Jason Day’s vertigo update: ‘I’m not thinking about falling over on my face again’ 
ST. ANDREWS, Scotland — Golf isn’t a sport where on-field injuries happen often, so when Jason Day collapsed on the second day of this year’s U.S. Open, it came as a shock to the entire sport. Here was one of golf’s millennial stars falling to the ground on live television; that was bad news, right?
Yes and no. Day, as it turned out, suffers from vertigo, and on that particular afternoon at Chambers Bay, the vertigo brought him to the ground. Since then, he’s undergone tests and treatments to determine the source of the problem – and as he demonstrated on Thursday at the British Open, he’s maintained a sense of humor about the whole thing.
“I should just stay healthy, so I don’t have to answer these questions anymore,” he said, smiling, after shooting a 6-under 66 to put him one stroke off Dustin Johnson’s lead. “I feel good. I’m not thinking about falling over on my face again.”
Day has suffered from vertigo since 2010, which meant the U.S. Open collapse wasn’t quite as terrifying as it could have been. “If it was the first time that I ever had it at the U.S. Open then I’d be kind of scared,” he said, “coming out here knowing, maybe it’s going to come back, don’t know yet.” Doctors and medicine have reassured him that he’s taking all possible precautions.
In some strange way, the U.S. Open collapse brought Day a measure of positivity. “Even though you just want to give up and pack it in and walk away, which is easy to do, the hard thing to do is to stand up straight and keep moving forward and I was able to do that to an extent,” he told an Australian newspaper earlier in the week. “It was a good week mentally for me in that regard. The vertigo really made me focus on the shot at hand.” Day finished the U.S. Open in a tie for ninth.
“Obviously it’s not great to have it in tournaments, but if it comes, it comes,” he said. “I can’t really control it. That’s the unfortunate thing.”
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Jay Busbee is a writer for Yahoo Sports. Contact him at [email protected] or find him on Twitter.
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