Overview
Jason Anthony Day (born 12 November 1987) is an Australian professional golfer who plays on the PGA Tour and most notably won the 2015 PGA Championship. He is a former world number one in the World Golf Ranking, having first achieved the ranking in September 2015. Day first broke into the world's top ten in June 2011, rising to world number nine after his runner-up finish at the U.S. Open. In February 2014, Day won his first WGC title, the WGC-Accenture Match Play Championship and would win it for a second time in 2016. With his 2016 win, he joined Tiger Woods and Geoff Ogilvy as the only multiple winners of the WGC Match Play. He went on to win his first major tournament at the 2015 PGA Championship, scoring a record 20 strokes under par and rising to number three in the world rankings.
Early life
Day was born in Beaudesert, Queensland. His father, Alvin, was Irish Australian, and his mother, Dening, migrated from the Philippines to Australia in the early 1980s. He has two siblings, Yanna and Kim. His father took him to Beaudesert Golf Club and enrolled him as a junior member just after his sixth birthday. He was allowed to play six holes a day as a junior. At the age of eight his family moved to Rockhampton, and during this period he began to win events in the surrounding districts. Alvin Day died of stomach cancer when Jason was 12.
Day's mother sent him to Kooralbyn International School, which had a golf course attached. Later he went to Hills International College, where they have a golf academy, at the behest of his coach, Col Swatton, who had moved there when Kooralbyn school closed down. Day borrowed a book about Tiger Woods from his roommate, and it inspired him to improve his golf by practicing in the early morning, at lunch-time and in the evening. He used the book's reports of Woods' scores as his benchmark for improvement and as a reachable standard. His first big win was at the age of 13 in a 2000 Australian Masters junior event on the Gold Coast, where he won with scores of 87, 78, 76 and 76.
Amateur career
As an amateur, Day was twice awarded the Australian Junior Order of Merit. He finished seventh and was the leading amateur at the Queensland Open. Day won the Australian Boys' Amateur in 2004. His amateur success extended to the United States, where he won the Boys 15–17 division at the 2004 Callaway World Junior Championship and was runner-up in the 2005 Porter Cup. He was a member of the Golf Australia National Squad.
From Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0).