrassing. Every Wednesday my wife used to argue with me as I would take him to a golf club drop him off and pick him up again at eight o’clock at night and get told off for keeping him off school.” The 28-year-old’s Swedish mother, Elisabet, said her husband used to write “the most appalling excuses … for years and years” to get their golf-mad son off school. “But the PE department supported him the better he got. The school were fantastic.”One of Willett’s brothers, PJ, a teacher, became a Twitter sensation on Sunday night when he live-tweeted his disbelief at his sibling’s victory: “Speechless.  I once punched that kid in the head for hurting my pet rat. Now look,” he wrote. When Willett was 13 or 14 he moved on to Bondhay club near Worksop, where coach Justin Fores remembers an initially unremarkable player.  “He wasn’t especially good; he was just a normal boy who liked playing golf. Then his handicap got down to +5 and he was the world number one amateur in 2007. What marked him out was his self belief. He was always that little bit arrogant; he always believed he would win.  Ninety percent of the game is mental, really.” Fores  believes Willett got so good by playing on tough courses.  “Bondhay is well tree-lined and bunkered and quite tight. If you can play around here and get good scores then it’s going to be easier playing everywhere else,” he said. His protege still holds the course amateur record: Willett’s scorecard (67 on a handicap of +1) has been rendered into a metal plaque and sits on the mantlepiece underneath a flat screen TV in the club cafe. As Willett’s career has progressed - he turned professional in 2008 - his home courses have got progressively more grand. A few years ago he joined Lindrick , an exclusive members-only club hidden behind electric gates in the outskirts of Worksop. The club is near the home he has built with his wife Nicole, who gave birth to their first son, Zachary, just ten days before his Masters victory. In the club shop, Steve Rose said Willett was in for a game only last week. “He had a lesson. It was blowing a gale, freezing. But he still went out and played. That’s the sort of mentality that wins you the Masters.” Meanwhile back in Thrybergh, South Yorkshire, round the corner from Rotherham golf club, where Willett is an honorary member, it seems locals never doubted that Willett had the talent to win. “People were getting a right strop on,” said Darren Whitehouse, after collecting his winnings at the bookmakers, where it seems the cashier was having a tough day. “It was rammed and she were saying she didn’t actually have enough money in the till to pay out, there were that many people who had bet on Danny.” One of his mates, who had won £4,000, was apparently “giddy as a kipper”.