“I played in South Africa on the HotelPlanner Tour in January 2023 and I just broke down while speaking to my parents on the phone and they just both said ‘come home’.”
In 2016, Chris Wood had the golfing world at his feet. He won the BMW PGA Championship on his way to becoming a Ryder Cup player and was comfortably sat inside the top 50 on the Official World Golf Ranking.
But even then doubts about his game were beginning to surface, doubts which led to a level of anxiety that forced him take a break from the game in 2023.
Now, looking for a route back to the DP World Tour, he tees it up at this week’s Soudal Open thanks to a top ten at Turkish Airlines Open that was his first in almost seven years.
Here, in a remarkably candid DP World Tour Player Blog, the affable Englishman talks about his descent into anxiety, his recovery with the help of his wife Bethany, his ambitions for the future and how he never considered quitting the game he still loves.
I was just riddled with anxiety and fear and tension from the moment I left home for a tournament. It was 24/7 during tournament weeks, I was extremely anxious and not sleeping and it becomes a vicious cycle
I started to feel my swing not becoming my swing towards the end of 2016. I had a year of playing the best golf of my career but I just felt it started to drift towards the end of 2016 where I started hitting the ball a bit weaker. I knew where it was going but it was weak and the ball fight wasn't great so in any windy conditions it started to get a bit harder. I always thought I would only move up the leaderboard in the wind because I had an ability to hit a good ball flight and it deteriorated a little bit from there. I felt like I needed to improve that situation and to improve myself as a golfer but for two or three years I just stayed where I was with the odd feel that worked. I saw a bit of progress but looking back they were more like plasters.
In 2019 I was working with my coach and I started to develop some severely wide shots, particularly with my driver, to the point where I didn't carry a driver in the bag at Wentworth at the BMW PGA Championship in 2019, just three years after I’d won it, that’s how quickly it got from one point to another.
From then, I was just riddled with anxiety and fear and tension from the moment I left home for a tournament. It was 24/7 during tournament weeks, I was extremely anxious and not sleeping and it becomes a vicious cycle. You're constantly draining energy but at that point I was hitting balls like I needed to do it more to make my swing better. I felt like I needed to do it more and there’s a saying with golfers: the secret’s in the dirt - golf is practice until your hands bleed. But I was in a point where I was not really connected to myself in my swing.
I was rightly trusting my coaches but I wasn't questioning them. I was going with them and I needed to be stronger and be able to say: ‘actually, that doesn't quite feel right to me, is there another way we could do this?’. I really liked the coaches and they’d worked with some great players so I kept doing it but it gradually took me away from my golf swing. I had that combined with the mental side of things and it was a difficult situation.
I hardly played during Covid, I couldn't face it. With the Tour freezing the categories, I didn’t have to play and I was starting to recognise those feelings that I was getting in 2019: the anxiety, the fear, the tension and we weren’t directly affected at home so we had a really good time. At home my wife Bethany and I had two young children, we’ve got four now: Jonah, Lottie, Toby and Kasper, but we had two at the time and every day when we’d go for our hour walk which we were allowed to do, Bethany would be the one who was the listener every single day. That was probably the first time I was really talking about how I was feeling about things which was obviously extremely hard for her to listen to and to hear. For someone who has always encouraged me to be playing and then for me to turn around and say I’m not going to be playing, I don’t want to be playing and these are the reasons why, my wife has always been someone I tell everything so she has been in the picture the entire time. I can remember those walks incredibly well based on the strength of those conversations. I'd then do two hours of practice every afternoon and it was a good balance. But I was still thinking I had to keep practising and I was not really improving. I should have stopped there but I didn't realise what I was dealing with at that point.
I'm someone who has got quite a bit of fight in me, I never give in so I kept going until I lost my card in 2022. But about six weeks before the end of the season, I sat down with DP World Tour doctor Tim Swan and just opened up and revealed I’d been struggling. From there the Tour medical team have been great, they put me in touch with the right people but then I played in South Africa on the HotelPlanner Tour in January 2023 and I just broke down while speaking to my parents on the phone and they just both said ‘come home’.
