We’re already nearly 24 hours into 2024, which means New Year’s resolutions are already old news. As for looking back on 2023? Ancient history.
But let’s stay reflective just for one more day, because men’s professional golf is on the cusp of beginning its new season at this week’s Sentry. What do pros think about at times like these? What do they make of beginnings and endings? At last month’s Hero World Challenge, the final event of the year for many top pros, I approached several of ’em with a simple question:
What’s one thing you learned this year?
Here’s what they told me in response:
Matthew Fitzpatrick learned his lesson the hard way.
“One thing I learned this year is just how important it is to not be injured,” he explained simply. “You don’t feel comfortable, you don’t practice as well, you don’t train as well and you don’t play as well. It’s just, once you get injured it’s the weeks after, the months after, how long does it linger? You’ve got to clear it up as best you can. And then when you are injured you’re just like, this feels horrendous, you feel worse and it hurts your confidence.”
Fitzpatrick ticked through his own year in health. He hurt his neck in January ahead of the AT&T Pebble Beach, an injury that led to further complications in February. By March, he said, he’d improve to 60-70 percent. By April he was 90 percent or higher. “It wasn’t too bad. It’s just not nice feeling like s—,” he said. His results follow that storyline: From the time of his injury through mid-March he missed four of six cuts. But just a month later he won the RBC Heritage at Harbour Town.
The sky’s the limit in a healthier 2024.
Jordan Spieth offered up a crucial skill.
“I learned how to change two diapers within, like, 90 seconds. Back-to-back,” he said, his craft no doubt honed from his newfound status as a father of two. “You can go for speed over comfort with the older one, but you’ve gotta really make sure with the little one you’re really doing it right.”
He was less certain what he’d learned when it comes to playing professional golf. “Not really much,” he said. “But I learned a lot of things off the course. I had a quick catch-up session on bylaws. Crash course, I guess. It’s not like I knew them all before.”
Justin Rose, on the other hand, said he’d learned so many little golfy things that it was tough to pick one. But he took solace in the idea that, while he had a satisfying 2023, there’s still more to come.
“I think big picture-wise, I learned that I can still compete,” he said. “That’s big.” Then he thought of something more specific.
“I’ve learned a lot about what creates speed,” he added, nodding in the direction of swing coach Mark Blackburn. “I wouldn’t say I’ve done anything with that knowledge yet. But I understand a lot of the mechanisms that are required. I’ll do something with that; II think there’s more in there somewhere.
“The foundation is there. My body feels good. Now it’s about the nervous system. Strength is good; it’s a baseline. But being able to go fast means building your brain to where it’ll allow you to go fast.”
Will Zalatoris, who was teeing it up in competition for the first time in months, preached patience. “When you go from feeling okay going into Augusta and then Thursday [of Masters week] blowing out my back and having surgery that Saturday and then knowing it’s 12 weeks before I’m doing anything at all? And then knowing it’s just listening to my back and it could be six months, it could be four months, it could be nine months? You go from planning out your schedule to then, my goal was just to play this fall, but it was very evident very quickly that I needed to spend a little more time. “
Around week eight of recovery Zalatoris enrolled in online school to finish his Wake Forest undergraduate degree.
“That was when I was finally functional, didn’t need help getting into a car and stuff. But overall I just laid around, read a bunch of books and tried to keep my mind busy,” he said. I was impressed, I told him, that he was reading ‘a bunch”! “Look, they taught me how to read, even though it took me nine years to graduate,” he said.
His deadpan humor’s still intact.
Max Homa drew inspiration from another part of the world.
“What did I learn this year? About anything? I learned why lions are the king of the jungle,” Homa said after a pause. He meant it literally; This learning came thanks to a safari he took with Justin Thomas and their wives leading up to their appearances at the Nedbank Golf Challenge in South Africa. So why are the lions kings?
“They’re one of the few really big animals that eat meat and really hunt,” Homa said. “Like, rhinos eat grass. If they didn’t eat grass maybe they could be king of the jungle. But they’re not; the lions are.” Hippos, he added, may be the scariest. “Maybe they could be the kings, because they’ll eat some meat, but they stay in the water.”
Perhaps he found inspiration in his new understanding of the food chain; Homa would go on to win that week.
Wyndham Clark learned that self-belief pays off over time.
“I learned to trust more in my process and trust that good things are going to happen,” he said. He has reason to feel validated; the guy won the U.S. Open, after all. But that’s the point. Narratives of top play and top players are far easier to write in hindsight than in advance.
“Early in the year I played really well. A lot of people only focus on who wins each tournament, but I was trending well,” he said. “I just kept believing that good things were going to happen — and then they did! But it’s only after the wins that everyone goes, ‘oh, wow, you’ve been playing great, what an amazing season.'”
Jason Day’s face lit up with excitement. “Anything I learned, like, any category? Ooh, there are whole bunch,” he said.
“No weird theories for now, let’s leave it to golf; that’s probably the easiest thing. Patience. What I learned was more patience. Because my results over the last five years compared to prior to that were very average. I thought and said stuff like oh, I was going to quit. But eventually I realized that I still had a lot of love for the game; it’s just difficult to be patient enough to wait around for those results. But I’m glad I ended up doing that, because it was the greatest thing to have delayed gratification. It was more a reinforcement of patience than anything else.”
Finally there was Rickie Fowler. Like Day, Fowler ended a lengthy winning drought. Like Day, Fowler learned something in the process.
“I feel like after going through those few years of struggles you learn to enjoy both the good and the bad times,” he said. “The bad times make you appreciate everything else. Without understanding that side of things, it’s never going to be as good at the top.”
Fowler pointed out that every career will inevitably have ebbs and flows. “People are always going to struggle,” he said. He’s learned to embrace his reality. “It’s been great having the people that I’ve always had around me as players and friends. Y’know, Jordan [Spieth] and I crossed over a little bit as far as when he was struggling, I was as well, and he started coming back before I did. So you see some stuff that that gives you some kind of motivation or some belief.”
Even after a year like this one, where Fowler won on the PGA Tour and made the U.S. Ryder Cup team and returned to the game’s upper crust, there’s no guarantee your next tournament will be as good as your most recent ones.
“I mean, I could shoot four straight 80s, right? The past guarantees nothing about the future. There’s still good and bad ahead.”
There sure is, gang. There’s good and bad ahead. I’ll be rooting for more good than bad, for you and for us. Happy New Year!
