SINGAPORE – Golf, and winning, seemed to come easily to Matteo Manassero in the first four years of his professional career.
In his rookie year on the European Tour, the Italian won the 2010 Castello Masters Costa Azahar, becoming the youngest winner on the circuit at 17 years and 188 days.
He continued to rack up wins, with one title in each of the next three years on the tour.
One of the sport’s up-and-coming talents appeared unstoppable as he rose to 25th in the world rankings at just 20.
But golf can be cruel and Manassero ended up waiting 11 years for his next victory.
“I was playing good, I was doing well, I wasn’t experiencing bad golf, almost never. Every year I was getting a win, so for me that was normal up until I started to try and get better, but it backfired,” said Manassero at the Porsche Singapore Classic on March 20.
“It was not necessary and I just needed time to develop physically and mentally. I tried to force it and slowly, week after week, my game was getting worse, my confidence was dropping a lot.”
The 30-year-old, who won the 2012 Barclays Singapore Open, is part of the field competing at the ongoing US$2.5 million (S$3.4 million) Singapore Classic at Laguna National Golf Resort Club.
The journey was tough for Manassero, who also enjoyed a stellar amateur career. At 16, he was the youngest to win the British Amateur and by the end of 2009, he was the top-ranked amateur in the world.
Golf had lost its shine for the boy from Negrar, who fell in love with the sport aged three. Things got particularly difficult from 2017 to 2019 as his form continued to dip.
In 2019, he made the cut just once in 18 events, pocketing €6,918.82 (S$10,000) from the Oman Open, where he finished tied-45th. He plummeted to 1,805th in the world rankings.
He said: “I got to the point in which I didn’t feel competitive at all, I didn’t know what was going to make me better so I had to restart and change everything.
“It was a bit of a dark time... When you get out on the golf course and you feel like you can’t do anything, you’re stressed and your golf is not helping at all, you don’t see any positives so you bring that outside of the golf course and life becomes stressful.”
So in 2019, Manassero took a few weeks away from golf. He never entertained the thought of quitting, but the break allowed him to evaluate his next steps.
When he returned to professional golf, Manassero started with the Alps Tour and Nordic Golf League, both third-tier tours in Europe.
While Manassero acknowledged that he could have obtained invites to play in higher-level competitions, he felt he was not ready to go back to the DP World Tour – formerly known as the European Tour – immediately and wanted to start “without much stress and without much demand from myself”.
He got back to winning ways at the Toscana Alps Open in September 2020, before returning to the second-tier Challenge Tour and claiming two titles there in 2023.
After 11 hard years, his fifth DP World Tour victory finally came at the Jonsson Workwear Open in South Africa on March 10, when he won by three strokes.
“I went through difficult times but when you get a day like Sunday, when you get a win like that, it feels much better because I understand how much it takes, how difficult it is,” said the world No. 185, who is aiming to make the Paris Olympics.
“The journey has been difficult but that’s what golf is. I had a lot early on and then some difficult times but I’m happy to be standing here and say that I’ve had both.”