That was the point where I knew I could not face it any more and I knew I needed to step away and deal with it correctly. I then spent a lot of time working on the burnout I had suffered because of the cycle I had put myself in and then I started to deal with the anxiety.
My daughter wants a trophy party so she can wear a party dress. My children have not seen me win a tournament, so that's a huge motivator for me
There was never once a part of me that thought that I was done, that the break that I took from the game in 2023 would be permanent. You have days where you're feeling severely down, there’s no other word for it but depression. But the fire in my belly has never gone away, I've always believed that I've got the ability to play. I've always been able to see the shots, I've just not been able to hit them. I feel like as long as I can see the shots, at some point I'll be able to hit them again. And that's what I suppose has kept me so motivated. I watch golf on TV and I can see the shots, I've got those shots so while there were really difficult days, the overwhelming feeling was stopping was never on the table. I don't think I ever fell out of love with golf. I just couldn’t face it.
I’m now starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel both mentally and with my game. I’ve been working with coaches James Martin and Ed Coughlan on swing and performance and the mental side for close to two years now and from the start both of them have said the number one thing is: ‘no more trauma. We do not add any more trauma to what you've suffered over the last few years. You've had enough trauma’. There were times on the HotelPlanner Tour last season where I would be thinking about hitting a tee-shot with driver three holes before I had to hit it and that is just building anxiety. We now just say: hit the shot that you see. So if I’m not comfortable, I won’t hit it, I’ll hit the shot I see which I can fully commit to.
When I first started trying to get back onto the golf course in 2023, my coach decided we should just start with a six iron and a putter and go and play nine holes. That was my first time back on the course and that was brilliant because there isn't really any trauma for me with a six iron. I started there and we worked our way up and it’s progressed over the last couple of years when I've been able to handle it and I'm now at a point where I'm pushing the coaches a bit more. I'm OK to fail now which is great so we're trying to make that practice a bit harder because I can take a little fall now whereas a year or so ago, any more damage was really traumatic.
My daughter wants a trophy party so she can wear a party dress. My children have not seen me win a tournament, so that's a huge motivator for me. I had a small sample size of a successful week in Türkiye and I love the satisfaction of the work you're doing working and knowing that you're doing the right things and getting some validation with results. That’s hugely satisfactory and I crave more of that which drives me towards working on the right things in the right way. Going well and going well again is something I really want to be able to do.
Looking for starts and invites is something that I'm really eager to do and that top ten in Türkiye gets me into this week. Hopefully I can sort of try and get a few more invites off the back of it and give myself a chance of working my way back. It's obviously a long way back I've just got to keep doing what I am. I know I'm progressing and hopefully it's just a matter of time.
I feel like my potential is a lot bigger mentally than it was even when I was playing well. I feel like the stuff I'm doing now is so much further down the road that more avenues have opened up mentally to be able to go about things in a different way or more consistent way or in a way that challenges myself a bit more. I'm practising in ways I've never practised before and that's what gives me belief that I can return to be a better golfer than I was before.
I want to get my card back, that's my goal. I think that's probably pretty obvious. The result in Turkey has obviously given me a nice few points. But it’s a fifth of the job. I've got a long way to go to be able to do it but that's the aim. Anything beyond that would be a bonus. The hard thing is that I'm relying on other people to give Chris Wood an invite this week. What if those invites dry up and what if those invites don't come? Then I'm stuck. But if I can give myself some form of category to make next year even a bit easier, then that's not quite as good, but it's a step in the right direction.
I've been starting to talk a bit more about my struggles I've been through the last few years. I've done a few interviews with people asking where I’ve been and since I did the first one where I felt I was ready to speak a bit more it's really helped. I'm absolutely delighted to be able to feel like that because a few years ago being able to talk about my struggles felt a long way off. I now feel really comfortable with what’s happened.
