Jimmy Walker: ‘I knew I was going to win the PGA Championship’

It was a feeling like no other.

At the famed Baltusrol, with the 2016 PGA Championship on the line, Jimmy Walker entered a mental state that only a select few golfers will ever experience.

Chasing his first major title while being hunted down by the best player in the world, he felt like he couldn’t miss. He was just playing too well.

“It’s hard to be scared about anything when you know you’re so on it,” Walker tells bunkered.

“The confidence I was walking around with the whole time was uplifting. I had a sense of freedom. I just didn’t think I was going to make a bogey. I’ve won golf tournaments by nine shots but I’ve never had that feeling. It was so comforting.”

The blanket of invincibility worn by Walker that week in New Jersey would sell for millions.

The Texas native played the final 28 holes without a single blemish on his card to oust world No.1 Jason Day and lift the Wanamaker Trophy.

Walker’s coolness won through on a weekend where Mother Nature was determined to wreak havoc.

Nearly four inches of rain had battered Baltusrol’s Lower Course ahead of Saturday’s third round. Play was wiped out 15 minutes before Walker was due to tee off. Then, on a marathon 36-hole finale on Sunday, organisers allowed for preferred lies on the deluged fairways for the very first time in a mad dash for a finish.

“I had this really strange calm,” Walker says. “The greens were soft. I was chipping very well and putting very well.” Unperturbed, a Sunday morning 68 left him just ahead of Day, Brooks Koepka and Henrik Stenson.

“After that third round, I went to my bus, laid down on the couch and took a nap for a bit. I knew that I was hitting it well enough that they would have to hit a good score to beat me.”

Three moments defined the final round.

After reaching the turn at level par, Walker holed out from the greenside bunker on 10. “You don’t want to have nine pars in a row and finish with a bogey,” he recalls. “I was just on the upslope and I had plenty of green to work with. Was I trying to make it? No. I was trying to get it close as possible. When that went in I thought, ‘I will get this done today.’”

He held onto a two-shot lead until the par-five 17th. “My caddie said if we birdie this hole we win the golf tournament. I said, ‘Let’s do it.’ I smoked the drive, killer lay-up, and we watched Jason Day not birdie. I flipped a wedge in there, made the putt and had a three-shot lead.”

That nerveless eight-footer should have made it a formality. But on the 18th tee, Walker watched Day crush a two-iron from 254 yards to within eagle distance. The defending champion marched up to the green and made it.

Suddenly the lead was one, and needing a par or better, Walker had carved his fairway wood into the heavy rough. “I hit it in the worst possible spot. It got a lot harder than it needed to be.”

Pressure?

“I wasn’t nervous,” he insists, reliving his three-footer for glory. “I hadn’t missed one and I knew I wasn’t going to miss.”

Just three years before this seismic moment, Walker was a journeyman pro battling to keep his tour card. Six wins later and the keen astrophotographer was shooting for the stars. Walker had been pushed to his absolute limits but had managed to achieve a lifelong dream.

“Jason was parked right next to me,” he says. “We talked after the round and then I texted him that night and said, ‘Hey man, great finish, you doing that helped me learn so much more about myself. You made me dig deeper and find something else.’ He took it the right way.”

Just months later, Walker’s inspirational story soon took a cruel twist. At the World Cup of Golf in Australia in November 2016, he thought he had come down with a nasty bug. He was floored by flu-like symptoms that would never go away and it wasn’t until he arrived at the Masters the following April that he received his diagnosis. “I was a wreck,” he says. “At Augusta I found out I had Lyme Disease and that’s what was kicking my ass. It really beat me up pretty good. It did a full-blown attack on me. It hit every part of my body.”

The bacterial illness is transmitted to humans through the bite of infected ticks, and, without treatment, the infection can spread to joints, the heart and the nervous system. Walker isn’t sure where he picked it up, but speculates it may have been on a hunting trip that autumn. The effects were devastating.

“I basically had the flu for two years,” he says. “I had no energy. Your phone battery is sitting on 3 per cent the whole time. That’s how it felt. It was hard to practise. It was tough to get off the couch. Even once I physically started to feel better it still fried my brain. It hit every part of my brain and I still deal with brain fog and forgetfulness.

