When golf rescued Dustin Johnson from crime

• Augusta Dustin Johnson sweeps the most atypical Masters

Those years weren't so easy at Coastal Carolina University.

On the roster for the 2003-2004 season, two Spanish names on the team

,

(number one) and

(number two).

The fifth and worst player on the team was a big, shy American named

.

The training sessions were tough and the

very demanding.

The stereotype of the revelries and excesses of the American university fraternities that we see on television,

it was not fulfilled.

"They were very strict and straightened us all a lot, including Dustin," says Moisés Cobo, then an important piece in Dustin's career and life.

Since that time, the two have maintained a great friendship. The last winner of the Augusta Masters had a very complicated adolescence, where he even became involved in a murder case, committed by the brother of a friend of his.

«I was in the place and

.

I looked at myself later in the mirror and realized that this person was not really me and was not what I wanted to be.

I wanted to go to college and play golf, I wanted to get back on the right track, "Johnson acknowledged in 2011. He also tested positive for cocaine and marijuana.

UNDISCUTABLE LEADER

In his sophomore year in college, Dustin's game improved and he began topping tournaments and close out victories.

His classmates called him

Mr. Second

.

But everything changed in the 2005 Regional Championships, played in Tennessee, where Dustin signed a 64 on the last day and took the tournament, since then he was the undisputed leader of the team.

His transformation was astonishing. Moses, now dedicated to representing golfers with Making Champions Better, recalls that when he arrived in the United States, the person who met him at the airport was Dustin Johnson.

«We were both rookies and he

coach

He asked him to come and find me, along with another colleague, since then we trained together, we went to the same classes, to the gym ... ».

Dustin and Cobo (as the American calls him)

they became inseparable

and forged a relationship that remains alive.

«Dustin was very shy, silent, but very intelligent, when he speaks in public he misleads.

He had an ability to study in a very short time, he was a good student. ”Among the highlights in the Coastal Carolina varsity career were victories at the Augusta state championship, the prize of which was being able to attend the

Augusta Masters

, and it was there, in 2005, the Monday before the competition, that Dustin Johnson first encountered Augusta National.

Dustin grew up in Columbia, just an hour from the sanctuary of the green jacket, and on a thousand occasions he passed by on the highway seeing the walls of his golfing Eden from the other side.

In 2005 he stepped on it for the first time and in 2020 he said goodbye dressed in the green jacket.

BAD TIMES

"Its

swing

It was always the same ”, Cobo sure, what has changed is his head.

Johnson went through bad times even when luck was already smiling on him as a player.

As in his college days, some disasters came.

In 2010 he signed 82 strokes in the last round of the

Us Open

, in which he came out as the leader, and in the PGA Championship he lost due to a penalty.

In 2011, an inopportune out of bounds cut him off from the Open Championship.

Added to these sporting disasters are other difficult moments off the field, with three penalties on the PGA Tour for using prohibited substances, but Dustin got through it all.

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