Jason Day caught fire with strong second half in 2015

Not too many people usually notice that Jason Day likes to ease into his PGA Tour schedule each year.

They have this year.

That’s what happens when you dominate the last two months of the previous season and reach No. 1 in the world on two different occasions.

The Australian played only three of the first 16 events of the 2015-16 wraparound season.

“I do this every single year and I don’t try to play any in the fall. I don’t go overseas to China or Malaysia, and I haven’t been back to Australia at all the last couple years,” he said.

Day said players noticed his absence on the tour when they saw him at Doral in early March.

It was his fourth event of the season, which included a missed cut at Torrey Pines in late January.

“Oh, are you playing?’” he said they asked.

After a tie for 23rd at Doral, Day was back on form in his next start two weeks later. He went wire-to-wire in winning the Arnold Palmer Invitational.

“It was very important (to win),” Day said after he won at Palmer’s Bay Hill club. “I’ve been working really, really hard. I mean I had not stopped. I’ve had to sacrifice a little bit of time spending with the family just so I could work a little bit harder and, you know, really focus on my golf game and, you know, it’s finally paid off.”

Before the win, Day said “everyone was asking what’s wrong, what’s going on, why aren’t you playing well? I just kept on saying to myself, kept on saying to the people, the fans, the media, just be patient, I’m just going through the process and I’m going to keep working hard. Things take time.”

The victory at the Arnold Palmer Invitational helped Day, who won the PGA Championship in August at Whistling Straits with a record tournament score for a major championship, regain the momentum he built starting in the late summer of 2015.

Starting in late July, when he won the Canadian Open, Day won four of his next six starts, including the PGA Championship two weeks later. The hot streak ended after he won the BMW Championship, the third FedEx Cup event, on Sept. 20. He closed out his season the following week with a tie for 10th at the Tour Championship.

“I put a lot of work into it,” Day said. “In that second half of the year, no one was going to beat me. You know, it kind of showed with four out of six weeks that I played, I won.”

He lost his No. 1 ranking to Jordan Spieth and wants to return to the top.

“I think for me right now, I’m very, very motivated to get back there,” said Day, who had five victories last season, tying Jordan Spieth for the most in 2015. “I’m very, very motivated to play well and win and win more consistently. I’m just trying to work my butt off to get back there because I know it’s very, very difficult.

“But at the end of the day, it all pays off when you’re the best in the world and you’re dominating. Not saying I’m going to be there for that long but that’s a main goal is to be one of those era players where you were dominant for a longer period of time than just four weeks. ”

Day mentioned that his idol, Tiger Woods, was a player who did everything he possibly could to stay at No. 1 once he got there. Woods holds the record for weeks at the No. 1 spot at 683 weeks, not consecutively.

Day reached out to Woods in late February to ask him how he worked to peak for the four major championships, something Day said he’d never asked any player about.

“If you’re going to pick a guy’s brain, he’s the guy,” said Day of Woods, who has won 14 major championships, including four Masters.

In a 50-minute phone conversation, Day said he asked Woods about “practice and balancing and dominating for so many years. And every time – I can’t count how many times he said effort and mindset and everything had to do a lot with the mind.”

Day and Woods exchanged text messages regularly during Day’s march to victory in the Arnold Palmer Invitational – a tournament Woods has won eight times.

“He says ‘Just be yourself and stay in your world’ and you can do this and start your own legacy here,” Day said. “It gives me so much confidence that a person like that would believe in me, especially as a kid I was idolizing him ever since I was a kid and watching him in 1997 win the Masters for the first time and all of a sudden I’m playing the tour and I’m pretty close with him now.”

Day said he believes that the mental part of the game is the last piece of the puzzle for him to master.

“I think once I’ve realized or once I learn to control my mind, especially out there, it’s going to be, I’m not going to say – I would say that it’s going to be a lot easier for me to go out there and play golf instead of fighting myself.”

Day won his first major championship in record-breaking fashion.

His 20-under at Whistling Straits made him the first player to reach that figure in a major championship. The record had been 19-under by Woods in the 2000 British Open.

“I had no idea about the record until after it was over and someone told me about it,” Day said.

“So, the amount of history that’s been through our game, in our sport, to be able to hold that record currently is really amazing. Just there’s been so many fantastic golfers throughout the history of our sport and playing so many major championships, but for me to be able to get to 20-under par and hold that record, I mean, some of the names I never thought I would be able to put my name with.”