“I remember at Augusta I was playing a practice round with Rickie [Fowler], Justin [Thomas] and Jordan [Spieth]. We finished 18 and they said, ‘Let’s go have lunch.’ I said, ‘If I sit down right now, I won’t be able to get up and practice.’ I went straight to the range and worked for as hard as I could for as long as I could – which wasn’t very long. I went back and I was done for the rest of the day.”

Walker somewhat miraculously managed a top-20 finish that week. He battled on to make more cuts against the odds and was determined not to let it derail him.

In reality, though, this relentless illness was causing irreparable harm. He soon caught the dreaded yips around the greens, destroying the best part of his game. “Something I was so good at was gone,” he sighs. “It was a mind screw. It was terrible.”

Even when Walker looked ready for a resurgence – notably with a tied-second at the 2018 Players Championship – it was impossible to build any momentum.

“I had weeks when I played pretty good but I just couldn’t practise,” he says. “I was three years down the road and so thankful for winning the PGA Championship and having the five-year exemption because I wouldn’t have been able to carry on without it.”

It was one thing for Walker to accept he was a spent force in professional golf, but the impact on his family life was the most taxing. He was balancing the rigours of tour life with a debilitating disease while raising his two sons, McClain and Beckett, with his wife Erin.

At one stage, Walker was so exhausted that he was falling asleep while reading bedtime stories to his children. “It was a tough time in my life,” he reflects. “My kids were young and they wanted to play. All I could do was get up and go to work. I felt like such a deadbeat dad and deadbeat husband. My wife ended up contracting it, we both dealt with it. Looking back, you wish it never happened, but you just move forward and hopefully I can write a new chapter.”

Walker eventually walked away from golf in 2022 – seemingly for good. His game was in tatters and, at the age of 43, he decided he was done after shooting 78-70 in his hometown event, the Valero Texas Open.

“I was really struggling with it and I felt like there wasn’t an end in sight,” he admits. “My wife was mad at me for saying, ‘I quit.’ She said, ‘You’ve retired and had an incredible career.’ I didn’t say it so eloquently, I just walked away without telling anybody what he was doing. I was bitter about it but I knew I was done for a bit. I wanted to come home, watch my kids grow and to be happier.”

Walker then received an unexpected lifeline. The defection of a number of PGA Tour players to LIV Golf moved him into the top 50 in the career exemption list, giving him full playing rights for 2023.

He grasped his chance but burned his one-time exemption by finishing 124th in the regular season FedEx Cup standings, which traditionally would have been enough to retain his card. Walker resents the PGA Tour for moving the goalposts after introducing a new Fall Schedule which meant that only the top 70 automatically retained their cards.

“I had so many people congratulate me on making it and I’m like, ‘No!” It was such a poor job of communicating that to the fanbase. Even me, when I came back I didn’t know. It was only halfway through the year that it wasn’t the lock and you had to be top 70 to keep your card. I was like, ‘This is unbelievable.’ I was pissed off. It’s how I felt.”

Walker may have lost his card, but he does have his swagger back. Illness is no longer dictating his life. “I call them Lyme days but it’s very rare I have one anymore,” he explains. “I’m healthy, I feel good, I look good. I’ll have my opportunities, they’re few and far between now but I’ll be ready for them.”

So, can he win again?

“I know I can, for sure. It could just take three shots for me to realise, ‘Wow, I can do it!”

Regardless, with the Wanamaker in the cabinet and plenty more on his CV, Walker has nothing left to prove.

“I would have loved to have won more but I’ve had an incredible career,” he beams. “I’ve played in Ryder Cups, the Presidents Cup, won a major, won by nine, defended a tournament, kept my card on the last hole by making a six-footer, got through Q School, won at every level. I even won the par-3 contest at Augusta! It’s been a blast.”

This interview with Jimmy Walker first appeared in issue 211 of bunkered magazine.

Ben Parsons joined bunkered as a Content Producer in 2023 and is the man to come to for all of the latest news, across both the professional and amateur games. Formerly of The Mirror and Press Association, he is a member at Halifax Golf Club and is a long-suffering fan of both Manchester United and the Wales rugby team.