World No.1 Dustin Johnson won more often. Others captured bigger titles - majors and WGCs - in more spectacular fashion. Many, headlined by Bryson DeChambeau, muscled it (much, much) further off the tee. He wasn’t even alone in being a 40-something antithesis to the 20-something rip and gouge brigade, Graeme McDowell achieving that very feat a fortnight later in Saudi Arabia. Indeed, save for a glorious week in January and another in December, he wasn’t even a regular headliner last year. â–¶ Yet few produced a narrative as heartening in 2020 as Lee Woodwood, Abu Dhabi HSBC Championship winner turned Race to Dubai champion, via a pandemic enforced mid-season stall and resulting global tailspin.
Rather than produce a scowl to smiling assassin storyline in the past 12 months, Westwood embellished it. The Englishman’s resurgence actually dates back to mid 2018 when something inside switched. By that November, the transformation turned to tears of joy when Westwood claimed the Nedbank Challenge in South Africa, his first European Tour win since April 2014 and first win anywhere since 2015.
Sports psychologist Ben Davis hashelped the evolution of the former world No.1 immeasurably, so too fiancée/ caddie Helen Storey. Sprinkled with a hearty portion of reality, let’s call it life experience both inside and outside the ropes, Westwood won again in Abu Dhabi 12 months ago.
“Ben has installed in me that fact I’m playing the game I love for a living, and I should enjoy it,” Westwood said after becoming just the third European Tour player after Mark McNulty and Des Smyth to win in four different decades in the UAE capital.
This story is from the January 2021 edition of Golf Digest Middle East.
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This story is from the January 2021 edition of Golf Digest Middle East.
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