Masters champ Bubba Watson candidly speaks on anxiety issues - 'Thought I'm going to die'

Bubba Watson has admitted he thought he was 'going to die' after speaking up about his ling standing battle with anxiety. Watson, 43, has long been cemented as a star of the sport, famously winning the Masters in both 2012 and 2014. He has also appeared in four Ryder Cups, although ended up on the losing side on each occasion.

He is also widely considered a real character within golf. He regularly uses a pink driver, and is renowned for wearing his heart on his sleeve on the course, displaying raw emotion that has endeared him to the public.

However, Watson, real name Gary Lester jnr, has now given a harrowing account of the mental health issues that he is dealt with ever since his first panic attack in 2007. In a frank interview with The Independent, he described how he had to hurry back from a tournament and wake up wife Angie, fearing he was enduring a cardiac arrest.

"I thought I was having a heart attack," he said. "I said I needed to go to the hospital." In fact, Watson had been nursing a wrist injury and it turned out that he'd had an adverse reaction to the anti-inflammatories he'd been prescribed by a doctor.

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Watson assumed it was the medicine that had promoted his anxiety, but the issue continued to resurfance and came to a head in 2011, just a year before his famous maiden win at Augusta. More significantly however, his dad, Gerry, had died after a lengthy battle with throat cancer just months earlier.

Watson withdrew from a tournament in Los Angeles before releasing a statement about a muscular problem in his stomach. In reality, the grief of his father's death, compounded by wife Angie having problems in trying