Danny Willett pushing to be fully fit for Masters after shoulder surgery

As a former Masters champion, Danny Willett will definitely be at Augusta National for the first major of the year.

Whether he is there just to sample the delights of Jon Rahm’s menu for the champions dinner or swinging a golf club in anger is less certain as he battles to regain full fitness following shoulder surgery.

Willett looked set to challenge for a second BMW PGA Championship title in September when he covered his first 12 holes in six under par, only to aggravate a shoulder tear after hitting his tee shot on the 15th.

The 2019 champion played through the pain barrier and completed all 72 holes at Wentworth but underwent surgery the following week and faces a race against time to compete at Augusta, where he won in dramatic style in 2016.

“The surgery went really well, I’m back hitting balls right now but Augusta is six weeks away. It’ll be very, very close,” Willett told the PA news agency at the launch of Prostate Cancer UK’s fundraising challenge, The Big Golf Race.

“It’s been a long time rehabbing it just to get it up to strength to be able to take the capacity and the load that it needs to. We’ll know more when we start practising in America as to how we’re getting on.

“The beauty of potentially playing [the Masters] is the fact that I know the golf course that well I’m probably not going to be slogging around 18 holes on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday in practice rounds.

“I’ll be able to take it a little bit easier but I also don’t want to go there and just make up the numbers.”

Willett had been managing his shoulder problem for several months before it flared up at Wentworth and the extent of the damage was only discovered when he went under the knife.

“We thought there was one tear and when the surgeon