Bubba Watson: ‘You reach a breaking point, I thought I was going to die’

Five years after hitting possibly one of the greatest shots in golf’s history, Bubba Watson stared into his bathroom mirror and stopped recognising the man looking back at him. No matter how much he would eat, his body refused to retain weight and he’d lost almost 15kg without any explanation. He looked in horror at the way his ribs now jutted out and the shadows that ran beneath them like sinister valleys. His tall frame, so famous for its unnatural coil and spring, a golf swing nigh on impossible to replicate, suddenly looked so lanky and fragile. The longer he held his gaze, the more the knot that seemed to have taken up permanent residence in his stomach started to tighten. The acid curdled in his oesophagus, the heat burnt across his chest, and the fear raced through his mind uncontrollably; the same words that had kept him up for nights on end. “I can’t breathe, I’m scared, I’m going to die.”

Watson began to think about his father and hero, Gerry, a former Green Beret who’d fought in the Vietnam War. Three days before Gerry passed away, Watson bathed him and saw how the man he knew as a giant, with a piece of shrapnel from a grenade still lodged in his back just centimetres from his kidney, had been reduced to barely 42kg. “I just kept seeing my dad in the reflection,” he says. “I’m looking like my dad. Do I have something wrong with me? Do I have cancer? I fell to my knees. I thought, if I’m only going to be here for a few more minutes, I need to tell my wife how much I love her, the same with my kids. I didn’t see a way out.”

It can be hard to imagine how, as Watson puts it, “chasing your dreams led to the lowest point in my life”. He is a two-time Masters champion and remains one of golf’s most ubiquitous