From a snapped 3-wood to a hangover, Tyrrell Hatton is in fine form for the Players

PONTE VEDRA BEACH, Fla. — This time last year, Tyrrell Hatton was in rare form.

“Last year it was kind of typical me,” the hotheaded Hatton told reporters in advance of this week’s Players Championship. “Where I was like, one shot outside the cut line with five holes to go and I had a blowup, snapped my 3-wood and basically started hitting shots on the run. I think we missed the cut by five or something like that.”

Hatton’s memory is basically correct, except he was actually one shot inside the cut line before finishing bogey-double-par-double-bogey to shoot four over, missing the weekend by five.

This year Hatton returns in triumph, having staved off brutal conditions and a host of the world’s best players en route to his first PGA Tour win at last week’s Arnold Palmer Invitational. After his win, he said he didn’t expect to be “in any fit state, at least until Wednesday.”

As promised, he rolled into his press conference still tired from the weekend’s celebrations.

“Yeah, I’m still feeling — I’m still quite tired, to be honest. But I was cuddling the toilet by 5 in the morning, so it was a good night.”

In a rousing presser, Hatton detailed how he was feeling coming down the stretch (“just trying to keep calm”) his friends reaching out (“I’ve still got around 100 unopened WhatsApp messages”) the spelling of “Tyrrell” (“over here it would be normally Ty-rell, wouldn’t it, but I ain’t no Ty-rell, so yeah”) and his prowess betting on soccer (“I’m quite good at losing money each Saturday”). It was clear that he was still in good spirits despite the wild Sunday evening.

“Sunday night celebration, there was a lot of red wine and then unfortunately I think the finisher was the drinking the vodka and tequila out of the bottle, which never ends well. And, yeah, I fell victim of that, definitely.”

Hatton enters this week’s Players showing good form; his only other start of 2020 came at WGC-Mexico, where he finished T6. He had experienced recurring pain in his wrist ever since slipping on the pine straw at the 2017 Masters Par-3 Contest, and decided it was time “to properly fix it” through surgery. The recovery took longer than expected — but it appeared to work. Now all that’s left is taking on TPC Sawgrass.

“Unfortunately it’s a tournament that I haven’t done too well at in the past, but I’m hoping that changes this week,” he said. “Obviously nice week last week — and a few days to recover — before we get going tomorrow.”

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