Jason Day: Work Ethic, Strategic Thinking Get Him The Lead
Jason Day opened up a big lead today – here’s how he’s thinking about the weekend at Bay Hill.
Jason Day may think he’s boring, but to those who listen to his answers in the media room, he’s anything but. After rounds of 66 and 65, he has a solid lead over the rest of the field at the Arnold Palmer Invitational.
“I felt like I couldn’t do anything kind of wrong out there, which was good,” he said after the second round. “My goal was to try and stay patient but still aggressive, and it worked out over the last two days.”
While it looked easy to those who saw his morning round, he said it wasn’t.
“I’m still grinding,” he insisted. “I really have to kind of bare down and make sure that I hit the correct shot out there, and if you just have that one little lapse in concentration, that could be the swing of momentum where you’re making a bogey or a double-bogey out there, and instead of being 13-under, you’re back at 10.”
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But it’s more than concentration over the shot.
In the last few weeks, he has been working hard on his sand game, trying to hit a flop and run bunker shot, which is a new for him. He described it as trying to hit a fat bunker shot, and he had not tried it in competition until the second round at the Arnold Palmer Invitational. At the sixth hole, a crescent-shaped, par five, bordered on the left by a lake that extends from tee to green, the new shot made its competitive debut.
“When you’re trying shots you really haven’t put in play before, with water behind and things can possibly go wrong, it shows that I’m pretty confident with how I’m feeling out there,” he said. He blasted out to three feet and made the putt for a birdie.
Day has also spent time working on his driver with Trackman.
“I found that if I’m swinging two to three degrees on the inside into out at like 2 degrees up with 1.5 degrees open fact, it’s perfect little start out to the right and draw,” he noted. “ I find if I hit it harder, I can hit it straighter.”
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He said he does not have an off-speed driver swing. If he tries it, he said, it puts his swing out of sync.
Though he was one shot better in round two compared to round one, he said the ball wasn’t going as far in the early morning.
“I was hitting it about ten yards shorter in the morning,” he explained. “Once it starts warming up,the ball starts going a lot further. It reacts different. Today I had 172 yards into the 10th hole and hit 7-iron where that is usually an 8-iron for me.”
As far as his strategy for the weekend, he said his intention was to be patient and aggressive.
“Aggressive means if I have a wedge in my hand, do I need to hit it 20 feet away, then aggressive to that target,”he added.
Patient to him means if he can just get himself on the green, he thinks he has a good chance to make putts.
“I’ve got to think my way around this golf course,” he said. “I’ve got to make sure that I’m trying to be smarter than everyone else.”
He’ll try to not get distracted or caught up in anything but making the best shots he can at the moment.
Next: Jason Day: Balancing Golf and Life
“I got to keep trying to extend that lead, trying to get more birdies and more birdies and more birdies,” he said. “ You can’t coast it in.”