How do you approach the subject of taking down a man who's never fallen? Bud Martin of SFX Sports, Day's agent, hates the angle that Day is going to suddenly blow away big, bad Tiger. But Martin does little to dispel the idea when he says of the kid, "He could end up being the best ever." Day was 14 and playing a practice round with Greg Norman and Adam Scott at the Australian PGA when he first caught the attention of Martin, who quickly judged the kid the most talented of the three. Ian Davis, Day's manager in Australia, played with Norman in the 1970s and rates Day "a shot better a round than Norman was at a comparable age." Adds Colin Swatton, Day's caddie and coach: "He's just an all-around package. A lot of people say he's got the maturity of a 30-year-old in the body of a [20-year-old]."
What sets Day apart isn't just his swing speed but his short game, a strength that distinguishes You Know Who. "I played with Jason when he was 16 in the Aussie Open," says Jarrod Lyle, a 26-year-old touring pro who lives a few minutes from Day in the Bay Hill neighborhood of Orlando. "Some of the shots he played around the green were just unbelievable. I walked off that course thinking he's got one of the greatest short games I've ever seen."
At the Nationwide Tour's Jacob's Creek Open in Adelaide, Australia, last February — his first tournament of his first full year as a pro — Day was on the Friday cut line as he came to the par-5 18th. The pin was tucked on a high ledge in the right corner of the green, but Day shoved his 3-iron approach 30 yards right, onto a patch of hardpan. The caddie was thinking: Pitch it up there 30 feet behind the hole, two-putt — and hope. Instead, Day opened the face of his 58-degree wedge, picked the ball perfectly off the rock-hard earth, dropped it onto a three-foot-wide landing and watched it stop five feet from the cup. He made the putt and the cut, on the number.
In Day's first five PGA Tour starts in 2006, he made 190 of 212 putts from 10 feet or less. That stat would have put him among the leaders on Tour had he played enough rounds to make it official, not to mention the fact that he was fourth in driving distance (310 yards), 10th in driving accuracy (72.4 percent) and second in greens in regulation (72.2 percent). Such feats are not the result of talent alone, those close to Day will tell you. He dug his game out of the Australian dirt. He works hard. He wants it. As a teenager at boarding school, Day taped above his bunk bed a goals list, to which he vowed total dedication. He'd set his alarm for 5 a.m., so he could be practicing by 5:30. He had weak legs, so Swatton gave him a pivot drill to keep the kid from moving off the ball, a drill Day was doing three months later, long after the coach had forgotten about it.
