Jason Day, the beautiful Day. You too could be like him, Nick Krygios

IF the likes of Nick Kyrgios and Bernard Tomic were only half like Jason Day, they’d be winning games and fans too. This is Day’s amazingly humble back story.

Day winning stuff and feeling pretty good about it in 2007.

“CAN I hit it, sir? Sir, can I hit it?”

These are the five simple words that tell you everything you need to know about Australia’s Jason Day, who today won his first golf major title, the PGA Championship.

The words were spoken years ago, and often, by the pre-teen Day as he trailed long-serving Beaudesert Golf Club president Jack Doherty around the rough bush course in the Queensland town where he grew up.

This is “Royal” Beaudesert Golf Club. It’s not really called that.

Day had a set of banged-up second-hand golf clubs salvaged mostly from the dump, and was so desperate for a hit at any opportunity, he’d sneak in at times when the course wasn’t open. Other times, Doherty would take him out to play. But all in his own good time.

“Jack would teach kids the etiquette of golf, to be respectful and wait your turn,” explains Marilyn Antcliff, a 34-year-old Beaudesert GC stalwart who, with other locals at the club, was sweating on every stroke a world away in Whistling Straits, Wisconsin, this morning.

“That explains his patience,” Mrs Antcliff says. “I call Jason a real gentleman, and I only know two or three.”

But Jason Day wasn’t always patient or the consummate gentleman. As an 18-year-old, he came across as impetuous in an early profile penned by respected Queensland journalist Mike Colman.

“I want to take down Tiger,” Day was quoted as saying, in reference to the American who at the time dominated world golf.

In response to that quote, US golf writer Geoff Shackelford had, excuse the pun, a field day. He labelled Day “the latest golfer who thinks he could be better than Tiger and is dumb enough to tell a reporter”.

Day winning stuff and feeling pretty good about it in 2007.

Around the same time, another cocky young Queensland sportsman, the then-14-year-old Bernard Tomic, boldly told a magazine he wanted to have “the mind of Pete Sampras, the groundstrokes of Roger Federer and the heart of Lleyton Hewitt”.

Young athletes talking themselves up, excuse the pun again, is par for the course nowadays. But cut forward eight years, and while Australian tennis’ current two young stars, Tomic and Nick Kyrgios, continue to flounder on a self-made bed of hubris and/or rudeness, Jason Day has moved on from all that.

You only had to see the grace with which Day won today. Those tears. That amazing outpouring of emotion after he holed that final tiddler of a putt. Day had a three-shot buffer so knew he was about to win. But out came all that emotion anyway, in warm floods of his tears as he hugged his caddie and mentor Col Swatton.

Swatton is a central figure in the Jason Day story. Day’s dad, a worker at the abattoir at Beaudesert, died of stomach cancer when Day was 12. His mother sent young Jason to live and study at the nearby Kooralbyn School, a Queensland boarding school with a strong sports program, which until today was most famous for producing Adam Scott.

You got a good dad, kid. Jamie Squire/Getty Images/AFP

That’s where Day met Swatton, who has been coach, caddie, father figure and more ever since. It’s due in large part to the older man’s calm, mature presence that Day always seems to have a sense of composure about him. He’s competitive, but that competitiveness never bubbles over into aggression, self-pity or something uglier.

One of Day’s greatest attributes is his honesty.

“I’m going to be honest here,” he told the US sports and pop culture site Grantland last year. “I came from a very poor family. So it wasn’t winning that was on my mind when I first came out on the PGA Tour. It was money. I wanted to play for money, because I’d never had it before.”

After he’d had money for a while, Day then wanted big titles and he wanted them badly. Have a look at this video from two years ago. It’s the final of the matchplay tournament where golfers go one-on-one against each other. Day was playing a Frenchman in the final and really needed the win to give him the confidence to go to the next level.

Day was leading. Then the Frenchman hit this impossible, unthinkable recovery shot from the cactus. Did Day curse his misfortune? He did not. The expression on his face between about 1:10 and 1:15 in the video tells you everything you need to know about his class.

It was the wry smile of a guy who knows he is in charge of his own destiny, who understands that greatness is earned, not given, that bad stuff happens along the way, and that no amount of ranting or raving will ever change that.

Above all, Day clearly grasps that the key to greatness is tenacity. Don’t give up. And when you really don’t want to be there (you listening, Nick Kyrgios?) well, that’s the very moment when you’ve really, really got to dig deepest. As Day told Grantland last year: “What you have to do, when you get to that point where you’re in the fight-or-flight moment and you’re out of your comfort zone and you have a chance to win — you have to be like, ‘Screw it, gotta punch through it, let’s go and do it,’” Day said.

“And when you do it, it’s the most rewarding because you actually got past that barrier. And once you get to that uncomfortable stage a lot, you’ll start feeling a lot more comfortable. And once you start feeling a lot more comfortable and know exactly what you need to do, then it becomes easier to win.”

So it proved today as Day held off world No. 1 Jordan Spieth to win his first major. Don’t underestimate the achievement. Spieth is the hottest thing in golf. He won the first two majors this year and almost, like Day himself, won the third, the British Open.

In 2015 terms, Jason Day’s victory was the absolute equivalent of “taking down Tiger”. Jason Day has lived up to his early promise, and his early promises. Our tennis brats could learn so much from him.

The Wanamaker trophy is widely known for being one of the biggest in sport in terms of both size and prestige.

Meanwhile, as Day he walked triumphantly of the Whistling Straits course holding his son Dash, the three-year-old boy adorably asked, “Can we go home?”

He can indeed. And when Jason Day is back in Australia and other kids ask, “Sir, can I hit it?” the sir in question will be a man with a very large trophy on his mantelpiece.